Stormin' Norman Mailer, from "Writers Gone Wild" (Bill Peschel)

A writer's life: finding inspiration in oak-paneled rooms, vistas overlooking inspiring views, sharing witty conversation with one's peers. And, of course, brawling.

The story between the covers of a book may only tell half the tale of its author's struggles to get his point across. Many times this confusion and misunderstanding can come from many directions: editors, publishers, critics, friends -- and enemies -- can change the course of literary history as surely as drink, drugs, sex, and other obsessions in a writer's life.

Much contemporary biography has become studies in pathology, as some critics have noted not unfairly. Still it is fascinating to hear some of the stories behind the words, if only to make the reader marvel that the completed novel got written at all.

Here, for example, is a brief excerpt about the outside-the-ring pugilistic career of Norman Mailer, from Writers Gone Wild, a compendium of stories about the less-sedate aspects of the writing life by Bill Peschel.

Norman Mailer, between rounds

Highlight Reel

Norman Mailer was as prolific with his fists as he was with his opinions. Here are some of his classic bouts:

* Jerry Leiber: In 1967, at the popular restaurant Elaine’s, Mailer attacked the songwriter from behind and got kicked into a wall, smashing the plaster. Mailer tried to eye-gouge Leiber and a waiter did the same for Mailer. Elaine herself broke up the fight by threatening to bar Leiber if he knocked out Mailer.

* Bruce Jay Friedman: The novelist and screenwriter was on the receiving end of a Mailer head butt after he messed up Norman’s hair at a party in 1968. As Friedman got in his car, Mailer unleashed his fury on the car, hammering it several times. Friedman got out, took a head-butt to the chest, and threw a punch. They were separated again, and Friedman drove off with Mailer again punching the windows .

* Rip Torn: As part of an improvised scene in Mailer’s 1970 movie “Maidstone,” Torn nearly brained the director and star with a hammer, wrestled him to the ground and choked him. Mailer bit off part of Torn’s ear and fought back until they were separated by Mailer’s fourth wife, Beverly, and his children.

* Gore Vidal I: After Vidal compared Mailer’s “The Prisoner of Sex” to “three days of menstrual flow” in 1971, Mailer head butted him in the green room of “The Dick Cavett Show.”

* Gore Vidal II: At a New York party in 1977, Mailer threw a drink and then knocked Vidal to the floor. Vidal got the last word, however: “Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.”

Martin Mull, actor (MFA, Rhode Island School of Design)

Some books are so eager to become part of a collection they literally jump off the shelf and hit the reader on the head. Martin Mull's Paintings Drawings and Words fell off a high bookcase at a library sale while I was trying to pull away its neighbor -- Paul Bowles' The Spider's House. Both books, of course, wound up being worth the combined, exorbitant $1.00 price.

Mull is one of the Hollywood people for whom the glare of the spotlight is a welcome help to finding one's glasses, but not much else. Because of his relatively low show-business profile after abandoning a career as stand-up comedian and recording artist, Mull has been able to pursue a career as a painter, with years of exhibits to his credit.

Bedroom Scene (1992), Martin Mull

His television appearances -- as a late regular on Roseanne, The Ellen (DeGeneres) Show, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, as well as recurring roles on American Dad and even (yes, really) Sabrina the Teenage Witch -- belie his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and he's been quoted as saying everything else he has done in his life has simply been to support his painting.



Paintings Drawings and Words is a large-format catalogue of Mull's work to 1995, accompanied by essays on art and work in his typically self-effacing style. Discussing originality, he has the smarts to quote Jean Cocteau ("One has to be very careful with originality or one may appear to have a brand-new haircut and a brand-new suit") and the honesty to claim "The Piano Lesson" by Henri Matisse as the single painting that has influenced his work.

"Though the gravitation was probably driven by nothing more sophisticated than 'I don't know about art, but I know what I like,' hindsight suggests that the deceptive simplicity of his work and the promise of accessibility and understanding that it afforded were a major motivation as well. I was hell-bent to learn picture-making from the best picture-maker I could find ... by virtue of his astounding visual intelligence, Matisse was the most important painter of the twentieth century."

When Mull, then a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, finally sees "The Piano Lesson" in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, he calls it a "confrontation rather than surprise encounter." After years of seeing the "postage-stamp sized reproduction" in art books, the original painting's size -- eight-and-a-half by seven feet -- made his knees go weak.

