Foreword to Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer
Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer, by Seymour Krim (New York: Excelsior Press Publishers, December 1961), p. 6. Composed New York, September 1960. Transcribed from Project Mailer's reprint at https://projectmailer.net/pm/Foreword_to_Views_of_a_Nearsighted_Cannoneer.
This is the full text of Norman Mailer’s foreword to Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer*, by Seymour Krim (New York: Excelsior Press Publishers, December 1961, p. 6) — Mailer’s first foreword, preface, or introduction to a book by another writer (61.23). The foreword is signed “New York, September 1960” — Mailer composed it more than a year before Krim’s book appeared. Reprinted at Project Mailer “with permission of the estate of Norman Mailer.” Rights to the text are reserved — see the frontmatter rights-note. See the Work page: Foreword to Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer (61.23).*
Krim and his odd honest garish sober grim surface is a child of our time. I think sometimes, as a matter of style, he is the child of our time, He is New York in the middle of the 20th Century, the city man, his prose is brilliance upon occasion as the electronic beauty of our lights, his shifts and shatterings of mood as screeching and true as the grinding of wheels and a subway train. He has the guts of New York, old Krim, and it is not so impossible that when the digital computer in the mind of new historians begins to take over the psychic ash heaps and spiritual dumps of this insane, cruel, rapacious, avid, cancerous and alas — in the end — cowardly city, they will say if they have a sense of the past that yes, in the work of Seymour Krim lives one of the truest beats of how horrible, how jarring, how livid and how exciting was this city where the best of us burned and burned out without a war, a cause, an underground, or a passion for the blood.
New York, September 1960