mailer's letters

There's a piece in this week's Nueva Jorker (6 Oct), a printing of select letters from Norman Mailer. Reading letters from writers that were not intended for you is pure literary voyeurism. I eat it up. Of course you must not let the sudden rush of wind blow off your skeptic hat. 

Writers, especially colossal egos like Mailer, write everything with the knowledge that it may one day be read. This, of course, tends to detract from the intimacy if the letter is actually written to you. I haven't dived in yet, but these types of letters are always a pleasure read. Even if you see posturing, and I think I will with Mailer's letters, it reveals a great deal, if only the fact you sometimes need to shade your eyes from a writer's narcissism. 

Despite it being Mailer's attempt to outdo Capote, The Executioner's Song is one of the greatest pieces of extended journalism ever written, so all the dissing above shouldn't detract from his great abilities as a journalist.

(Later). Finished reading them. There is a surprising candidness about them, but they do not stray far at all from Mailer's persona, that of the rugged in-your-face manly-man wants-to-be worshipped character. Mailer is an interesting study. On the one hand, he wanted to be considered a great novelist and "artist," but on the other hand he never had that detached meditativeness of the stereotypical artist. He would (try to) walk the line between worldliness and tormented talent, but the scale leans heavily towards worldliness, and the artist part of his was more a desire of his than a reality.