Norman Mailer Takes on America at The Harry Ransom Center

*This post comes from Guest Contributor Kerry Skemp*

Beyond a vague yet fascinating physical resemblance (no, really), George W. Bush and Norman Mailer have little in common. The former represents all that is evil in the world (or all that is good, depending on who you talk to), and the latter represents the fact that our country used to offer journalistic investigations of a type that didn’t begin and end at Gawker.com. If you want to impress (and thereby gain license to snog with) that cute girl/boy/unidentifiable entity with hot shoes (and an extra three day pass) you just met who’s in town for ACL, take him or her or it to the Harry Ransom Center’s fascinating new exhibit, “Norman Mailer Takes on America.” In addition to impressing your new love interest, you just might learn a thing or two—not just about Mailer, but also about yourself and the country you live in—and get motivated to take on America just as Mailer always has.

It’s debatable whether Mailer is more famous for writing his acclaimed war novel The Naked and the Dead, or for stabbing his (former) wife Adele after a long night of partying. However, Mailer has also written well over thirty books and a number of influential articles, run for mayor of New York City, and boldly confronted revered public figures and political practices. The Ransom Center’s exhibit successfully provides background for almost all the events and accomplishments of Mailer’s life, ranging from his capturing a short story prize while a student at Harvard to his reviews of boxing matches to his open letters to President Kennedy.

It’s a powerful, nearly religious, experience to bend over the glass cases in the Ransom Center; examine the novels, articles, letters, and other items contained therein; and realize that the hands of famous authors and public figures—Mailer himself, James Jones, John Dos Passos, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Stokely Carmichael, James Baldwin, Don DeLillo, and more—actually touched the letters you’re viewing. In our e-mail-based “information age,” where so much communication takes place in MySpace messages and blog comments, it’s borderline astounding to recall that people once commonly hand-wrote (or sometimes typed) letters to one another and then had to hand-fold, hand-address, and hand-stamp those communications, and wait days, weeks, months or more for a response. The exhibit’s strong focus on the written word is a fitting way to celebrate Mailer, whose somewhat pompous public image all too easily overshadows the incisive insight of what he actually wrote. Mailer was first and foremost a thinker who expressed himself in writing, and the exhibit painstakingly chronicles not only his decades of work but also the (often vitriolic) public and private responses to it.

One of Mailer’s most admirable characteristics has always been his willingness to respond to criticism of his work. Rather than deny his flaws, the journalist owned up to them (even if he didn’t necessarily fix them), and directly addressed concerns. And just as he was unafraid to confront critics, Mailer was unafraid to confront censorship of any sort. His resistance to the nation’s McCarthyist practices of the 1940s and 1950s, as portrayed in the Ransom Center exhibit, is eerily reminiscent of the dire need for resistance to the reduction in civil liberties that we’ve recently experienced in contemporary culture. It’s not difficult to see that Islam is, in a sense, the new communism, and that our president is slowly chipping away at our personal freedom in order to advance himself and his own interests in the name of protecting the very freedom he’s violating.

The lack of persistent public outcry against the Bush administration’s questionable practices, contrasted with Mailer’s willingness to speak out both in general and in book form (see 2003’s Why Are We At War?) emphasizes that society has a fundamental need for individuals like Mailer and the challenging questions they raise. As noted, Mailer’s ability to be highly critical was accompanied by an ability to intelligently respond to criticisms of his own work, sparking involved and thoughtful—if occasionally rash and radical—debates. The unwillingness of our current political leaders to respond to criticism in an intelligent manner is a frightening shortcoming that needs to be resolved.

President Bush recently remarked that our present war on terror “is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century and the calling of our generation.” Despite decades of difficult experiences, Mailer continues to resist and question what he finds unacceptable, and still insists on having his say in our nation’s “decisive ideological struggles.” Not only do we have a lot to learn about Mailer’s life from the Ransom Center exhibit, we have a lot to learn about ourselves and the way we should approach life—persistently, rabidly, and intelligently. It’s not something easily done.

A line from Mailer’s novel The Deer Park describes America’s current situation succinctly: “There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.” If there’s anything Mailer refused to do throughout the years, it was to remain the same. Visit the Ransom Center’s exhibit to witness Mailer’s evolution over time, and be inspired to take on America—or at least its unjust aspects—in your own unique and courageous way.

Norman Mailer Takes on America
Harry Ransom Center
Runs Through December 31st

*Image of Norman Mailer from Ransom Center Site (c) Roy DeCarava*

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