Norman Mailer vs. Everyone

In this letter to novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick, after she took issue with Mailer’s statement about the fatwa on Salman Rushdie.

April 22, 1989

Dear Cynthia,

When I saw you name on the return address, I thought, “That’s nice,” and had a passing image of you and me on the same podium reading from The Satanic Verses should the awaited catastrophe ever come to Salman Rushdie, and other authors have to stand in his place. Twenty seconds later, having read your billet-doux, I could recognize all over again that I qualify to run for the world’s first romantic.

I must say, I’m overcome by your epistolary style. For a writer of talent, your letter is so unhappily composed. I’ve seen you employ that harsh and jargon-ridden vain before, and suspect it is due to the intensity of your feelings. I would remind you, however, that one test of our skills is to keep to our style when we are in a state of agitation.

In any event, you show enough clarity to consider the possibility that the Times might not have quoted me in good measure. Of course, they didn’t. My statement was a page and a half long, and had a few things to offer. The Times left out the middle, crucial, of course. If you’re interested in what I’m really saying, please call PEN or my assistant, Judith McNally [. . . ], and they’ll be happy to forward you copies of either my first statement about standing for Rushdie, or the second, to which you refer, or both. I may not be speaking for you, but then, I don’t pretend to. At any rate, you’ll be able to attack properly, if that is your desire.

As for the “star chamber proceeding,” why don’t you consult [Cy] Rembar about the role I played in that? You may have a surprise or two, if you are ready for any.

Cheers,

Norman

As a result of this scathing letter to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of The New York Times, the paper ran a correction, noting that The Spooky Art did indeed have thorough source notes, compiled by the editor, J. Michael Lennon.

March 24, 2003

Dear Arthur Ochs Sulzberger,

Over the last ten years, Michiko Kakutani has reviewed every one of my books published in that period. In order, they were Oswald’s Tale, Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, The Gospel According to the Son, The Time of Our Time, and The Spooky Art. All five were given bad reviews (The Spooky Art perhaps the least awful), but three of those five could make the claim that the ugliest review all received came from Kakutani. What underlined the procedure and could give it a willful subtext was that four of those five reviews came out a week to two weeks ahead of publication. Michiko was first with the worst. One of the basic tricks in book criticism is to get out early if you really detest a book. Still, four out of five! Kakutani was abusing her privilege.

Indeed, even this much determined deconstruction of my later writing seemed not quite enough for the lady. In the course of reviewing The Spooky Art, she summarizes my lifework as follows:

“There was a very solid [ italics mine] World War II novel (The Naked and the Dead), some ground-breaking [italics mine] journalism (The Armies of the Night, Of a Fire on the Moon), a brilliant piece of Americana [italics mine] (The Executioner’s Song), two huge oddball [italics mine] novels, one about Egypt (Ancient Evenings), the other about the CIA (Harlot’s Ghost) and a steady but wasting trickle of minor works [yes, italics mine] about everything from Marilyn Monroe to graffiti to Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Now, Michiko Kakutani is obviously entitled to her opinion. She is even, given her status, able to downgrade the reception of each of my new books by persevering in her lust to get out there first (it does take three good reviews to overcome a bad one, if the bad one is a potential reader’s first acquaintance with the work).