Mailer and Styron at Harvard

(Editor's Note: Since 1937, Harvard has annually hosted a dozen American and three foreign journalists under arrangement with the Nieman Foundation. Larry L. King, 41, a novelist and Contributing Editor to Harper's magazine, was a Nieman Fellow in 1969-70. The current issue of Harper's contains an 8,000 word article, Blowing My Mind at Harvard, by Mr. King. This article-which will appear in the CRIMSON in two installments-is extraneous to that piece, largely treating the Cambridge appearances last spring of authors Norman Mailer and William Styron, though making other comments pertinent to the Harvard condition.)

We Nieman Fellows were not long in discovering that only the most Establishmentarian of faculty members or newspaper executives appeared at our official seminars. We were supplied no students, no blacks, no national politicians, no literary stars, no one likely to make waves-not even the most celebrated of Harvard's faculty lights. Our immediate predecessors-the Nieman class of 1968-69-had rebelled against such intellectual pabulum. In their case, the Nieman Curator (a former editorial page editor of the late New York Herald-Tribune, and a man of humorless mien) had proved so unyielding they were obliged to fund their "underground" seminars from their own pockets.

Our class, desiring more stimulation than that provided by pipe-sucking Deans or publishing executives who sang praise to themselves, staged our own rebellion. As good revolutionaries should, we built on the smaller gains of our predecessors: thus the Nieman Foundation bore the expense of our underground seminars, even if or Curator continued to find reasons excluding his personal attendance.

To these semi-illicit gatherings we attracted such figures as Ramsey Clark, Dr. John Knowles, Norman Mailer, FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson, Congressman Morris Udall, Justin Kaplan, literary agent Sterling Lord, Roger Wilkins, William Styron,Professor Howard Zinn of Boston University, and Harvard professors, including Wald, Galbraith, and Riesman. We hosted correspondents fresh from Vietnam, blacks representing all degrees of militancy, students of varied ideological stripes, urbanologists, magazine editors, former ambassadors, and a gaggle of ex-aides to Presidents. These provided the most valuable experiences of the Nieman season and revealed, I think, what the program might become in the hands of men capable of wielding larger hammers.

Our "underground" programs superimposed on the official slate meant that we suffered perhaps 80-odd speakers where half that number might have better served. Probably we could have done without contributions made by the circulation manager for a Boston tabloid, the biologist who touted a miracle bug-killer (in which, it developed, he held some proprietary interest), the Time-Life poobah who saw no First Amendment dangers in newsmen being required to surrender their notes or tapes to Big Brother's agents in Washington, or the faculty-tie who severely lobbied in behalf of Foundations remaining untaxed despite those many abuses revealed by Congressman Wright Patman. President Pusey sat with us for two hours, staring at his shoes and compulsively rolling and unrolling his necktie to the limits of its extremities, telling us what a grand institution he runs.

We expended extraordinary energies and time in the bread-and-butter arrangements of travel, menus, audiences, and overnight accommodations due our semi-official guests-all without secretarial help-thus somewhat dulling hours in which we theoretically were to occupy ourselves in thinking great thoughts or uplifting journalism if not our immortal souls. My contribution to these frowned-upon seminars was to provide two men large in contemporary American letters, both of whom happened to be my special old literary heroes. Let us here consider the hazards of such an exercise in modern-day Cambridge, digressing to include arbitrary judgments on Norman Mailer and William Styron as man and artists.

WILLIAM STYRON'S Lie Down in Darkness, published in 1951, was probably the one book that hardened my vague resolve to one day try my own writing hand. In a time when my household bills were not easily met, I thought nothing of buying multiple copies of that book to be thrust upon friends with commands that it be immediately read. Norman Mailer's early novels made their own strong impressions: I came to consider Mailer the American writer who best understood our society as it marched crazily through the present toward that outer rim falling away to fiery voids; he foresaw bits and pieces of tomorrow more readily than others. Fate would in time provide introductions to my contemporary literary idols, and I would be properly awed: imagine an apprentice lawyer in the presence of Darrow. Styron I would know better than Mailer, though each relationship fell short of intimacy.

