Sunday Forum; An Evening With Norman Mailer

You may be curious about the title of the talk tonight I think the talk is at least worthy of the dignity of a title and the title of this talk will be the comparative existentialism of journalism new journalism the novel. And the pome. As they may possibly apply to espionage. Now let's see if I can bring that one. OK. But. Q Your difficulty that's come upon us all these days is that we're I think we're all most Americans are almost in the situation that the English were in fact about the time Richardson was writing. Each week or each month it's my recollection that each month a new installment of Pamela would come out. But it may have been once each week because I don't have the faintest notion now which magazine put it Pamela series in

cereal but you may remember that read or heard about it in English that all the England finally waited for the next installment of that serial with its most famous serial ever written would permit retain her virtue was the ongoing theme. It was as if the British Empire might or might not hold together symbolically metaphorically speaking if Helder did not hold on to her virtue and the novel was in its heyday. The novel was off to a great ride. Well we've moved on from Pamela to Richard. We read the papers every day now in ways we never used to those of us who had any sense. It used to be that one could take one's pride in not reading the newspapers because you knew it was going to happen next. I remember when I was in college even though it was a war going on. You know the Jews had to

catch up with the papers once a week because if you couldn't figure out on the basis of any given news story on a given day it was going to happen for the next six or seven days with that news story that you had no sense of things you didn't know how history was made you know how things moved. You had no notion of the powers that be. What's happened. To us in these 30 years since I went to college. Is that apparently the temple of history has speeded up seven times. Because now you have to read the papers every day. And the history that's being made is taken on the intensity and the the amusement and the bewilderment. And the rich sense of shifting hypothesis that we get only in the best novels. It's part of the crisis of the modern novel today is that it cannot possibly begin to keep up with the newspapers.

The newspapers are better. But history is being made is more curious than any plot. I mean would I ever have dared to create an agony or. No I mean think of the reasons why I would never have dared because I wouldn't believe that you would find men much like Agnew all over the world and in places of power. If so I would not have thought the opposition within his I would dream to begin with that you have a man who came out of nowhere as a republican liberal and win the hearts of the hardest Republican conservatives and the acrimonious activity of alliteration. You see deep in every conservative there is a primitive student of the English language screaming to come out.

And alliteration tune them into the English language is the most exciting thing they'd heard that took up golf. And I would talk to the press for which I won my heart revered him deeply. It's not every man who has the courage to attack the press. It's not every man who knows how bad they are. Which is a peculiar structure in English if you stop to think about it because it's an alliteration at the end. New nuggets a new guy. A man who makes the most incredible acceptance speech that a vice president has ever made. When he spoke about the strobe lights of the ego. I mean you have to have the imagination to employ a speech writer who has such

poetic gifts. Thank you. He was not an ordinary man. No but he had the face of a. Dictator a banana republic. But there was no banana republic. It was big you know. It looked like we were going to become a banana. A man capable of large an interesting and exciting and passionate crimes against the state. Instead he was guilty of petty crimes. I confess to you as a novelist I would I would have thrown away and every driver. I would have said my character does not hold up. He's too perfect to my left wing bent. I'm writing propaganda. No Republican can be this bad and this interesting

this corrupt this hypocritical and this bold he's absolutely too marvelous as a character we going to throw him out and get someone quiet or. Get someone more in keeping with Richard Nixon. Like Gerald Ford. So we have that and then we have one day after that's gone. We have the next episode. Which is the heart of the Boston establishment that fine Boston astonishment would have a protagonist who would have that multiple name of Cox. Slow but sure perceive things are tough. COX stands up to the president.

The president fires Cox. An honorable man of the administration who is a novice I would name John Richardson because my name Elliot you would all say there is mailer tried to make some of my own connection to Dee has. Resigned. A man with presidential ambitions resigned. House resign. Bork comes in. Bork was a media described by this evening's papers as analogous to William Buckley Buckley and Bork. No if it ruptures any notion we

have of politics in other words what we have is we have the marvelous collision of possibilities that you have in a lot of modern racing novel a novel doesn't take itself too seriously a novel that plays with the art of the novel that creates hypotheses in order to destroy them. You see the notion we have always when we're trying to comprehend a social process is that we look for an eye policy. Because with that hypothesis we can begin to decide whether we know what's going on and on. In other words we can say we could resupply policy support leftists we can say the corporations control America everything that goes on in America willy nilly. Ultimately is determined by the corporations. Then Aunt things happen. Let's say over the past two years I will try to look for examples of the tumor to Jermain. Very slow but not altogether sure talks. Look for.

