2003

Mailer turns 80 and publishes three books — The Spooky Art (on his birthday), Modest Gifts, and the anti-war polemic Why Are We at War? — while emerging as one of the most outspoken American critics of the Iraq War.

Norman Mailer, 2003

Mailer’s 80th-birthday year was also a three-book year. The Spooky Art, his gathering of a lifetime’s thinking about the craft of writing, appeared on his birthday; Modest Gifts collected his poems and line drawings; and Why Are We at War? made him one of the most visible American opponents of the invasion of Iraq. A wave of birthday interviews and a run of anti-war speeches kept him in the press from January through the summer.

January

January 31 — Mailer’s 80th birthday, marked by the publication of The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing by Random House (03.7), dedicated to J. Michael Lennon. The book drew a long run of reviews — admiring (Tarloff, O’Connell, Jeff Simon, Roger Lewis) and hostile (Michiko Kakutani, John Leonard) in roughly equal measure.

A cluster of birthday interviews ran the same month: Christopher Bollen in V Magazine (03.1), Julie Salamon in the New York Times (03.2), Malcolm Jones in Newsweek (03.3), the London Independent (03.4), Hillel Italie for the AP (03.5), and Michael Lee in the Cape Cod Voice (03.6). In them Mailer reflected on the novel’s fading cultural force — “The novel now rides in a sidecar” — and, more than once, on the 1960 stabbing of Adele Morales: “there’s no doubt in my mind that I will pay for that one.”

February–April

Mailer became a leading literary voice against the coming Iraq War. On February 20 he delivered an anti-war speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, reported as “Mailer Erupts: Bush Needs a War” (03.11) and published in full as “Only in America” (03.20); a 22 February speech at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities became “Gaining an Empire, Losing Democracy” (03.12). He warned of “a pre-fascist atmosphere here in America” (03.15).

Spring — Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings (03.17), gathering revised poems from Deaths for the Ladies (62.3) and Cannibals and Christians (66.11) with new work and roughly a hundred drawings.

April 7 — Why Are We at War? (03.18), a slim, fast-tracked polemic assembling two 2002 interviews and the Commonwealth Club speech, dedicated to Norris.

Summer

In July the New York Review of Books ran Mailer’s “The White Man Unburdened” (the expanded form of 03.21), which provoked Ronald Tiersky’s rejoinder and Mailer’s reply, printed together as “Bush and Terror: an Exchange” on August 14 (03.27). That same month the Mailer family gave a Provincetown benefit reading of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (03.25).

The Norman Mailer Society

November 1 — The Norman Mailer Society holds its inaugural conference in Brooklyn, New York, formally launching the scholarly society devoted to Mailer’s work (its first gathering had been a half-day session at the 2002 American Literature Association conference). Conference program (PDF).

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