A comparison of the two, as men and artists, was inevitable. If Styron's writing was prettier, then Mailer's had more of blood and tissue in it. Mailer's work was barren of the personal grasses of childhood, while Styron poked in the dusts of his youthful past until one sensed that it haunted him in the night, blew grain-by-gain through his soul; sandpapered it. Mailer wrote of sex in terms of a fifteen-round fight in which red peppers were joyously thumbed into the other fellow's eyes: he saw fucking as vital confrontations. Styron wrote of how sweet and good it had been before the bloom faded, preaching that the bloom would always-surely, definitely-fade. "In all of Styron's work there is the unwillingness to censure aspiring, troubled, and weak humanity," the critic Maxwell Geismer wrote, and then went on to declare that "Mailer has no confidence in human nature."

Yet, it was Mailer who in a sense looked West, looked ahead, looked out to the horizon at that fiery outer rim: it was important to see who might fall off, and for what mad or ironic reasons, and in what style they would go over: screaming the sissy begging of pardons, or spitting and pissing into the flames? Styron looked South, looked back to where the land was burned out or spiritually polluted or lying fallow, and empty souls stood whispering their personal regrets: for him it was more important to consider what might have been than what might yet be. Mailer might lead you to witness an electrocution where God in a key moment of fine jest caused the power lines to fail; Styron would not once think of God permitting a botched execution, though he might include Him among the later mourners at the grave: probably He would be solemn and sigh a lot.

Mailer in middle age continued to carry himself like a retired welterweight who might be thinking of a comeback, though he now pushed a bank clerk's belly. Age had performed interesting surgery on his face: cast him as a cab-driver, Chicago alderman, Irish cop, dart-champion in a workingman's pub, sly old convict; his face, like that of the late Everett Dirksen, told something of where he had been. Styron's face was a gentle mystery. Smooth for its forty-five years, it had of late come to look maybe a touch soft-trough so unblemished you wondered if his secret picture, like Dorian Gray's, bled and festered somewhere in the attic. There was something of the Frat Rat about him: he would come back to reunions.

In the flesh, deep in their eyes, Mailer was suspiciously aggressive where Styron was aggressively suspicious. Mailer hoped to get in the first blow; Styron hoped you would not steal his pocketbook. In private moods, one imagined, Mailer threw hot coals of rage where Styron brooded and sulked. One saw Styron in repose turning inward into himself, Mailer turning outward against the world; the first was sad and the second was angry.

Mailer's easy verbal facility made listening to him hard work: required a mental mountain goat to jump from this theoretical jut to that craggy intellectual ledge. Styron was easier listening: he told you anecdotes in the familiar idioms of home, and you could rest during his pauses for verbal regroupings: he had the virtue of relaxing you more-though when you reached your bed it likely would be Mailer's words that nagged and clanged and rumbled hotly through your mind. Had Heaven planted them as religious saplings, Mailer might have grown into Elmer Gantry or have taken a crack at faith-healing. Styron in his ecclestical maturity might have become... an Episcopal bishop?

I bore no small personal grudge against these old heroes. Mailer, at a Manhattan party in his honor promoting The Armies of The Night, when we were both independently drunk, smote me a kidney-punch which may have been intended as friendly, but it hurt like hell and angered me. Styron, having written a private letter in praise of my first novel, hit me with a negative response when I inquired whether his endorsement might be converted to promotional purposes. I no longer pretend that Styron's blow was not the more painful. Still, I thought enough of both as artists and men (and owed them enough for their old inspirations) that I was eager to attract them to Harvard. I labored long to assure that all would go well for them in Cambridge. Sadly, neither enjoyed their best experiences.

( The conclusion will appear in tomorrow's CRIMSON.)