As a student, he was so impressed by its striking simplicity and color that it became "the perfect classroom" for what even Mull now claims was "an arrogant and ill-founded pursuit, doomed from the outset." Matisse's genius, he writes, was a learnable theorem that would reveal itself as a reward for diligence, determination, and patience.

"It has taken me nearly thirty years to realize that my original, mistaken premise -- that diligence, determination, and patience could ultimately deliver up a painter's genius -- was only slightly askew. The truth is that diligence, determination, and patience can deliver up a specific painting's genius --that magical and intangible quality that enables a painting to make music. Recently I have attempted to tap the feelings that attended my first viewing of "The Piano Lesson" as inspiration for paintings of a similar subject.

Study for The Dinner Guest (1993), Martin Mull

Although working from a preconception, even one as vaporous and esoteric as those memories ... I have made what I currently consider to be some of my better paintings. This is not to say I have accomplished what I set out to do. That is going to take a lot more diligence, determination, and patience."

In 2004, "Admissible Evidence" was Mull's seventh solo show in New York. His most recent paintings evoke a 1950s suburban childhood, darkened with what one reviewer calls "feelings of loss, disconnection, and fear" -- exactly the emotions most children feel when they sit for an hour in front of a piano. It seems Mull has internalized the experience of "The Piano Lesson" after all, if not its genius.

"Illuminations:" A selection from John Ashbery's new translation of Rimbaud

"Bottom"

Since reality was too prickly for my lavish personality, - I found myself nonetheless in my lady's house, got up as a great blue-grey bird soaring toward the ceiling mouldings and dragging my wing through the shadows of the soirée.

At the foot of the baldaquin supporting her beloved jewels and her physical masterpieces, I was a large bear with purple gums and fur turned hoary with grief, my eyes on the crystal and silver of the credenzas.

Everything turned to shadow and a passionate aquarium.

In the morning, - a bellicose dawn in June, - I ran to the fields, a donkey, trumpeting and brandishing my grievance, until the Sabine women of the suburbs came to throw themselves at my neck.

from "Childhood"

III

In the wood there is a bird, his song stops you and makes you blush.

There is a clock that doesn't strike.

There is a pit with a nest of white creatures.

There is a cathedral that sinks and a lake that rises.

There is a little carriage abandoned in the thicket, or that

hurtles down the path, trimmed with ribbons.

There is a troop of child actors in costume, seen on the

highway through the edge of the forest.

Finally, when you are hungry or thirsty, there is someone who chases you away.

IV

I am the saint, at prayer on the terrace, - as meek animals graze all the way to the sea of Palestine.

I am the learned scholar in the dark armchair. Branches and the rain hurl themselves at the library's casement window.

I am the walker on the great highway through dwarf woods; the murmur of sluices muffles my steps. I gaze for a long time at the melancholy gold laundry of the setting sun.

I'd gladly be the abandoned child on the pier setting out for the open sea, the young farm boy in the lane, whose forehead grazes the sky.

The paths are harsh. The little hills are cloaked with broom. The air is motionless. How far away the birds and the springs are! It can only be the end of the world, as you move forward.

John Ashbery, 2008 (photo by Nathaniel Brooks, New York Times)

"Democracy"

'The flag goes to the filthy landscape, and our dialect stifles the drum.

'On to city centres where we'll nourish the most cynical prostitution. We'll massacre logical rebellions.

'On to peppery and waterlogged countries! - at the service of the most monstrous industrial or military exploitation.

'Farewell to here, anywhere. Well-meaning draftees, we'll adopt a ferocious philosophy; ignorant of science, sly for comfort; let the shambling world drop dead. This is the real march. Heads up, forward!'

This selection is from Illuminations, John Ashbery's new translations of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1901). From Ruth Franklin's 2003 piece about Rimbaud in The New Yorker: "(The) complete works—fewer than a hundred short poems, the seven-thousand-word prose text “Une Saison en Enfer,” and the prose poems known as the Illuminations, as well as approximately two hundred and fifty letters and a handful of other texts—barely fill two volumes. The poetry ranges from inspired to truly puerile; many of the letters contain outright lies, while others are fragmented or of dubious authenticity…. In the words of the biographer Graham Robb, he has been resurrected as 'Symbolist, Surrealist, Beat poet, student revolutionary, rock lyricist, gay pioneer, and inspired drug-user,' and invoked by artists from Picasso to Jim Morrison." Patti Smith, as expected, puts things a bit less prosaically: “John Ashbery has gifted us with an exquisite, untainted translation of Rimbaud; a transmission as pure as a winged dove driven by snow.”