We look for that we have an eye policies. The corporation is back of everything bad in America. Then slowly as the fight for ecology goes on we notice that in peculiar places certain corporations to a slight degree seem to be responding to the fact that there might be a general danger to the economy and to the nation that might be somewhat larger than their own self-interest. And so we wrestle with the hypothesis. That we if we're interested in a college we wrestle with it closely. We follow what various people are saying about this. We we here are going to say no the corporations are still working entirely for their own interest and they don't give a damn about ecology if other people say no that's not quite so you're not obeying the fact that's a slow developing process and depending on your knowledge or interest in it and how far you push your inquiry and how much the people around you know you begin to acquire a certain amount of knowledge about the question of the corporations and ecology. You have an iPod. It's useful it's useful even if it's wrong because in the course of having that hypothesis this proved for you you end up with a richer view of the way things work.

It's the way everything is a science proceeds almost impossible to do anything interesting in science without an apotheosis. It was impossible to do to do the final experiment without that hypothesis if you're going to try to prove or disprove that B will follow out of the will prove itself to be a function of A in this and that fashion. So when we look to the news we look for hypotheses that will enable us to understand what's going on. And when we. Find the confirmed hypothesis because more interesting we find them denied. We very often are presented with a new hypothesis that is a little better. The novel recognizing that this wonderful use of the hypothesis that it built the technology and much of the culture of the Western world was becoming a little inadequate to put up with the shifting of Monterey's and customs and everything else. The media before us and life began to mock the notion of hypothesis. You could say that the novel of the absurd the novel of black comedy depends completely on the idea

that the apotheosis of the steroid overnight. The imposter began it if you will in the longest journey where he creates a tremendously interesting character named Gerald I think his name was. And then on the way you turn the page in the beginning the third of the fourth chapter and journalism in the center of this book is something a third of the fourth chapter of a book which is 20 chapters. You turn the page and you read Gerald died that day. He was kicked to death in a football game you might say that was the beginning of a novel of the absurd. You get in a car journeys wiped out the parent that equate think of all those hypotheses you had about Agnew's higher purpose have been wiped out mine along with yours. Well that produces an extraordinary ability in reading the newspapers. And it begins to turn. It begins to torment us with a notion which is creeping into the 20th century

which is that culture is no longer a bull that rolls along a table that may have a few inclines on it but that indeed culture may be a ball rolling along a table which has a profound top a logical warp within it so that we no longer even know when the ball is rolling off the table. It may not be rolling off the table at all it may merely be rolling on the other side of what do you call a mo. E.B. a ring. What do you call it. Strep. I said it louder than you. Given this development in our culture this sort of huge acceleration of the novelistic possibilities from day to day in the American scene give this advance from the idea that we began to

arrive at some of us even a year or two ago that America was what it was was the natural religion. You see that because if you want to understand Republicans you have to understand the first thing about Republicans was that the country was a religion which is a larger market after all it's a larger mark when you say that America is a more fundamental religion to Catholics than Catholicism or more fundamental religion to his companions that Episcopalianism given that it's now as if the country's only become a national religion. It's become a national art form. No novels not Tolstoy not Dickens not even Smollett. Not even a lesson Hunter Thompson. Has come up with the turns that we've been confronting from day to day. Now to give you an idea of how how far we've moved

in our notion of personality I thought that I'd. Read tonight from a few pieces I've written about Nixon over the years. I started writing about Nixon in 1960 and I'm out in the 160 and a little bit about 1964 which I won't repeat here because it's so little it would just pick up our time. I wrote a bit about him in 68 and the bit about him in 72 I thought it fun to read to go over and read just these little passages about him and from there possibly we could start to swim into some notion of what we're talking about we talk about journalism new journalism the novel the pome and the possible existential relations espionage. The first is that this fully shorted refers to Nixon's reaction

in 1960 when he had won the nomination for president. And as he was seen on television. Yes Nixon said naturally but terribly tired an hour after his nomination the TV cameras and lights and microphones bringing out a sweat of fatigue on his face the words coming very slowly from the tired brain. Somber modest. Sober slow slow enough so that one could touch empathic leave the cautions behind each word. Yes I want to say said Nixon that whatever abilities I have I got from my mother. A tired cause. Don't moment of warning

