The Errant Æsthete

With the passing of Normal Mailer [EA post 11/11/07], a notable read and ironically, what would prove to be, a lasting tribute from David Denby in The New Yorker written in 1998, nineteen years ago when Mailer was just 75.

Commenting on an article Mailer had written for Esquire back in 1964 where he murderously attacked San Francisco “a beautiful city that by the mid-sixties had become disfigured by monstrous boxes of Kleenex ten, twenty, thirty stories high,” an unsightliness culminating in the new San Francisco Hilton, which “looked from the street to have the proportions and form of a cube of sugar,” Denby praised Mailer for electrifying the young men and women of Denby’s generation.

It is impossible to overstate the liberating effect that those sentences, and many others like them, had at the time—impossible to exaggerate how much pleasure they brought, and especially to readers like me and my undergraduate friends, young men moldering in a fine state of genteel nullity. In that same year, Mailer told an interviewer that he wrote for men and women who had “no tradition by which to measure their experience but the intensity and clarity of their inner lives.” For anyone hungry for that kind of intensity but ignorant of how to attain it, Mailer’s writing was the most powerful of lures. One could read him and learn.