Norman Mailer Speaks His Mind
Brief published interview with Mailer conducted at the Montreal home of Robert Hershorn (publisher of Exchange Magazine), with three reporters representing the Star, Le Nouveau Journal and the McGill Daily — focused on the hipster, with an extended list of writers who have influenced Mailer and comment on the Adolf Eichmann trial.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
“Norman Mailer Speaks His Mind.” Interview by Reford MacDougall. McGill Daily Panorama (Montreal), 19 January 1962. Setting: “Large, dimly-lit living room of Robert Hershorn, Publisher of Exchange Magazine.” Characters: Mailer; three reporters representing The Star, Le Nouveau Journal, and the McGill Daily; Stephen Vizinczey, editor of Exchange Magazine. Properties: one tape recorder; three pads and three pencils.
The interview’s spine is the hipster/beatnik distinction Mailer had developed in “The White Negro” (57.4) and elaborated in Advertisements for Myself (59.13): “Beatniks are passive, contemplative and take pride in being impractical. They are also defeatist. The Hipster, however, is active, believes he has something extraordinary in him and wants to do good. Both take marijuana.” On the trial of Adolf Eichmann then concluding in Jerusalem: “A Jewish disaster. I say this as a Jew and I know the Jews feel about it. They were trying to do something heroic, but they should have assassinated Eichmann in South America.” Mailer also offers a substantial list of writers who have influenced him — Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Stendhal, Freud, Marcuse, Spengler, E. M. Forster, Isherwood, Thomas Wolfe, Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Steinbeck, James Jones, Hemingway, Maugham — and discusses the calculated/instinctive split he sees in his own writing, his fears that America may become “the finest and most exquisite expression of totalitarianism,” and his self-description as “an existentialist.”
Full text
A complete transcription of the interview from Project Mailer’s reprint of the McGill Daily clipping is held at wiki/texts/1962-01-19-norman-mailer-speaks-his-mind.md, rights: REQUEST-NEEDED (Mailer Estate literary rights plus McGill Daily / McGill University typographic-arrangement rights).