quote and my. Close quote. The connection now made the rest comes easy. Quote and my school. And my church close quote. Such men are capable of anything. What you see was easy a nine hundred sixty nine thousand sixty you could have a hypothesis about Nixon that would last for 12 years. 13 In fact things are getting tougher and I am 68 as he comes up to the Miami Hilton. He's fighting for the nomination at that point to get Republican nomination for president in 1968. Just a glimpse. He's in a car course. He has a sunburn his forehead is bright pink and he's made it into the hotel. Push from behind. Hands and handshakes in the front here are recognizable. It is

curly or than most and combed on roller coaster waves not on reminiscent of the head of hair on the doll but. I must have known him for going on. Maybe that is why Gore got so mad at me is to compare me to Charles Manson I don't know. At any rate the discussion was on to talk about how Nixon passes through the crowd goes through the crowd to get into his hotel. Nixon passes with the odd stick like motions which are so much a characteristic of his presence he's like an actor with good voice and hordes of potential. But the despair of his dramatic coach Dick you just got to learn how to move. There's something almost touching in the way he does it there's a sense of pleasure winces at the way he must expose his lack of heart for being warm and really winning in crowds and getting his own heart before his time ASC is a total unstinting exercise of the will. What's funny deliver every last Grace.

Yes he's like a missionary handing out bibles among the poor do. Right they are but weak fellows but deserving of the touch. No it's not so much that he's a bad actor but Nixon in a street crowd is radiant with emotion to reach across the prison land of his own artificial moves and deadly reputation and show that he is sincere. It is rather they grew up in the worst set of schools for actors in the world white clubs and church usher debating team young Republicanism capital likes forensic style as an actor Nixon thinks his work is to signify. So he if he wants to show someone that he likes them he must smile if he wishes to show disapproval of communism. He frowned. America must be strong. Out goes his chest. If the next day he's at a press conference it's a press conference that as you'll discover a little while for particular reasons has been called. Well I'll leave that to the reading.

The room filled slowly by the time Nixon began it was a pair of the 500 seats of an excess of estimate perhaps half of them were filled. Certainly no more than two thirds is still 1968 the summer of 1968 before Nixon won the nomination. It was nonetheless a large press conference. Nixon came in wearing a quiet blue gray suit white shirt black and blue close figure tie black shoes no handkerchief in the breast pocket. He stepped up on the dias definitely not certain whether applause would be coming or not. There was none. He stood there look quite ugly and warily at the audience and then said that he was ready for questions. This would be his sole press conference before the nomination. He was of course famous for his lack of sparkling good relations with the press. He had in fact kept his purposely to a functional minimum these past few months. The work of collecting delegates have been done over the last four years particularly over the last two. There are legions have to confirm the last six months of his primary victories. You know anything which again from good interviews none at least until his nomination was secured.

He had everything to lose from a bad interview. A delegate who was slipping could slide further because of an ill chosen remark. Probably Nixon agreed to this conference only to avoid the excess of bad feeling which no meeting with the press would be likely to cause. Still this was an operation where his best hope was to minimize the loss so he had taken the wise step of scheduling the conference at 8:15 in the morning. A time when his worst enemies presumably the heavy drinkers Free Lovers and free spenders on the Reagan right and far left of the press corps would probably be asleep in bed or here asleep on their feet. Nonetheless his posture on the stage hands to a side or class before him gave him the attentive guarded look of an old ballplayer like a rabbit Marinol let us say or even oh come on up before a parole board. There is something in his carefully shaven face the dog Giles already showing the first overtones of the gloomy blue at this early hour somewhere which gave promise of never leaving him some hint of inner debate about his value before eternity which spoke

