If I may chime in somewhat late, I’ll say I have been a bit puzzled by this piece. It reminds of an observation in one of Susan Sontag’s earlier collections that, somehow, Mailer ‘was hard to take seriously’. I am puzzled because I think the interest of Mailer’s writing (I am writing this in earnest) is his particular brand of irony. Do you really believe that, for example, his bombastic flight of fancy about ‘America’ at the end of ‘The Armies of the Night’ is ‘serious’? He often assembled jarring elements of style and substance, as if to say “Can this really work together?’ with a perplex stare, and at the same time, frenetically kicking it everywhere to make it work. But I believe he was, in part, conscious of this. Hence his fooling around.
On another note, I think defining Marylin Monroe as just a ‘comedic’ actress is limiting. Think, for instance, of her performance in John Huston’s ‘The Misfits’. And I wonder if Mr Roger Kimball is not projecting on the sixties (they viewed ‘any appeal to facts as an unacceptably authoritarian threat’), the kind of ‘discurse’ which became fashionable in the United States academia at hand of the children of the sixties, from the mid-70′onward. Mailer himself was too old to have held such language. He did not understand ‘existentialism’, and talked a lot about it, that was it for him.

Regards,

Ludovico Fischer