The Last Page

...NICOLAUS MILLS...

...De­fending his most famous Dissent essay "The White Negro" (Fall 1957), Mailer writes his friend Jean Malaquais, "I was trying to fumble my way forward toward a theory of energy hu­man energy, which some genius following be­hind us may be able to pick up and use in order i20 . DISSENT I Winter 2009 to become the new Marx," and two years later, in a letter to Irving Howe, Mailer, anticipating the direction the sixties wí11 take, writes of his eagerness for Dissent "to begin a dialogue with the psycho-anarchists (wherever they are...

...Nobody, left or right, is immune from his judgment . "You read politics and Partisan Review today," he writes in 1949, and there are no longer ideas in them, just canapés, and despite the brilliance of all their people and their erudi­tion, etc . etc they no longer think, they merely hate ." What would Mailer have said about our current troubles...

...in order to become "the center of a radical gen­eration which may be coming into existence ." Mailer makes clear in his letters, as he did in his personal essays, that he thinks the worst sin for a writer or a politician is piety...

...As Philip Roth and Christopher Hitchens remind us, we have no shortage of literary bad boys these days...

...Sadly Irving Howe found mak­ing copies of his letters and postcards a nuisance, and all too many of his friends shared his devastating modesty, taking their cues from his example...

...Five years later in a 1965 letter to the con­servative National Review editor, William Buckley, Mailer is just as measured in gently telling him that their political debates have gotten dull: "I think our public debates are probably over-for a time at least . . . . As writ­ers we are not both villains, and that excites no proper passions ." But it isn't just when he is making putdowns that Mailer's letters are fun to read . At his most serious, there is always an edge and a self-deprecating quality to his writing...

...It is hard to know, but a let­ter that he wrote in 2003 about George W. Bush gives us a strong indication of the direc­tion in which he was headed...

...THE LAST PAGE THE PUBLICATION in the October 6, 2008, New Yorker of a selection of the more than fifty thousand Norman Mailer letters that have been archived reminds us of what a vacuum he left when he died in November 2007 at the age of eighty-four...

...It seems to me," Mailer observes of Bush, that "the best argu­ment you can present is that he's a total, shal­low, manipulative shit, but that he's got the luck of the devil working for him ." Not bad for an early assessment, and more than enough to make anyone pleased that Mailer saved so many of his letters . As a Dis­sent writer, I found, however, my pleasure in the care Mailer took with his letters dimmed by the thought that the only record we wí11 have of the Mailer-Howe correspondence wí11 de­pend on Mailer...

...But Mailer was a special kind of bad boy-generous, self-mocking, and always on the lookout for the joyous in a situation . Here, for example, is Mailer in 1960 let­ting Jacqueline Kennedy know that he intends to vote for her husband but that he has great reservations about his policies : "I do not agree with your husband about Cuba . I think he is moving into a serious error, but I wí11 vote for him anyway" Mailer promises, then adds, "It is just that I have now lost much pleasure in my ballot...