of precisely the sort of improvement that comes upon a man when he shifts in appearance from looking like an undertaker's assistant to looking like an old con seriously determined to go respectable. The old Nixon which is to say the young Nixon used to look on clasping his hands in front of him like a church usher of the variety who twist the boy's ear after removing him from church. The older Nixon before the press now the new Nixon had funny quiet so the dignity of the old athlete the old con. He taken punishment. That was on a space now. He knew the detail schedule pain a real loss. There was no touch of this in his eyes which gave the offer of some knowledge of the abyss. Even the kind of gentleness which ex drunkards attain after years in AA as he answered questions beating them with a sure model of an old shortstop who gets a few homers but supports the team on his fielding. What sorrow in the faces of such middle aged shortstops. So now his modesty was not without real dignity. When Eisenhower days his attempts at modesty had been as offensive as a rich boy's arrogance for he had been transparently contemptuous of the ability of his

audience to witness him. Now the modesty was the product of a man who had worsted grown from a bad actor to a surprisingly good actor. Well from an unpleasant self-made man outrageously rewarded with luck to a man who had risen and fallen and been able to rise again. And so conceivably had learned something about patience and the compassion of others. He spoke with clarity and gently not badly but for an unfortunate half smile pasted to his face. The question would come he would backhand it with his glove a trumpet. Like all politicians he considered answered every question but he gave structure to his answers. Even a certain relish for the dialectical complexity where once he pretended to think instead of sentimentality and slogans. Now he held the question up worked over it deployed it amplified it corrected its tendency often aside usually attempt to be humorous revealed its contradiction and then declared a statement with all insensitivity almost palpable to the reservations of the press about his character his motor than his good intentions. He still had no natural touch with them. His half smile when he listened to a question was unhappy

for I had nowhere to go but into a full smile and his full smile was as false as false teeth. A pure exercise of will. You could all but see the signal passed from his brain to his jaw all. Smiles at the signal. And so he flashed in a painful kind of joyous grim ace which spoke of some shrinkage in the liver or the gut. Which he would have to repair afterward by other medicines and good fellowship by winning the presidency. Perhaps he always had the ability to violate His own nature absolutely if that had to be necessary to his will. There never been anyone in American life so resolutely phony as Richard Nixon or anyone so transcendently successful by such means. Small wonder happy electorate had regarded him for years as equal to a disease. But he was less phony Now that was the miracle. He had moved from a position of total ambition and total alienation from his own person at the time of checkers the dog speech to

a place now where he was halfway conciliated with his own self as he spoke he kept going in and out of focus. True one instant only the next then quietly correcting the full step 68 that was now. 72. In 72 he was a course in entire command of his convention. And by the time he arrived in Miami there was no question about who was going to be nominated. And there is very little question of who is going to win the election. He already had an enormous lead in the polls and of course in the months that followed. Able to his medical secrets were discovered McGovern's economic. Policies crashed before the walls of financial experts got cooperations all over the country. And we were on to that election which Nixon won by that huge majority on the day. I'm describing he had come to Miami to in effect pick

up. His prize. That is he was going to appear briefly at a convention to give his acceptance speech. And he was a peering. He was coming to star. In that three day epic celebration on TV that he and the people around him had designed. He got off his plane and you remember the the Young Republicans for the president well they were all out there that day. They were out there in the grandstand when he got off the plane they all cheered. And his wife and his daughters were there and the foot of the plane as he came off the plane he braces his wife and kisses his daughters but with appropriate Reserve. They are being watched after all. By about 3000 years and about five across the

embraces suggest of a 5 million some of such greetings evening as commuters get off at a suburban stop and go through the revelation and the guard they crawl up against revelation of their carnal nitty gritty. A good game for a face watcher and Nixons is not different from any other man who picks a kiss in public. As he walks toward the young voters for the president and salutes and smiles and great is preparing to stop before them and raise both his arms for they are now no longer just cheering with the principal but are often all the autoerotic suppressing their own arms in the air poor fingers up while screaming four more years. Four more years. So next and probably nodding toward the exhibits again that characteristic gate which is alone and might provide a thought for analysis and even so profound a student of body movements is a villain right next in his character armor. Hordes of it. Several schemes of honor are stacked

on top of one another. But none complete. It is as if he's wearing two breastplates and yet you can still get peeks of his midriff. He walks like a puppet. More curious than most human beings. For all the strings are pulled by a hand within his own head. And enquiring hand which never pulls the same string in quite the same way as the previous time. It is always trying something out. And so the movements of his arms and legs while superficially conventional even highly restrained are all impregnated with attempt still timid after all these years to express attitudes and emotions with his body. But he has his body like an adolescent suffering excruciation of self-consciousness with every move. After all these years. It is as if his incredible facility of brain which manages to capture every contradiction in every question put to him and never fails to reply with a maxim of advantage for himself.