Politics, censorship and banned books: "increasing intolerance is changing the fabric of America"

The Obama administration has come under a round of predictable fire for the events surrounding last week's killing of Osama bin Laden -- what the administration did before, during and after the raid in Pakistan will provide political grist well into the 2012 election cycle. The administration seems firm in its resolution not to release photographs of the dead bin Laden, and most Americans seem to be in agreement that decision is a good one.

In America issues of politics and censorship have played a large role in determining what facts readers learn about events. From the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the New York Times -- leaked by Daniel Ellsberg -- to the current jailing of of Bradley Manning in the Wikileaks case, government agencies claim issues of national security to keep sensitive and allegedly damaging information from being released, while Individual rights remain at risk.

Censorship can affect mass-market publication, too, most recently as in the case of Operation Dark Heart (see below). At one point the Defense Department threatened to buy up all copies of the book in order to prevent it from reaching bookstores; St. Martin's Press has agreed to a partial compromise -- but one that involves redacting (blacking out) classified text.

At the Banned Books site there is a long list of censored and banned titles, many of which were challenged by American government agencies. Writers using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain material have been questioned and refused access. Publishers have long fought such pre-publication censorship. In one case -- the Valerie Plame book -- the outed C.I.A. operative found a way around government censorship: she published the redacted text and amended an afterward by a second writer, who reveals the public record of all the redacted material.

"We believe attempts to censor ideas to which we have access--whether in books, magazines, plays, works of art, television, movies or song--are not simply isolated instances of harassment by diverse special-interest groups. Rather they are part of a growing pattern of increasing intolerance which is changing the fabric of America. . .Censorship cannot eliminate evil. It can only kill freedom. We believe Americans have the right to buy, stores have the right to sell, authors have the right to write and publishers have the right to publish Constitutionally-protected material. Period."

(Excerpt from a letter to 28 newspapers, signed by Ed Morrow, president, American Booksellers Assn. and Harry Hoffman, president, Walden Book Co., Inc., 1990).

Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House (2007) Written by Valerie Plame Wilson, who claims her cover was intentionally disclosed by the Bush administration. Portions of Fair Game are blacked-out and indicate, say the publishers, places where the CIA has demanded redactions. The extensive afterword by reporter Laura Rozen, drawn from interviews and the public record, is included to provide context to Plame Wilson's story.

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (1971) by Mike Royko. A Ridgefield, CT school board in 1972 banned this book from the high school reading list, claiming it "downgrades police departments."

The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974) by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks. The CIA obtained a court injunction against this book's publication stating the author, a former CIA employee, violated his contract which states that he cannot write about the CIA without the agency's approval. First amendment activists opposed this ruling, "raising the question of whether a citizen can sign away his First Amendment rights." After prolonged litigation, the CIA succeeded in having 168 passages deleted.

Deadly Deceits (My 25 Years in the CIA) (1983) by Ralph McGheehee. The CIA delayed the publication of this book for three years, objecting to 397 passages, even though much of what the author wrote about was already public knowledge.

Freedom and Order (1966) by Henry Steele Commager. The U.S. Information Agency had this book banned from its overseas libraries because of its condemnation of American policies in Vietnam.

Operation Dark Heart (2010): On Friday, August 13, 2010, just as St. Martin’s Press was readying its initial shipment of Operation Dark Heart, the Department of Defense expressed concern that its publication could cause damage to U.S. national security. The publication of the initial edition was canceled. However, after consulting with the author, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, St. Martin's Press agreed to incorporate some of the government’s changes, which includes redacting classified text, into a revised edition.

Pentagon Papers (1971) Commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1967, this 3,000-page history of U.S. involvement in Indochina was kept a secret even from the Johnson administration and banned from publication by court order. The most damaging revelations in the papers revealed that four administrations, from Truman to Johnson, had misled and lied to the public regarding their intentions. The New York Times was printing portions of it when the order to stop publication came down. Later that year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the decision and Bantam proceeded to publish a paperback edition. Daniel Ellsberg, who originally leaked the document to the Times in 1971, said at the end of 2010 that “every attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”

"Gentleman of the Road" (2007): Michael Chabon, in search of a little adventure

Summer's nearly here, and the reading -- as it should be -- is easy. June 16 may be Bloomsday, but I'll save reading Ulysses for some other season. Meanwhile, trips to the library can provide some entertaining surprises when the early-May temperature is already in the 80s.

