Norman Mailer: The Art of Fiction XXXII
Steven Marcus's omnibus Paris Review interview with Mailer — one of Mailer's most important Q&As, per Lennon. Conducted at 142 Columbia Heights on 6 July 1963 and published in The Paris Review no. 31 (Winter-Spring 1964). Part of the magazine's 'Writers at Work' series. The interview develops Mailer's positions on craft, the writing process, the unconscious 'navigator,' the difference between writing on schedule and writing in spurts, and the relation between style and personal belief. Reprinted in Writers at Work, 3rd ser., ed. Kazin (Viking, 1967); Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Braudy (Prentice-Hall, 1972); partial in Cannibals and Christians (66.11); Pieces and Pontifications (82.16) as 'Craft and Consciousness'; complete in Conversations with Norman Mailer (88.6).
“Norman Mailer: The Art of Fiction XXXII.” Interview by Steven Marcus. Paris Review, no. 31 (Winter–Spring 1964), 28–58. Omnibus interview, conducted at 142 Columbia Heights on 6 July 1963 — six months before the Winter–Spring 1964 PR publication. Per Lennon, “one of Mailer’s most important” interviews.
The Marcus interview is the second of Mailer’s two major Paris Review Q&A’s of the early 1960s. The first was “The First Day’s Interview” (61.10, PR no. 26, Summer–Fall 1961) — Mailer’s first appearance in PR and his first self-interview. The Marcus interview is, by contrast, a long conventional Q&A in the magazine’s “Writers at Work” interview series, conducted by a literary-critic interlocutor and edited per the PR house standard. Per Lennon’s Norman Mailer bibliography (Gale, 1986), the Marcus interview is one of four Mailer interviews — Stern–Lucid 1959 (55.1, 59.x), Krassner 1962 (62.21), Marcus 1963/1964, and Paul Carroll 1967 — that are “loaded with information on a wide range of topics and have been mined by critics, journalists and subsequent interviewers since they were published.”
Per Lennon: “Mailer speaks at some length in the Marcus interview about the problems” of craft and the writing process — including his standard positions on the unconscious’s “navigator” function, the relation between style and personal belief, the difference between scheduled writing and spurts, and the relation between The Naked and the Dead and his later work.
Reprintings
- Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews, 3rd ser., ed. Alfred Kazin. New York: Viking, 1967.
- Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Leo Braudy. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972.
- Partial in Cannibals and Christians (66.11).
- Pieces and Pontifications (82.16) — as “Craft and Consciousness.”
- Complete in Conversations with Norman Mailer (88.6).
Related pages
- 1964 | The Paris Review | Steven Marcus | The First Day's Interview | An Impolite Interview with Norman Mailer
- The Homosexual Villain (55.1) | Cannibals and Christians (66.11) | Pieces and Pontifications (82.16) | Conversations with Norman Mailer (88.6)