In a language which is resolutely without experiment. It is facile and incredible brain off on a journey of inquiry into the stubborn refusal of a body to obey it. He must be obsessed with the powers he can blow up his body could also function intimately as an instrument of His will as intimate perhaps as his intelligence. Which has become so free of the distortions of serious moral motivation. But his body refuses like a recalcitrant hound it refuses so he's still trying out a half dozen separate gestures we'd step a turn of his neck to say one thing and putting his wrist to show another. A sprightly step up with one leg a hint of a drag with the other. And all the movements are immediately restrained pulled back to zero revelation as quickly as possible by a brain which is more afraid of what the body will reveal than of what it can discover by just once making authentic moves which gets authentic audience response.

Yet he remains divided on the utility of this project. Stubborn as an animal the body does not give up and keeps making its disjunctive moves. Why the will almost as quickly snaps them back to. You when he begins to talk to the crowd. This muted rebellion of his activities comes to a halt like an undertaker's assistant. You see see authors use that image when they use it as a four years before a 12 years before it came back. With plagiarising myself. I get undertaker's assistant who fixes you with a stare and thereby gives promise that the men of the publication he will not giggle. No I improve them out of order. Nixon has made a compact with his body. When the brain stops experimenting with its limbs and takes over a cerebral function like manipulating an audience. Then the body becomes a BDM to the speaker's posture installed on it. Now hands clasped behind him Nixon begins. I was under some illusion that the

convention was downtown. He says it takes a while for kids to get it. Why be peers young voters for the president. Why be peers are not the sort of hogs who grab a high IQ when they realize he's not only complimenting them for the size of the numbers but on their importance. They come back with all the fervor that arm in the air and the four fingers up in the double beat Nixon has appropriated the old B for victory sign. Better He's cut old all the old sentimental meanings. Viva victory means liberalism united in the people and compact against tyranny etc.. It is his now and doubled up go the double horns of the kids. One thing can be said for the presidency. It gives every sign of curing incurable my Laz Nixon is genial now he jokes with the crowd. I think I'm going to be nominated tonight.

I think so he says charmingly. Is the first time he's ever spoken with Atomics in public. And so is Vice President Agnew. He's going to be nominated too. They cheer every since they arrived on Saturday you know why the players have been cheering on the street at receptions in the gallery in the lobby of each hotel they visit and here at the airport they exhibit all the inner confidence of a failsafe when in doubt cheer. Once again you can be depressed. The sight of their faces is not only that these kids seem to exist at the same level of intelligence which is probably not quite high enough to become Army officers. But they also seem to thrive on the same level of expression. They have a feverish look of children who are up playing the on the hour of going to sleep. The eyes of the time and disoriented. Happy and bewildered. So they shriek with hysteria. The gleam in their

eyes speaks of no desire to go beyond the spirit they have already been given. Rather they want more of what they've got. It is unhappy but true. They are young pigs for the president. He thinks of all the happy new school ironic pirates of Flamingo Park over whom America which is to say Republicans are so worried. Perhaps America has been worrying about the wrong kids. I've been. I've been watching the convention on television. Nixon says through the microphone I want to thank you for the tribute you paid my wife. Now for the first time he puffs his chest up which given the mating dance he performs whenever addressing a crowd it has to signify that remark a portent is on its way. Based on what I've seen on television and based on what I've seen here today. Four more years. Those who predict the other side is going to win the

young voters are simply wrong. Deep breath a solemn stare. Now comes the low voice which backs the personality with a presidential bond of integrity. We're going to win. The young voters. Shrieks squeals cheers. Four more years. They are the respectable youth and they are going to triumph. Thank you. Back at the convention the delegates are watching this arrival to the airport on the three huge screens but the podium is being televised live both to the convention and to America. Only the galleries empty this afternoon but that is because the why BP is not present to fill their seats. They are here. Nixon takes them into his confidence. He knows they're interested in politics or that they would not be in Miami he says. And maybe one of them someday will be

president. Maybe one of your faces that I know I'm looking at will be president. It is possible. One thing I want you to know that is that we want to work with the trust and faith and idealism of young people. You want to participate in government. And you're going to cheers he smiles genially. However let me give you a bit of advise. This is to succeed in politics the first thing you want to do is to marry above yourself. They do not begin to comprehend the seismographic profundity of this advice. They only yell we want we want. Well you can have or Nixon says.