Michael Chabon's 2007 novel Gentlemen of the Road is a fast and dizzying spin through lands far away and long ago. Like other writers who have enjoyed taking their readers to unexpected places, the prolific Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Wonder Boys) weaves a spell here that recalls the adventure tales of Rudyard Kipling and the travelogues of 19th-century British wanderers like Sir Richard Burton. Unlike their British predecessors, however, these are certainly no gentlemen of leisure. Amram and Zelikman aren't even British. Chabon's original title -- Jews With Swords -- lays the story more directly on the line than the published novel's genteel title would suggest.

Whether or not the reader is swept up in the story of two Jewish charlatans in the Caucasus mountains of Khazaria circa 950 A.D. is a moot point, since the novel's quick 200 pages leave very little room for second-guessing the writer's intentions. Neither is Chabon interested in a plain, unvarnished tale. Gentlemen of the Road is told in a baroque writing style that pulls out all the considerable descriptive tricks at Chabon's command:

"Then tossing aside the wine bowls, they faced each other. The watchful mahout caught a flicker in the giant African's eyes that was not torchlight. Once more the ax dragged the African like a charger dragging a dead cavalryman by the heel. The Frank tottered backward, and then as the African heaved past he drove the square toe of his left boot into the African's groin. All the men in the inn-yard squirmed in half-willing sympathy as the African collapsed in silence onto his stomach. The Frank slid his preposterous sword into the African's side and yanked it out again. After thrashing about for a few instants, the African lay still, as his dark -- though not, someone determined, black -- blood muddied the ground."

A reader getting lost in the thicket of Chabon's prose is on his own. Chabon writes with the literary abandon of the pay-by-the-word adventure serials popular in the boys' magazines of the 1940s and 1950s, and with a suspension of belief that equals the Tarzan stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs before that. Its a fun and exhilarating style, a little exhausting -- the tossing of a knife warrants fifty words, if it wants five -- but Chabon knows that Gentlemen of the Road is a tale told quickly. Originally a serial published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the novel jumps from scene to scene is a breathless hurry. Any reader of Neal Stephenson's collected works will marvel at Gentlemen's brevity. No moss gathers here.

Although some readers will likely grouse about the lack of Serious Writing in Gentlemen of the Road, Chabon isn't out to trick the reader: in an afterward, the writer makes it clear that he is stepping outside his usual story framework of "divorce, death, illness, violence, random and domestic; divorce, bad faith, deception and self-deception; love and hate between fathers and sons, men and women, friends and lovers; the transience of beauty and desire; divorce -- that about covers it."

In short, says the author, I have gone off in search of a little adventure. The point is made again by the design of the book: it's profusely illustrated, as the publishing trade used to trumpet, with drawings by Gary Gianni, illustrator of the Prince Valiant comic strip.

And a novel that centers on the exploits of two tenth-century Jewish comrades-in-arms is not your typical colonials-in-bush-country, although it does echo the rollicking style of, say, the late George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series. If Chabon enjoys this kind of story-telling, he could fashion a second career by picking up where Fraser left off in that lengthy series of escapades, based on the fictional memoirs of Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., K.C.B., K.C.I.E.

One element that makes Gentlemen a pleasure to read, like Fraser's Flashman books, is that Chabon tells his story without irony or tongue too firmly in cheek. If there's no heavy thinking going on here, it's a relief to read a novel that doesn't keep winking and nudging the reader for approval of its cleverness. Sure, it's doubtful that this ranks with great literature, but it's a fun read and a summer afternoon's entertainment. In that, Chabon -- who shows a remarkable imagination for a good yarn -- joins others like Dumas pere and fils, and Victor Hugo, who knew a thing or two about swashbuckling narratives. That's not bad company at all.

Tuesday in Decatur: Emory M. Thomas and "The Dogs of War, 1861"

Retired University of Georgia professor, historian Emory M. Thomas, will be speaking about his new book, The Dogs of War, 1861, tomorrow night at the Decatur library beginning at 7:15 p.m. In The Dogs of War, Thomas draws upon his lifetime of study to offer a new perspective on the outbreak of America's defining crisis.

In 1861, Americans thought that the war looming on the horizon would be brief. None foresaw a four-year bloodbath that cost the lives of more than half a million people. In his recent review of Thomas's book, Jim Cullen remarks on the ultimate lesson of the study: the unexpected costs of having been unprepared for war, and some surprising contemporary echoes in Iraq.

