Steven Marcus: Have you ever written to merely improve your writing, practiced your writing as an athlete would work out?
Norman Mailer: No. I don't think it's a proper activity. That's too much like doing a setting-up exercise; any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger and responsibility does not improve the body—it just wears it out. ("Craft and Consciousness", reprinted in Pontifications, p. 18)
I have great admiration for Norman Mailer as a writer, even as a thinker. But what he says here seems poorly thought through. For one thing, he forgets the analogy to athletes that Marcus is suggesting. I'm entirely confident that Mailer would not say that Muhammad Ali was engaging in an "improper activity" when he was working out, taking a few rounds with a sparring partner, say, or even just going for a jog. To suggest that a writer's "responsibilities" when writing are somehow more serious than a boxer's when boxing is not just wrong, it's not what Mailer believes. So I'm quite sure he would retract this statement upon reflection.
Then there's the fact he's just plain wrong about working out. It is simply not true that an easy five kilometer run, or some light sparring in the ring, (or practicing your scales on the piano for twenty minutes,) wears the body out. The opposite is true. What wears the body out is to be always engaged in activities characterized by "danger and responsibility". Likewise, it is not good for your style to constantly (or even continuously) weigh it down with the duty or open it up to threats. You can do this for a few hours at most every day, when you struggle to "write for publication". During some periods, you should set this entirely aside and do, yes, some "setting-up exercises", entirely free of consequences.
People who are serious all of the time aren't really serious any of the time.
8 comments:
The quality of the Roman army improved immensely when Gaius Marius (presumably as the first in world history) introduced pointless drills during peace time.
Yoda: No. Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try.
What's something you admire in Mailer? I know him only as a blowhard.
What have you read?
Bits of Naked and the Dead, White Negro, and some other short prose. I really meant that I know him not as a writer but a public figure, e.g. in that public forum where he got that famous slam from Cynthia Ozick.
Yes, I suppose that from that vantage he comes off like a blowhard. The best corrective, I think, would be The Armies of the Night.
Thinking of Mailer as a blowhard is a bit like thinking of Ezra Pound as a fascist. It's not false, and it's an important part of understanding him, but it doesn't just identify some simple attribute that should prevent admiration.
Paul Theroux wrote a great piece called "On Cowardice" many years ago. To describe him as a coward on that basis would actually not be unfair (he says it himself), but it's not the fact of his cowardice that should interest us, it's the detailed description of its nature. Mailer did similar things for (let's call it) "ego". It's not that he had one that matters (that's too obvious to bother with) but that he wanted to understand it. You don't finally admire him for thinking highly of himself (and there's no point in denouncing him for it), you admire him for helping you think your own opinion of yourself through.
Thanks, I'll check it out (literally) when I get back from this pesky vacation. The Pound analogy makes sense. It's possible to be a fascist through writing (I was just looking at something of Farinacci's) but that's not what EP was up to.
Yes, to steal a line from WCWilliams, Pound has a "complex relation" to fascism.
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