Re: JCO:& r.i.p.MAILER

In a message dated 11/16/2007 12:41:47 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, Cyranomish writes:

Hi, Eric.  Thanks for your thoughtful reply.  Since posting last, I've reread some of the other stories in the collection THE SEDUCTION with great enjoyment.  "Getting & Spending" (title from the Wordsworth poem "The world is too much with us/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers/Little we see in nature that is ours.")  JCO locates her "Mailer" story  -- if that is indeed what it is -- in Maine, not Provincetown on Cape Cod, where Mailer spent his latter years happily married to wife #6 (#7?)  Similarly, JCO relocated Ted Kennedy's Chappaquiddick waterloo from Martha's Vineyard to coastal Maine in BLACK WATER.

    Anyways...in THE SEDUCTION, I rediscovered the story "The Imposters," which is quite vividly set in 1970s Provincetown.  Enjoyed the descriptions of that overworked summer tourist mecca -- P'town's littered landscapes and joyously kitsch artwork all up & down Commercial St.  The squalid bohemian lifestyle that JCO has portrayed so vividly elsewhere.  You can roll your eyes at P'town and still love it every summer. In "Imposters," of course, it's the backdrop to a grim story whose hero ends "slipping backward into sleep, as if into dark water."

    I liked your take on Getting & Spending.  I tend to the view that the shy (Alice-in-Wonderlandish) heroine did not have a sexual fling with Roger Craft; he did, however, shake her up emotionally.  Her great failure in their relationship was to abstain, not from sex, but from reporting RC's abuse of his little son, with the excuse that it was "none of her business," that it would stir up too much "fuss" with RC, who would be furious with her for snooping into his domestic business.  Later, when they meet on a cruiseship, RC and the narrator's husband take an immediate dislike to each other. RC finds the husband "priggish" -- and the narrator eventually divorces from that husband and is last seem tagging after RC in search of a good interview for the same fashion magazine that she had started out with as a journalist many years previously.  It makes sense the RC would remember their first acquaintance as a sexual one -- because the narrator turns out to be as uneasily compliant as his actual wives were.  So, I don't think they had sex, but he did exert a great emotional control over her, which endured for many years.

    Yes, you're right: they have opposite philosophies.  I hadn't thought of that. And at the same time RC is admirably ambitious & tenacious,  -- as is JCO herself, who -- I think in that old NEWSWEEK profile I mentioned below -- smiles at her own "laughably Balzacian ambition to put the whole world into a book."  In Getting & Spending, the narrator and RC are both "triumphant survivors" each on his/her own terms, but I believe readers are also being asked to reflect on what the triumph has cost them.

Best,

Cyrano    

 

 

In a message dated 11/14/2007 11:37:54 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, erickarl78@hotmail.com writes:

Hi Cyrano

Thanks for pointing out "Getting and Spending." I read the story years ago, but hadn't connected that "Roger Craft" might be inspired by Mailer. I can see it very clearly in reading it now. It's an interesting piece, sort of a hesitant portrait of a vigorous, intelligent, violent man. The narrator is so inward and quiet, so hesitant to admit much about her own life that it's difficult to tell whether the two really did have an affair in the house in Maine as Roger later claimed. He comes across very vividly as someone so brutish and selfish, but admirable in a way for his tenacity. Really he's the complete opposite of the narrator in that he tries to find the answers to the philosophical questions of life by bullying his way through it. Whereas the narrator tends, at least in the beginning, to extreme introspection and withdraws herself from any combative situation. "Roger Craft" Surely one best observed from afar.

Eric

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From: Cyranomish@aol.com
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 08:25:29 -0500
Subject: Re: JCO & r.i.p.MAILER
To: erickarl78@hotmail.com

In a message dated 11/12/2007 8:21:12 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, Cyranomish writes:

Hello, all.  I'm emailing you separately because my server does not connect reliably with Tone Clusters, and I haven't yet figured out how to fix it.

     Provincetown just isn't going to be the same without the looming, offstage presence of Norman Mailer, whose WWII novel The Naked & the Dead should be read by any serious lit-lover.  JCO cited him with admiration in her early-1970s NEWSWEEK profile. A few years later, she gently but very firmly reproached him for his unsympathetic attitude toward women's reproductive freedom.  (Randy can probably direct you to that article; I can't at the moment recall the magazine.)

     For a very thrilling JCO short story "about" (I think) the impact of NM on her art, please peruse the short story GETTING & SPENDING, collected in the 1975 book THE SEDUCTION & OTHER STORIES.  I'd love to hear your reactions. 

     Please forward this note on to other Tone Cluster folk I have overlooked in my haste.  Does anyone have Greg Johnson's email address?

Best,

Cyrano

 

 

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