I want to keep it. Yes he had wanted her and he wanted to keep her back and what a year before they were married he would drive her to Los Angeles when she had a date with another man. Now this is not Hunter Thompson making it up. This is from her campaign but Nixon that was came out of one hundred fifty nine over the summer 1960 and so Nixon presumably gave her a maze of these details because of an official biography. Back in what a year before they were married he would drive her to Los Angeles when she had a date with another man. Then he would pick her up and drive her back to Whittier. When the day was done. That is not an ordinary masochism. It is a near to bottomless bowl in which the fortitude of a future political genius is being compounded. It made him the loser who did not lose.

He had learned that the movies were wrong and the second most attractive man was the one to pick up the marbles. Since loses by the laws of existential economy had to be more numerous than when it was some public men he said in an interview. I guess I'm to be loved and other public men are destined to be disliked. But the most important thing about a public man is not whether he's loved or dislike but whether he's respected. So I hope to restore respect to the presidency at all levels of my conduct. My strong point if I have a strong point is performance. I always do more than I say. I always produce more than I promise. It was this truth of Vietnam. As for China and now here was this nice man talking to children you stood in that stricken zone of oscillating dots which comes upon the mind when one tries to comprehend the dichotomies of a century. Here's this nice man who has a reputation of being considered

about small things and people who work for him. His family man married so many years the same white possessor of two daughters who are almost beautiful and very obedient. He's a genius. Who would know. Yes the loser stands talking to all his gang of adolescent losers who are so proud to have chosen stupidity as a way of life. And they are going to win the small get a wad lies over the heart. Freud is obsolete to explain Nixon nothing less than a new theory of personality can now suffice. Thanks. Well it was fun writing those pieces at the time I wrote them it was fun reading them tonight and all the while I was reading them I kept reading them and hearing the tolling of my own personal bell because I guess I read it I kept saying this is all marvelous stuff.

And yet my new journalism is dead because it doesn't do what I thought it used to do. I was I had a process on the accident. It's just no longer fits the facts the facts are too novelistic for the hypothesis. He is either much more and much more victimized and much cunning and I'm much more diabolical and a much more mixed up and a much more incredibly logical man in the sense that he had a deal in mind that was incredible and he merely lost on route. But whatever it is I no longer have that sense of him that I had when I wrote this. Most writing that is any good at all depends upon the author having his or her happiness intact while they're writing which is to say they don't have to be happy they can be writing in misery but they have a hypothesis. And with that hypothesis they are moving their way through material and finding something that

to them seems true. They're having that delicious experience that you can find on occasion when you write which is the only reason funny the people who write I think that as you write you feel you're discovering the truth from the very turning a pencil. And it enables you to put up with all the disadvantages and all the difficulties of running because there are many. There is that marvelous joke about the baseball player who was asked if he ever gets bored standing out there in the sun. He's an outfielder of course. Just waiting for a fly ball to come his way occasionally. And he says well yes it does get a little lonesome out there and it does get a little boring he said but there's one thing about baseball he says you can't beat the hours. And the same may be said of course of writing you can't beat the hours the hours are your own. You can write when you wish to write. That's the best thing we said about writing and maybe the last good thing to be said about it other than the modest faculty that writing has to show you what you think a piece of the truth that that faculty of putting yourself together in such a way that you feel in harmony with everything you've

ever received for that brief moment while you're writing. Or comes to you when you're reading it over you say my God I didn't know that was true but it is true that feeling that I had when I was writing these things about Nixon that the time reading them over tonight my feeling was no that's not necessarily true. It's not necessarily true at all about Nixon. It's true about some somewhere there's something in it that's true about somewhere or other there's some real man who probably fits this picture it's not a story true about Nixon but end of it. The disadvantage of riding in cars. Is that incredible loneliness that need each day because if you're a novelist to go in and find your sanction to write. Because the act of writing is possibly the most arrogant single act that any artist can make because I do not pretend to go to all the arts this moment but it occurs to me immediately that when one paints

there is a revelation of the self in the way in which one not necessarily the way one perceives but sort of the relation one has with one's eyes everything that one sees and also with much of one's senses and in the sense that one shows one sensuality or one's profound restraints about color in the course of painting. It's a way of almost sharing something with the viewer. When you paint when you write you finally are trying. To present your view of the world in such a way that you're going to affect people with it. If you have no more of a holy purpose in life you certainly have the great desire. To illumine them with your notion of what the truth might be. And so to do that each day you have to get yourself into that point. Again I say particular writing a novel and you have to pick up on a given day with where you left off the day before. You have to get yourself to that point where you have the right to continue. It's not an easy matter.

