My Washington Times Review Of Jack And Norman

The Washington Times published my review of Jerome Loving’s Jack and Norman today.

I’ve not read “In the Belly of the Beast,” Jack Henry Abbott’s book about his prison experiences and his half-baked commentary on Marxism and Communism, and I don’t plan to. But I have read Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song,” which was one of the few books by Norman Mailer that I liked.

Jerome Loving’s “Jack and Norman” is a book about the two books and the relationship between the two authors; Abbott, a convicted criminal, and Norman Mailer, a celebrated author who pursued controversy and greatness.

“This is the story of the author and the apprentice. It is the story of literary influence and tragedy,” writes Mr. Loving in the introduction to the book. “It is the story of a state-raised convict, the “by-blow,” as Melville says of another society’s orphans in “Billy Budd,” a novel that comes into play in our story; of an army drunk; and a Eurasian prostitute. It is the story of a writer who set out all his life to write the Great American Novel and stumbled into its greatness as essentially a gifted journalist whose “true life novel” transcends the quotidian world of facts. Finally, it is the story of incarceration in America.”

This is certainly a lot of ground to cover in one book, but Mr. Loving largely succeeds.

Mr. Mailer was instrumental in getting Abbott, a check forger, bank robber and violent inmate, paroled from prison in 1981. He praised Abbott’s writing ability and told prison officials that he planned to hire him as his literary assistant. Abbott’s prison book was about to be published and he became a free man again with money and celebrity advocates. Six weeks after his release, Abbott and two women went to a late-hour restaurant after a publisher’s party in Abbott’s honor. Abbott got into an argument with Richard Adan, the restaurant’s manager, and the two went outside to an alley where Abbott stabbed the manager to death. Abbott then fled the scene and became a fugitive.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/2/book-review-jack-and-norman-a-state-raised-convict/ 

Something New Under The Sun: A Hemingway Biography That's Original

Ron Capshaw offers a good review in National Review of James M. Hutchisson's Ernest Hemingway: A New Life.

Norman Mailer once located courage in Ernest Hemingway's manic depression. Proof of this, according to Mailer, was that Papa was able to produce classic works despite daily struggles with that crippling condition.

James Hutchisson tales off from that point and advertises that his is the first "balanced" view of Hemingway in years. Others, he argued, have either portrayed the writer as the persona he created for himself - that of a rugged adventurer with a genius for words - or as an alcoholic womanizer.

Hutchinsson justifies this latest attempt of explaining Hemingway by announcing that he would view the author's work through several prisms: his medical condition that grew worst over the years (like others, Hutchisson sees an air of inevitability about Hemingway's putting that fatal shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger); his obsession with life and death, which was grist to his creative mill; and his relationship with women.        

You can read the rest of the review via the below link: 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439437/ernest-hemingway-new-life-james-hutchisson-book-review

P.J. O'Rourke Rips 'Buckley And Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped The Sixties'

I was a teenager and a political conservative in the 1960s (although in other aspects I was far from conservative) and I read William F. Buckley's newspaper column and his political books. I also watched him on his PBS TV show, Firing Line. In later years I read and enjoyed his spy thrillers. He was a huge influence.

In the 1960s I also read Norman Mailer's novels and nonfiction work. I didn't agree with his worldview, but I thought he was an interesting writer. I also thought Mailer's The Executioner's Song  was an outstanding true crime book.

Having read both authors and having watched the two brilliant men debate on Firing Line, I was initially very interested in reading Kevin M. Schultz's Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties.

But having now read P.J. O'Rourke's book review in the Washington Post, I'm not so sure.

Kevin M. Schultz’s “Buckley and Mailer” would be fun without Kevin M. Schultz. He’s a third wheel. What he contributes to the chronicle of friendship between William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer is what an oversize carry-on bag contributes to an airplane flight. If “Buckley and Mailer” were a Bing Crosby and Bob Hope road movie, Kevin M. Schultz would be along instead of Dorothy Lamour. Athos, Porthos and . . . Schultz.

In fairness, telling the story of two men who liked each other is difficult if you don’t like one of them. Schultz detests Buckley.

“ . . . a salesman’s eyes, as though Buckley were trying to sell something he knew you didn’t really want to buy.”  

... Schultz’s subtitle says it all — wrong. “The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties.” The adjective, the verb and the nouns are incorrect.

Schultz is a historian of the ’60s. I was there. William F. Buckley did not shape the ’60s and would have been appalled to be accused of it. Buckley, who led conservatism’s long march from cocktail-hour mixed nuts to political main course, shaped the ’80s and, to an extent, the ever-since.

Norman Mailer did not shape the ’60s. Prosperity, pot, the pill and the draft did. Mailer was an artist; he shaped all of creation. But he had little direct influence on we who fancied ourselves members of the Armies of the Night. And Mailer considered us to be lost in the dark, anyway. Buckley and Mailer together can hardly be said to have done what Buckley and Mailer separately did not do.

... I met Buckley a number of times and owe him a boatload of praise. He was a mainmast of courtesy, an anchor of encouragement and a spinnaker of enthusiasm for whatever one had written. And he knew what it was. The man must have read everything, including National Lampoon. My first contact with Bill was in the mid-’70s, a personal note lauding something I’d done, maybe “Why Fluoride in Water Turns Kids Into Commies.” (Infrequent need to go to the dentist means fewer salutary waiting-room exposures to hard-line Cold War articles in Reader’s Digest.)

Only once did I get a chance to talk to Mailer at length. We were seated near each other at a dinner party. “The Executioner’s Song” had just been published. I asked Mailer if Gary Gilmore’s inamorata, Nicole Baker, had as much je ne sais quoi and you-know-what as it seemed. The answer was: did she ever.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/intellectual-frenemies-of-the-1960s/2015/05/29/bf7c5dd0-f285-11e4-bcc4-e8141e5eb0c9_story.html?postshare=5721433079430125