2002
Turning 79, Mailer keeps the 'Zelda, Scott and Ernest' dialogue on stage and devotes his public voice to the gathering war: a run of impassioned post-9/11 interviews — the BBC, Dotson Rader, The American Conservative — that he would gather the next year as Why Are We at War? Lawrence Schiller turns their Robert Hanssen investigation and Mailer's miniseries screenplay into the book Into the Mirror. The James Jones Literary Society gives him its Lifetime Achievement Award in Paris.
On stage, and looking back
The “Zelda, Scott and Ernest” dialogue reached the 92nd Street Y in January (02.1), and a series of reflective interviews caught Mailer at 79 taking stock — “Machismo is that faint zephyr I can still barely hear on the other side of the hill” (02.2) — naming his three best novels (The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner’s Song, Harlot’s Ghost) and revisiting the stabbing of Adele (02.2, 02.3). In June the James Jones Literary Society gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award at its Paris symposium, saluting him as “the chief narrative interpreter and chronicler of the American Century.”
The gathering war
Most of Mailer’s public energy went to the post-9/11 moment and the march toward Iraq. He told the BBC that “11 September was ‘larger than the atom bomb’” — “Allah versus the Almighty Dollah” (02.6); warned his friend Dotson Rader that “patriotism in a country that’s failing has a logical tendency to turn fascistic” (02.9); and gave The American Conservative a long anti-war conversation, “I Am Not for World Empire” (02.10). He skewered George F. Will for likening Bush’s prose to Hemingway’s (02.5). These pieces would be gathered the following year as Why Are We at War? (03.18).
Schiller, Vidal, and a book in the wings
Lawrence Schiller turned their joint Robert Hanssen investigation and Mailer’s miniseries screenplay into Into the Mirror (02.7). Mailer wrote forewords and tributes (the Levenda Unholy Alliance, 02.13; a Steinbeck centenary note, 02.14), saw an advance excerpt of The Spooky Art run in The New Yorker (02.12), and reconciled, genially, with Gore Vidal in Provincetown.
Related pages
- 2001 | 2003
- “11 September was ‘larger than the atom bomb’” | Into the Mirror | Dotson Rader
- The Very Literate Are Different: Zelda, Scott and Ernest on Stage (02.1) | Machismo Isn't that Easy to Wear (02.2) | For Whom the Will Toils (02.5) | Why Are We at War? (03.18)