"Thomas makes some skillful juxtapositions between the miscalculations of Americans at the outset of the Civil War, and those of the Iraq War in 2003. He makes a chilling comparison between a memo from Brigadier Janis Karpinski, who presided over Abu Gharib prison, and one from Henry Wirz and Andersonville. The message is clear: almost by definition, going to war means getting blindsided. It should be avoided -- whatever your aims -- at almost all costs.

.. To paraphrase William Goldman's famous maxim of the film business, nobody knew anything, even those who were presumed to know, then and since. That included politicians, the professional military, and rank and file volunteers -- who were volunteers to a great extent precisely because they didn't know what they were getting into."

Thomas highlights the delusions that dominated each side's thinking. Lincoln believed that most Southerners loved the Union, and would be dragged unwillingly into secession by the planter class. Jefferson Davis could not quite believe that Northern resolve would survive the first battle; once the Yankees witnessed Southern determination, he hoped, they would acknowledge Confederate independence. The decisions of the two leaders, in turn, reflected these widely held myths.

Thomas weaves his exploration of these misconceptions into a tense narrative of the months leading up to the war, from the "Great Secession Winter" to a fast-paced account of the Fort Sumter crisis in 1861.

Emory M. Thomas's books demonstrate a range of major Civil War scholarship, from The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience and the landmark The Confederate Nation, to definitive biographies of Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart. For more information about Tuesday evening's appearance contact the Georgia Center for the Book.

From the journals of Philip Whalen, in Big Bridge magazine

Here are excerpts from a collection featuring the art and transcriptions of Philip Whalen, with an introduction by Brian Unger, appearing in the current online journal Big Bridge. As Unger is careful to point out, "no subsequent edition of any original work is ever final or complete. And no new edition is ever a substitute for the original. The textual history of a worthwhile literary work necessarily continues, and continues, and continues." This is especially true when dealing with a hand-written and illustrated manuscript in what Unger refers to as Whalen's "arrighi calligraphy style." For more of Whalen's work, there is Michael Rothenberg's large volume The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, published by Wesleyan University Press (2007). Most of these poems appearing at Big Bridge have not been previously available.

From Brian Unger's introduction: The following excerpts and images from the journals of Philip Whalen have been transcribed and reproduced from the poet's archive in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. For the material featured here in Big Bridge, I selected a brief but fascinating section from one of the 'Kyoto Notebooks' found in the Notebooks, 1957 – arrighi 1990, Box 1, folder 10. Physically, this particular object is rather typical for Whalen, one of those small writing tablets with a faux marble cover, 8" by 10", common in elementary and secondary school classrooms in the 1950s and 60s.

If you are a fan of Philip Whalen's work the journals are a profound joy to peruse, and if you are a student of the Beat Generation or of American Buddhist literature, these journals are an indispensable lens into the life of a late 20th century American Zen monk-poet and his circle. Whalen's journals embody a literary project far removed from, for example, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, written around the same time. In retrospect, Merton's ruminations and meditations seem to reflect the positivist, ecumenical optimism of the period in American Zen dominated by Columbia University lecturer D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966). ...

OM VAGĪŚVARI MŪM

8 : IX : 67

ran lunatic in the midst of our canoeing trip, had to tie him

up & sit on him in the bottom of the canoe in the daytime, tie

him to a tree at night and he kept talking and laughing and cussing

the whole time we put a gag on him one night so we could get some rest

from his noise but pretty soon he had eaten and swallowed it all some way

or other we were afraid to try that again because he might get all fouled

up with all the cloth inside then he had to get loose a couple times and

we almost lost him completely hunting for him through the brush and timber

we never would have found him except for his talking and we never did catch

him asleep from the time he first started acting funny

Philip Whalen

10 : IX : 67

Dreams of all my family at the cabin

in the woods, from the time the car turns

off the highway the clay bank hillside and

ferns appear as in passing lighthouse beam

then down sloping fir tree tunnel and

so to the house. Who was driving the

car? Dick Anderson, Clarence Thompson—

a friend of mine they never saw, or

some friend from earlier school days

we arrive, my grandmother is delighted,

all the rest jostling and roaring per

usual

Just now I read my mother's

Name in a poem by the Earl of Rochester,

Pepsicola in Japan.

TRIBUTE

to Wallace Stevens. I never should

have left the U.S.A. without copies of

all his poems.