Preface to Norman Mailer: Works and Days
Mailer's preface to the Lennons' bio-bibliography — a witty tribute to J. Michael Lennon as his 'pro bono archivist,' without whom, Mailer writes, his literary estate would have become 'a dumping ground of moldering unlabelled cardboard boxes.'
Mailer’s preface to Norman Mailer: Works and Days — written for the 2000 first edition and reprinted in the 2018 revised edition — is a characteristically self-aware tribute to his friend and archivist J. Michael Lennon. The two were, Mailer writes, “as designed for each other as some species of American Yin and Yang, as hot dogs, perhaps, and mustard”: Lennon’s “talents, his discipline, and his ambition form a complement to all the slacks, voids, and indolences of my nature.” Mailer admits that, left to himself, he would “throw old manuscripts and letters into manila envelopes and deposit them in cartons”; under Lennon’s two decades of pro-bono labor, his papers became “so well-organized by his passion for precision and documentation that the result could appear obscene to me in its perfection, if it were not for the fact that I need and use it like a bone with its marrow.” Should posterity favor him, Mailer concludes, “those historic tides that carry a few authors’ boats to the golden islands of posthumous investiture will have felt his hand on the tiller.” He ends: “Three cheers for my friend, Mike Lennon, and my own private ovation for Works and Days.”