Parsing Mailer

The New Yorker has a long catalogue of Norman Mailer's letters, from 1945 until 2005. I'd have liked to see more boxing stuff, but then I usually say that. A couple of favorites:

To the Editor of Playboy

December 21, 1962

Dear Sir,

I wish you hadn’t billed the debate between William Buckley and myself as a meeting between a conservative and a liberal. I don’t care if people call me a radical, a rebel, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist, or even a left conservative, but please don’t ever call me a liberal.

Yours,

Norman Mailer

To Mickey Knox

December 17, 1963

Dear Mickey,

The Kennedy thing hit very hard here. Women were crying in the streets (mainly good-looking women), a lot of middle-aged Negroes looked sad and very worried, and then we all sat around in gloom and watched the television set for the next seventy-two hours. Altogether it was one of three events having something profoundly in common: Pearl Harbor day and the death of Roosevelt being the other two. And the Ruby-Oswald stuff was just too much on top of it. I haven’t felt like writing a word about the whole thing, I’ve been too fucking depressed every which way. The main loss I think was a cultural one. Whether he wanted to or not Kennedy was giving a great boost to the arts, not because Jackie Kennedy was inviting Richard Wilbur to the White House, but somehow the lid was off, and now I fear it’s going to be clamped on tight again.

As for Oswald and Ruby, I don’t know what was going on, but I don’t have the confidence we’ll ever know. I’d like to believe that the F.B.I. had a sinister hand in all of this, but somehow I doubt it. I suspect the real story is that two lonely guys, all by themselves, put more grit in the gears than anyone ever succeeded in doing before, and it’s just a mess, a dull miserable mess. . . .

Love

Norm

To William F. Buckley, Jr.

January, 1966

Dear Bill,

I send you the enclosed not because I love National Review so much, for I don’t—it’s not so good as it ought to be, and often it’s tiresome, especially when one knows in advance what your trusted old line contributors are going to say—but as a personal mark of respect to you. Your letter was the best letter I ever read by an editor asking for funds. . . .

One request. Please keep my contribution in the secret crypts. It is not that I fear public opinion so much as ceaseless repetition. Repetition kills the soul and I would not wish to spend one hundred evenings in succession explaining to various outraged and somewhat stupid people in calm clear fashion my complex motives for giving a gift to a magazine for which I feel no affection and to an editor with whom on ninety of a hundred points I must rush to disagree. They would not understand that good writing is good writing, and occasionally carries the day.

Yours,

Norman