Ptown features prominently in this 1966 documentary on Norman Mailer:
Abby Margulies suggests that two new books on the legendary writer, the biography Norman Mailer: A Double Life and the essay collection Mind of an Outlaw, “offer insight into why Mailer, more than any other literary figure of his era, has been so mythologized, reviled, and revered”:
Mailer had a temper and was fast to throw a punch or quip a snide remark, often at the expense of his reputation. He is famous for stabbing his second wife, Adele Morales; addressing the feminists in his audience at the University of California, Berkeley, as “obedient little bitches” before going on to suggest that “a little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul”; and assaulting Gore Vidal at a party. As Mailer once wrote about himself: “To be the center of any situation was, he sometimes thought, the real marrow of his bone—better to expire as a devil in the fire than an angel in the wings.”
Norman Kingsley Mailer, the author of more than 40 books, encompassing fiction, journalism, poetry, essays, and interview collections, was a prolific and brilliant writer, but he is nearly as well known for his charisma and instigative prodding, his mayoral candidacy and threatened presidential run, his love of boxing, his insatiable promiscuity, and his penchant for settling scores with a firm head-butt. These competing facets of his personality—at once his greatest asset and his hopeless Achilles heel—created fantastic and inspired friction in all aspects of his life.
Biographer J. Michael Lennon, Mailer’s close friend and “extended family member”, explains why he frames his aforementioned book in terms of a “double life”:
Mailer believed that we all have two complete personalities in our psyche, and this was manifested in his own oppositions: family man-philanderer, activist-observer, leftist-conservative, rationalist-transcendentalist – the list goes on. But I wouldn’t describe Mailer as a private man. He was always mining his experience for his books, and always seeking more. His curiosity was huge. He did keep certain early experiences secret, but not many. He said he used them as “crystals,” and shined a light through them to illumine later experiences. Most of these were from his childhood and adolescence. He called experience “the church of one’s acquired knowledge.” For him, the best experiences were unforeseen, experiences that hit you like a brick tossed over a fence.
Richard Brody is fascinated by Mailer’s early life and wonders why the writer never channeled it into his work:
The grandson of a rabbi who struggled in business, the son of a picaresque bookkeeper and an adoring mother, he was a brilliant student and precocious writer. He was also something of a spoiled and fearful child—by his own account, a “physical coward.” Why did Mailer not want to write about the Brooklyn of his youth? Did he hesitate to reveal stories about his parents? (His father, a compulsive gambler, was often in debt, on the edge of legal trouble, and frequently unemployed.) Did he not want to write about his days of sheltered timidity? Was there some other aspect of his early years that he found unspeakable? Was he sparing his family—or himself? Or did he simply look at his background and find it wanting?
Paul J. Gallagher’s take on the above documentary:
It contains what was good and bad about Mailer—an overweening need to push his ordinary ideas (today’s word Norman is “totalitarianism”), with those occasional sparks of brilliance. It can be summed up by the know-it-all-booze-in-one-hand-Mailer versus Norman-being-a-father-and-husband, who is willing to admit he sometimes doesn’t know the answer. … There’s a truth in John Updike’s observation that Mailer had once the potential to be the greatest American writer of the twentieth century—if only he hadn’t squandered his talent on a desire to being a respected public figure. Writers write, they don’t run for office, or make unwatchable movies, or compensate for their own insecurity by turning everything into a fistfight.
The Dish 