Norman Mailer on Gilmore Girls
by Ernie on 13/11/07 at 7:05 pm
With the recent passing of Norman Mailer (which I learned about only when I overheard it at The Last Word, my neighborhood bookshop, since I’m very “unplugged” on the weekends), I thought I’d share this clip of him on the television show Gilmore Girls, an appearance that strikes me as terribly undignified for some reason. I suppose he was a great self-publicist, and admitted as much, but, as we see here, there are the consequences. So far as I can tell, he was no one’s favorite novelist, but he was a man who should be remembered and, perhaps, respected, in his way, for keeping the larger-than-life element of Hemingway alive in the American writer for a few more decades. Just click on the pic below to see the “I’m pregnant!” segment, one of several that featured the old sauropod at the Dragonfly Inn on the square in Star’s Hollow. It manages to be both abrasive and cloying at the same time—insofar as such a thing is possible, this is a Gilmore Girls masterpiece!
Just so no one gets me wrong, I will clarify: I do harbor small affections for both Norman Mailer and the Gilmore Girls, though I find both of them irksome and largely impracticable, which is to say somehow unattainable. I tore through Naked and the Dead as a young WWII buff, daydreamed over Armies of the Night as a frustrated, futureless dishwasher in Philadelphia, and I recently purchased The Jungle, his account of the “rumble in the jungle,” the 1974 heavyweight boxing title match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali in Zaire. I have always found Mailer a delightful (because so often delightfully absurd) subject in the many interviews he gave. Like many “big” writers—think T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound—he expressed incredibly stupid and indefensible ideas from time to time. I call his reputation unattainable because it is nearly impossible to be a writer in the mold of a Mailer anymore (or a Capote, Kerouac, Fitzgerald, take your pick).
Gilmore Girls, at least in the early seasons, served as an innocent fantasy for me (not the one you might think!). The notion of a quiet little Connecticut town�where precocious teenage girls and their gorgeous moms find themselves magnetized by the tough, literary men who crash through their lives—held enormous appeal for me. At one time, the television show’s website even included a bibliography of all the books and authors mentioned on the show. The first season DVD set, which my sister-in-law gave me as a joke gift last Christmas, includes a glossary! My wife, who grew up in Southington, Connecticut, and spent her weekends in New Haven, assures me that Star’s Hollow could only exist on a back lot in Tinseltown.
While I’m on the subject of Mailer, I’d like to offer up a quick literary anecdote before I go out for a drink. Like most literary anecdotes, I have no way of verifying its authenticity. I’m told that Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer appeared together on a television show, the sort of affair that is today unimaginable anywhere beyond the dusty corners of C-Span Book Notes (which even I find impossible to watch). Vidal, as is his way, made some subtle and probably quite eloquent jabs at Mailer during the show. Afterward, backstage, Mailer is said to have head-butted Vidal, knocking him to the floor. By all accounts, Vidal sat up, wiped some blood from his face, and coolly remarked: “Ah, Norman, I see words have failed you again.”
