Download Norman Mailer by Michael K. Glenday (auth.) PDF

Show description

152 This, indeed, is one of the great achievements of this book. In it, Mailer develops a journalism to counter the emptiness of publicity handouts, recognising the Introduction: The Shaping of Personality 39 need to address the gap between the technological complexities of the Apollo mission, and the human interest stories to do with those involved in the project. Mailer's alternative to this dilemma is to offer his own interpretation of that 'most secret voice'. '153 The book is an impressive achievement, offering both a finely detailed account of the moonshot, its creators and participants, as well as searching out its potential and actual meanings.

Even the weather was weirdan Indian summer with clammy days. l10 A violent act to begin one of America's most violent decades, with Mailer a bellweather of all that was adrift. The nation was on the cusp of the most tragic self-examination since its Civil War exactly 100 years previously, lurching from the neurotic conformities of the 1950s into a decade of assassinations, race riots and political confrontations, all of this domestic fury being inflamed by the war in Vietnam. It was the decade that would see Mailer flourish in its angers; in his life and his work, in the novels An American Dream (1965), and Why Are We in Vietnam?

The magistrate who ordered Mailer's committal told him 'your recent history indicates that you cannot distinguish fiction from reality',107 while Mailer insisted on his sanity. He was in Bellevue for just two weeks before being discharged as legally sane. Adele subsequently refused to press criminal charges against her husband, and refused to sign a complaint. Though the presiding magistrate of the Felony Court believed that 'a probable crime' had been committed and sent the case to the higher Grand Jury Court of New York County, it was there, almost a year later, that Mailer received a suspended sentence with a probation period not to exceed three years.