The Fight: Norman Mailer (Penguin Modern Classics)

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NOW, OUR MAN of wisdom had a vice. He wrote about himself. Not only would he describe the events he saw, but his own small effect on events. This irritated critics. They spoke of ego trips and the unattractive dimensions of his narcissism. Such criticism did not hurt too much. He had already had a love affair with himself, and it used up a good deal of love. He was no longer so pleased with his presence. His daily reactions bored him. They were becoming like everyone else’s. His mind, he noticed, was beginning to spin its wheels, sometimes seeming to repeat itself for the sheer slavishness of supporting mediocre habits. If he was now wondering what name he ought to use for his piece about the fight, it was out of no excess of literary ego. More, indeed, from concern for the reader’s attention. It would hardly be congenial to follow a long piece of prose if the narrator appeared only as an abstraction: The Writer, The Traveler, The Interviewer. That is unhappy in much the way one would not wish to live with a woman for years and think of her as The Wife.

Norman Mailer | US news | The Guardian Norman Mailer | US news | The Guardian

The evening before the fight Mailer has a beer with George Plimpton, who covers the fight for Sports Illustrated before attending the press meeting of Foreman at the Hotel Memling. Then Plimpton and he set out for Ali's place to join his retinue. At 2 AM, they all leave for the stadium where the fight is scheduled to start two hours later. In Ali's dressing room, Mailer observes the mood. Other champions had a presence larger than themselves. They offered charisma. Foreman had silence. It vibrated about him in silence…His violence was in the halo of his serenity…One did not allow violence to dissipate; one stored it. Serenity was the vessel where violence could be stored.’

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I can say confidently that one need not be versed in the pugilistic arts to enjoy this book. I know next to nothing about boxing, and on the rare occasion when I have viewed a bout, usually end up falling asleep by the end of the first round. Yet Mailer's description of the match is so gripping that even though you know the outcome of the fight, the scene is rife with tension. At the beginning of the book, he does state that he is going to do this, so it is not unexpected. This will also allow the reader, should he or she wish to continue, to get a different perspective. One part that I did enjoy was when Norman (how he referred to himself throughout the book) went jogging with Ali when the boxer was doing road work. While the pace was slower and he didn’t last the entire length of the run, it was nonetheless something that is not typically found in other books on this fight. Whalen-Bridge, John (2010). Norman Mailer's Later Fictions: Ancient Evenings Through Castle in the Forest . New York City: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780230109056. This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. ( December 2019) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) I think about it and I thank God, and I thank George Foreman for having true endurance.” The inevitable schizophrenia of great athletes was in his voice. Like artists, it is hard for them not to see the finished professional as a separate creature from the child that created him. The child (now grown up) still accompanies the great athlete and is wholly in love with him, and immature love, be it said.’

The Fight - Penguin Books UK

For if we are our own force, we are also a servant of the forces of the dead. So we have to be bold enough to live with all the magical forces at loose between the living and the dead. That is never free of dread. It takes bravery to live with beauty or wealth if we think of them as an existence connected to the messages, the curses, and the loyalties of the dead. In” The original footage was 45 hours long, but after the editing process the producers came up with a 110-minute film. It took them three weeks to watch the 45 hours of film, then about six months to cut it into 7.5 hours. According to Mailer, the crew worked a long time before they could get down to the 3.5-hour version, which no longer exists. "At that point, down from 7 ½ hours, it's a totally different film. It was endlessly long and slow and had all sorts of interesting corners, pursued all sorts of angles, that never quite got developed enough." [9] Norman Mailer, “A Gang of Champs,” The Fight: Norman Mailer, by Norman Mailer, Vintage International, 1997, p.47 His most famous boxing essay is the book-length account of the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle, The Fight (1975), but his best is the 30,000-word piece (originally published in Esquire) on the 1962 Liston-Paterson bout, which lasted one round, Ten Thousand Words a Minute. At a news conference, Mailer sat down in Sonny Liston's chair and refused to move when the boxer arrived. Maidstone is a sometimes hilarious, often boring, but always adventurous ego trip, a very expensive, 110-minute home movie that has been edited, rather fancily, out of something like 45 hours of original footage. That, in turn, prompts the thought that almost anybody should be able to get 110 minutes of something out of 45 hours of anything, even if it's simply the filmed record of a chic, chaotic, seven-day brawl in East Hampton, which is the raw, not-so-base material of Maidstone. [18]

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Something Mailer did better than writing novels was to apply the techniques of fiction to a non-fiction subject. The first book to use this strategy was The Armies of the Night (subtitled History as a Novel/The Novel as History), which recorded, through the eyes of the narrator, "Mailer", the 1967 march on the Pentagon to protest against the Vietnam War. He employed the same technique in other books, including Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968) and Of a Fire on the Moon (1970), an account of space travel in which he styled himself Aquarius. Norman Mailer, "A Gang of Champs", The Fight: Norman Mailer, by Norman Mailer, Vintage International, 1997, p. 44. Filmmaker Michael Mailer, Norman Mailer's son, credits Maidstone as a sociological statement and an embodiment of the "indulgence to the point of mental hazard" that ultimately caused the 1960s to "implode." [13]

The Fight - Penguin Books UK The Fight - Penguin Books UK

Lennon, J. Michael, ed. (2014). The Selected Letters of Norman Mailer. New York: Random House. OCLC 933749753. Vidal lived in New York after the war, as did Capote, and they moved in the same social circle, over which Tennessee Williams presided. “I first met Truman at Anaïs Nin’s apartment,” Vidal recalled. “My first impression – as I wasn’t wearing my glasses – was that it was a colourful ottoman. When I sat down on it, it squealed. It was Truman.”Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director. The best aspect of the book are chapters 13 through 15, the fight itself. Here, the “masculinity” of Norman’s writing shines best, as the reader will feel like he or she is ringside. Not just from the punches or reading about Ali’s famous strategy by leaning on the ropes early, but also from what is said by each fighter and their corners. There are similar segments earlier in the book when Mailer visits each fighter’s training and workouts. Knowing how the fight ends before starting the book, it was amazing to see that some of the popular myths about that fight, such as that Foreman was not prepared, are simply that – myths, not actual events.