Norman mailer

There are two competing ideas going around about “the old days” of journalism. In one, journalism was a sober public service, safeguarded by editors and ethics, untainted by the capital-A, capital-E Attention Economy. In the other, it was a racist, sexist boys’ club we managed to leave behind – even if only briefly, for long enough to support Teen Vogue’s politics vertical. (May they rest in peace.) The current pile-on concerning celebrity reporter Olivia Nuzzi, whose ex Ryan Lizza has revealed her affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., leans hard on the first fantasy. Once there were newsrooms; now there are “personal brands.” Once we had Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow; now there is a woman in a Lana Del Rey cosplay Mustang with 1990s porn-star brows.

Gstaad This is my last week in the Alps and I’m trying to get it all in – skiing, cross-country, kickboxing, even some nature walking along a stream. (I did my last downhill run with Geoffrey Moore, one that ended in a collision with a child at the bottom of the mountain, and I’m thinking of calling it quits on the downhill-skiing front.) The trouble with athletes is that we early on enact the destiny to which we are all subject, an early death. The death of sports talent is a subtle process. The eyes go first, then the step falters. Eventually you feel like an old man who is not in the same league as his opponent. I was lucky to get old late – in sport, that is.

Gstaad   Joan Didion, who died last December, took herself extremely seriously. American writers tend to do that, especially those whose books are unreadable, the kind who win prizes and get reviewed by the Bagel Times. Pretension aside, however, Didion was a hell of a writer, a stylist who modelled her prose on Papa Hemingway’s. We never met, but I knew enough to stay away because of a joke I played on her. Didion was godmother to David Mortimer’s and Shelley Wanger’s daughter, a young lady I have never met. Shelley is an editor at Knopf, and is the daughter of that beautiful and elegant actress of the 1940s Joan Bennett. David Mortimer is a scion of a grand old American family. I have always known them and like them, hence the joke.

New York Recently a story about my father, the writer Norman Mailer, getting ‘cancelled’ tore across the internet. What started the hoopla was Random House, Mailer’s long-standing publisher, suggesting that his estate bring a proposal for a book. The book was to contain excerpts from several of his political writings and interviews in which he presciently laid out the fragility of democracy. The collection was intended to honour his centenary next year. Random House received the proposal favourably, but then weeks later declined to publish it. The reasons are hearsay. One suggestion is that there were objections by junior executives to the use of the word ‘negro’ in Mailer’s essay ‘The White Negro’.

It takes a very good writer to produce prose that provokes an emotional response in a reader, even when it deals with events long past with which he or she has no connection. It also takes a good writer to subtly tip off the reader about a change in the character of the American people, one that has seen toughness replaced by weakness. Talleyrand once remarked that no one who had been born after the French Revolution could know how sweet life could be. Larry McMurtry wrote about life in small American towns in the 1950s and the great American West in the late 19th century, and his writing evokes feelings that those born after those dates can relate to. Most of his heroes, like those of Hemingway, were ultimately defeated.