Re: JCO: RE: Talent vs Experience

Hi, Andy. Mailer is Mailer; Oates is Oates. Apples and oranges. THE NAKED
AND THE DEAD is a great novel, as is THEM, and nothing can take that away from
their authors. JCO praised Mailer in her famous 1970 (?) cover interview in
NEWSWEEK, but she later took issue with statements Mailer made about women --
in a very courteous yet incisive manner that, to my way of thinking, was more
effective than anything I'd heard before or since about Mailer. (I'll try to
locate that article later, perhaps Randy already knows which one I'm referring
to.) For Mailer, that nod to Oates is the best he can do, voiced in the only
voice he has. As JCO often notes in her fiction: we play the best we can with
the hand of cards we've been delt. Mailer is stuck with being a man of the
early-mid 20th century.
Cyrano

In a message dated 10/18/2005 12:59:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
LitAsk@aol.com writes:

<< n many ways the Mailer quotation is quite flattering, in that he says that

JCO's talent allows her to write about subjects about which she may not
have
very much personal experience. I cannot, however, see how his remark that a
woman cannot be brave in the way a soldier is brave is anything other than
blatant sexism. In other words, I get the sense he admires JCO genuinely,
but
from this quotation I gather he's a touch misogynist. To me, this is
somewhat an
unflattering characteristic. I heard Mailer speak last year and he was
quite
interesting. He got very political, and as I'm in the same camp as he I
quite enjoyed it. (There was a woman in the audience, however, who got into
a
fight with him afterward saying that he was filling our college-student
brains
with propaganda or something.)

Andy



>>
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Re: JCO: RE: Talent vs Experience

On Oct 17, 2005, at 9:58 PM, LitAsk@aol.com wrote:

In many ways the Mailer quotation is quite flattering, in that he says that JCO's talent allows her to write about subjects about which she may not have very much personal experience. I cannot, however, see how his remark that a woman cannot be brave in the way a soldier is brave is anything other than blatant sexism. In other words, I get the sense he admires JCO genuinely, but from this quotation I gather he's a touch misogynist. To me, this is somewhat an unflattering characteristic. I heard Mailer speak last year and he was quite interesting. He got very political, and as I'm in the same camp as he I quite enjoyed it. (There was a woman in the audience, however, who got into a fight with him afterward saying that he was filling our college-student brains with propaganda or something.)

 

Andy

To be fair, Mailer was positing a particular woman, who happened to not be brave, or not to have experienced "bravery," but talented enough to still write about it. In a part I didn't excerpt, he imagined an old woman whose bones ached attempting to cross a busy street, knowing she may not make it before the light changes -- and noting that this act may well require more personal bravery than most activity in war.

Having said that, the section I did quote, while certainly meant to be complimentary, does come out rather condescending.

Randy