It's a matter that has such difficulty to you that I think provides the single explanation for why there are so few good writers when you think of how many intelligent people there are and how many people are of absolutely fantastic and fascinating lives most of them usually not writers. If you think of the amount of experience that we all have. When you think of that consciousness that we almost all have at one time or another in our lives it's always have almost all of our lives that each of us in our own life is absolutely extraordinary an individual that something's happened to us which is incomparable because our experience that's no book not really and the some of us said like I said if we could only say it that would be extraordinary for other people to read about and yet why is it kind of the soap you write as I think the reason is that it is simply too difficult to go in there every day day after day and keep facing into all the dull bruises in oneself the small idiocies the

embarrassments the failures not to mention all the larger failures of one's life as one gets older and the loss of illusions as one gets older and efface and all that. And somehow to just each day and moving a few inches forward and onto that literary tape. And I don't mean that now of speaking into a tape I mean that literary tape worm perhaps what I was trying to say. Is being pulled out of your gut has it finally. Each time you write your you are diminishing yourself that much more. A favorite notion of sought for is to believe finally that that writing was a form of nothingness. You were converting your being into nothingness in order to create something which we passed on. Now given all that given that agony for the novelist we understand why people turn to journalism. I posed a riddle to some journalists about two weeks ago in Washington.

Since I'm virtually one of them myself I thought they might receive it with some humor. Actually I was talking to the women's Democratic Club in Washington there is a table of journalists there. And I was bitter about Washington journalists because of that modest paper The Washington Post that savior of our nation and doing all those tremendous and terrible things to our enemies the Republicans. I speak in the firm conviction that people come out to hear me are nine tenths less and damn their eyes Democrats. Which says something terrible even about Republicans or myself. But that. This Washington Post is wonderful paper which is on so much of the Republicans and also doing so much to me which needn't bother you appear in Boston. But I was curious about him and so I pose as little to the table reporter as I said.

If you're not. Talented enough to be a novelist. And you're not smart enough or tough enough to be a good lawyer. And if your hand shakes too much to cut people so successfully that you can become a surgeon. And if your hysterical enough to be an actor but small voiced then what's the name of Heaven Can you become a reporter. And I thought that this large but appreciative laugh would come up from the table of journalists and instead a cancer wave rose. And I do not refer to any astrological sign as a wave rose and it descended like a folk and I slipped it. But I got hit with some of the spray that I had in the same sense.

Where you can see that I speak then out of a profound love for journalists and journalism. I could have added to that that if you're a psychopathic liar and you don't have the guts to become either a cop or a crook then what in the name of Heaven Can you do but become a journalist if you've got a tin ear and no sense of the English language. And no notion of nuance. If you hear the end of a tricky speakers saying in the first three words because if your head is so slow that takes you it takes you his whole sentence to write three words down. And so that's what you quote. Then what in the name of heaven and so on. Well. Is there a journalism student here. Are you all journalism students you look so.

That feeling a Bono Bono me that we shared for a time since I was gone that. There's half a room planned a career in journalism is that it. You know the difficulty is not that journalists are necessarily as bad as I have painted them although I suspect they are. It's that no one can work well no one can report Well if on the one hand they go out and they have to appropriate an experience on a day and write about it at night and turn it in. That's one huge difficulty. And the other huge difficulty if I can remember it. You know the time has come for two quick questions. No I was doing this somewhere in a point of a lecture because the moment I come to recognize. When we need an interruption because we live in a time.

