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Oral history has long been recognized as a legitimate and fertile form. But what about oral biography? Well, when it concerns Norman Mailer, the enduring enfant terrible, perpetual showman, seigneurial collector of wives and children, and protean writer, it amounts to a genre all by itself. Journalist Peter Manso sets out the lengthy musings of friends and enemies, editors and critics--almost anyone who has anything significant to say and some who do not--including Mailer's overprotective mother ("Running for mayor (of New York) was a mistake, and I told him, 'You don't understand all the spiteful things people do to someone who's running for mayor' ").
At some 700 pages, this is probably more than most people want to know about Mailer, especially when the talk winds down to details of book contracts and postponed deadlines. But there are priceless private scenes: Mailer asking his mother to judge which of five obscenities is the strongest, for example, and a sobering public confrontation when the author meets a hostile press after testifying for Jack Henry Abbott in the ex-convict's trial for the murder of Richard Adan, a Greenwich Village waiter. Mostly the book is grand gossip, a sort of Portable Hamptons, Everyman's own private literary soiree for a long afternoon in the hammock.
THE LEATHERSTOCKING TALES
by James Fenimore Cooper
Library of America; 2,398 pages in
2 volumes; $27.50 each
Mark Twain for the prosecution: "Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig . . . the Leatherstocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series." D.H. Lawrence for the defense: "Fenimore Cooper has probably done more than any writer to present the Red Man to the white man." For the reader: the Library of America, offering The Leatherstocking Tales in all their flawed glory.
Both critics have a point; Cooper's characterization of Natty Bumppo, the sharpshooter who boasts, "What I can see, I can hit at a hundred yards, though it were only a mosquitoe's eye," shuttles uneasily from stolid frontiersman to animated cartoon. Yet the surrounding Delaware, Iroquois and Sioux are presented for the first time as complex beings with heroic as well as villainous traits. It took another century to amplify the efforts of Cooper, whose unacknowledged voice can still be heard in romantic protest literature and films. If his works now seem closer to scenarios than to novels, so be it. They remain the most diverting westerns available without a VCR.
LOVE ALWAYS
by Ann Beattie
Random House; 247 pages; $16.95