MORE MELODIE MUSINGS

by Melodie Johnson Howe

Norman Mailer died. I have a love hate relationship with him just as I do with Doris Lessing. In fact I’m beginning to really detest Lessing after I read this quote from her in a James Carroll column in the Boston Globe. “… the 911 attacks were ‘not that bad.’ Not as ‘extraordinary’ as Americans seem to feel.”

It makes me want to take her Nobel Prize for Literature and thump her on the head with it. It almost makes me agree with JLW about her.

Mailer was a literary pugilist. Ducking, weaving, jabbing, and sometimes connecting with a beautiful right to the chin; but, sometimes missing so completely that he left you embarrassed for him. And at times, like good old Doris, I truly loathed him.

Thinking that “art” was more important than society, he helped the killer Jack Abbot, who wrote Belly of the Beast, to be released from prison. Soon after that Abbot stabbed and killed a young waiter who was serving him in a New York restaurant. Abbot didn’t like the way the waiter had looked at him. “Art” did not survive. Society did not survive. And God knows the waiter didn’t. But Mailer did, still dancing and bouncing like Ali around the literary world. I never forgave him.

He wrote one mystery novel, Tough Guys Don’t Dance. It got panned. But I admit to liking it. It’s Mailer through and through. Think of James Crumley on steroids.

One of my favorite stories about Mailer is when he met Tallulah Bankhead at a cocktail party. His war novel, The Naked and the Dead, had just been published. At that time a writer could not use the words that soldiers would naturally use. So Mailer came up the word “fug” to replace the F word. As the story goes when Tallulah was introduced to him, said in her boozy rough voice, “Oh, you’re the young man who doesn’t know who to spell fuck.”

I’m in the middle of writing a short story. Today I reduced four pages of what I had written yesterday to one short paragraph. It felt good because it was right. A writer has to learn let go of her precious words, especially when they slow the pace.

I recently moderated a mystery/thriller panel. The consensus in the audience seemed to be that they didn’t want to read about troubled detectives. They wanted a good story, but they didn’t want to be emotionally disturbed. So in an act of pure perversity I went home and read Ken Bruen’s The Dramatists. His Jack Taylor is one of the most troubled PIs around. Bleak doesn’t do him justice. Not one character in Bruen’s books is allowed to survive without suffering a great loss or falling into self destruction. But I’m one of those readers who do read an author because I love how he writes. As a storyteller Bruen gives the reader no hope. But as a writer his sparse elegant prose does. Every character in Bruen’s work is trying to avoid reality. Even reading books in Bruen’s world can be a state of denial. He quotes from Ann Rule’s Bitter Harvest:

“The one consistent interest, passion, and obsession of her life was books – even on the night of the fire. While people had often disappointed her, books never did. She was seldom without a stack of ten or more unread library books; a hedge against the reality she could not face. ”

But oh, what a wonderful defense.