That depends upon a certain artful use of the absurd and it's not an artful use of the absurd than an ungainly use of the absurd. But you're a generation that grew up having your heads wrenched by your parents switching the stations on the TV sets. Which for want of a better hypothesis is why I would assume that you have so little respect for your parents. They tampered with their heads. OK now I now remember what I wanted to say. Don't apply too long and often get it. That second half of it is that. Journalists are forced to work with the notion that I think is utterly destructive to any kind of reporting to any kind of dare I say it truth finding

even the limited way we talk truth finding which is finding that process that works for a while. Until it proves itself interesting because it ceases to work. Journals work work with the notion that the reporter is best faceless even mindless but the reporter is there to record the facts. And this notion I think is at the root of half the insanity in this country. Now there's a non-book of mind that will come out. It's a book which will be called Superman old socks. Chicago and The Godfather. It will be about the four convention pieces I did and in the course of getting it together for my publisher I wrote a preface for that book which I wrote a little bit about journalism and the new journalism and the novel I'm just a little and I thought I'd like to read it to you

now. And from there we can then begin to get toward that theme that I hope is holding us all together which is espionage. I just read this little bit. 300 pages of microfilm. I began these literary expeditions into the material of the convention reporter with a set of prejudices about how the materials of history were gathered and with one large advantage I had weeks and I've been given weeks to ponder over what I had seen and something like an update in which to do the writing. I don't suppose the literary heritage that the world was not there to be particularly processed. By traditional string of words but rather I was a novelist and it was expected of me to see this world with my own eyes. By the warped or stance of my character which when it collects in a certain eccentric or even agreeable integrity may be called a style.

I was then enlisted on my side of that classic of undeclared war. Between those two opposed modes of perception which are separately called journalism and fiction. When it came to accuracy I was on the side of fiction. I believe you could tell us more about the truth than journalism. Of course that is not to say I thought one should make up the facts. When writing a story about real people. I would endeavor to get my facts scrupulously as a reporter. The difference would be in another place. Journalism assumes the truth of the event to be recorded by the use of principles which might just as well go back to the cart. A political reporter usually has a view of the world so fixed that you may plot it on axes which will run right to left on the horizontal and down from honesty to corruption on the vertical. The fundamental assumption of journalism is that a faceless and even a mindless recorder is the best instrument for measuring history. The fictional assumption

is closer however to that moving world of Einstein where the velocity of the observer is crucial to the measurement as any object observed transported over from popular physics. This private assumption of fiction is that we learn the truth through a comparison of the lies. A remark by way of Leon Trotsky for putting in more American fashion. We are obliged to receive the majority of our experience a second hand from the warp and bias of the parents friends mates lovers enemies and journalists who reported to us the fundamental assumption of fiction as I then use the word is that reality does not live on anonymous Acces a fact. But is perceived through the swarm of our movements about one another a novelistic assumption. But don't we perceive the truth of a great novel through its events as a past of the style in which the person of the writer. We tend to know in our unconscious at least by the time we have finished an interesting novel. Where we think the author is most to be trusted and where in secret we suspect he is more ignorant than

ourselves. That is the flavor of fiction we observe. The Observer Perhaps that is why there is more dead air in journalism than in fiction and usually less light. It is because we do not have the advantage of seeing around a corner. It is a difference analogous to the photographic use of the flash bulb as opposed to a view of a sunset backlighting the contours of a range of hills. Be certain the journalistic flash bulb is best for recording the content of an auto crash but little else. But journalism in comparison to the novel throws no shadow whereas many a good and great novels takes pains with the tales they have facts which will put the best of journals to shame for the novelist. Lives with nuance. Speaking at the McDowell colony last summer I had a run of words when I said there's no reason to believe a novice is not better equipped to deal with the possibilities of mysterious and difficult situation than anyone else. Since he or she is always trying to discover what the nature of reality might be it's up to novices

out there sprung early with something most people never contemplate which is how and what. Is the nature of this little reality before me. The novice is the first to ask do I love my wife. Does she love me. What is the nature of love. Do we love our child. How do we love. Would we die Prachi. Or do we let the child die for us. The novelist has to deal with these questions because living with them is the only way to improve his or her brain without improving that brain. But that without refining the edge of one's perception it's almost impossible to continue to work as a writer. Because if there is one fellow rule in art it is that repetition kills the soul. So the novelist is out there early with a particular necessity that may become an assistant of us all. It is to deal with life as something God did not give us as a turtle and immutable but rather something half worked because it was our human destiny to enlarge what we were given to

forge a world which is always before us in a manner different from the way we had seen it the day before. Thanks.