Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling With Dots

by Norman Mailer

“A small treasure of a book…It deserves a wide audience of Mailer and Vidal fans”—Dick CavettHe prepared therefore for the meditative journey that proves most excruciating in Limbo, a rounding through the past, a trip back! It is a venture full of perils. To meditate on TV might prove equal to writing a recollection of an enemy one has never met and cannot quite believe in. Indeed, how to conceive of an enemy who is without personal animosity? It was like writing a memoir of an oxymoron. Limbo set its tasks.More a short book than an essay, Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling With Dots is Norman Mailer’s scathing and often brilliant take-down of television culture, penned for Esquire in the wake of Mailer’s infamous altercation with Gore Vidal on The Dick Cavett Show.Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling With Dots was originally published in Esquire, November 1977. Cover design by Adil Dara.

73 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 18, 2016

About the author

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.

Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

"All right Norman Mailer, you've written that sex can be killing. Now what do you mean by that?"

- Late-night talk show host

In 1977, Mailer reported for Esquire on his experience in what he called limbo, whose lone dictum is apparently that time is not to be wasted. In limbo, Mailer (and yes, he refers to himself in third-person here; just go with it, and count yourself lucky he doesn't refer to himself as 'Aquarius' in this one) is forced to reflect on his long personal history with television- both viewing and appearing on it. As a relatively young writer in the 50s, he believed that this new innovation could be a tool to "...learn the secrets of the world some easy way." Unable to sleep at night, he would routinely watch from midnight until two in the morning, when, just imagine this fellow travelers of the twenty-first century, the last show of the night would go off, as in there would be no more programming until the morning, not even a channel of crabs relentlessly pursued by giant eels on some Pacific island to fall asleep to; at two, The Star-Spangled Banner would play briefly over an image of the American flag, and then Mailer's Videodrome-like experiences would begin.

...In those early mornings when television was his only friend, he knew already that he detested his habit. There was not enough to learn from watching TV. Some indispensable pieces of experience were missing. Except it was worse than that. Something not in existence was also present...

After The Star-Spangled Banner, the screen would go blank. Or, not exactly blank:

Often, when the stations went off the air and no programs were left to watch, he would still leave the set on. The audio would hum in a tuneless pullulation, and the dots would hiss in an agitation of unlabeled forces...anti-noise dancing in eternity with noise...the message of TV was the scan of grey on grey and the hum of the sound when there is neither music nor voice. Much later [he compared] President Nixon's victorious but still featureless personality to a TV screen that is lit when nothing is on the air. Nixon was there...to deaden the murderous mood of the republic. [The TV's] message was the same as Nixon's: I am here to deaden you...

The first televised presidential debate was in 1960, between Nixon and Kennedy, and supposedly put Nixon at a disadvantage. But the true beneficiary of this new technology was neither Democrat nor Republican:

...if security against dread was the subtext behind every political movement in America...[then] the political movement whose real fortunes were advanced was television itself, with its silent radiating argument that it was the best political program yet found for the tranquilization of dread.

When he goes on The David Susskind Show with Truman Capote and Dorothy Parker, Mailer, always competitive, is obsessed with doing well; Capote, relatively sane, is happy to let Mailer "win", and they both agree that Capote came off just as terribly as he expected to, except for the strange fact that the only thing any of Mailer's friends seem to remember afterwards is Capote's succinct judgment of Kerouac: "It is not writing. It is only typing."

This gives Mailer a bit of a clue as to what makes for "good TV", and in the manner of his friend Mohammed Ali he lands a few satisfying punches over the years- one night on television he suggests that J. Edgar Hoover has done more harm to the United States than Joseph Stalin. And yet he's disappointed to learn how few people call the show afterwards, either to complain or to agree. Maybe television really did have the power to alter human consciousness...just not in the way he'd imagined. He "...did not yet know that television did not send you to the telephone, let alone the barricades."

The set piece here is the infamous episode of The Dick Cavett Show with both Mailer and Gore Vidal as guests, which airs soon after Vidal writes an article in which he critiques "the Miller-Mailer-Manson man (or M3 for short)", an article that Mailer, like the lunatic he is, rips out of his copy of The New York Review of Books and brings to Cavett's show with him. It's not so much being compared to Charles Manson that bothers him, he explains. But why, he wonders, didn't Vidal have "...the simple decency to say, 'this literary progression, extreme as it may sound at first, will engage my best efforts to show that there are startling and frightening similarities between Manson and Miller and Mailer?'"

Reasonable enough request, I think. But when they meet in the green room before the show, Vidal tries to make a gesture of reconciliation; Mailer casually puts a hand to the back of Vidal's neck, then slams his forehead into Vidal's.

"Are you crazy?" asked Vidal.
"Shut up", said Mailer.
"You're absolutely mad. You are violent", said Vidal.
"I'll see you on the show."

...And then they went on the show. What followed made for "good TV", but there was also a cost that Mailer didn't understand until later. "He had not only failed to dramatize his ideas, but had dramatized himself- it was himself rather than any idea that had come through the tube." Now he was participating in a form of escape for people, like himself, "...hungry...with some unfulfilled vision of themselves."

One thing in this essay that resonates with me is Mailer's intuitive sense that there's something uncanny about television; that watching it is not just a bad habit, but belongs to a different category than other life experiences. Difficult as this may be to defend rationally, I can't shake the feeling that he's right, that staring at a screen generally is somehow anti-experience. And on one hand, Mailer's essay aligns with the anxiety of the time- it makes a good pairing with a re-viewing of Network or Videodrome- and it may seem like an antiquated concern for people my age (I haven't had a television in most of the places I've lived for the past decade, though I've noticed that all my friends' parents have at least one, often more)...except for the fact that we are surrounded by screens more now than ever before. In Mailer's time, something was at least contained in a box at the far end of one's room, and at two in the morning it actually went off.

If Mailer is right that the underlying purpose of TV (or if the reason I get on the train in the morning in 2019, and see at least 75% of the passengers staring down at their phones) is to tranquilize dread, it's understandable that it would be welcomed, but that extracts a price as well, like any drug, both on individuals and on society: "...the price may be equal to the power to destroy the virility and fecundity of ideas. TV was not with us to make history, but to leach the salts of history right out of our cells."

...And yet then again this is Mailer, always self-doubting and self-questioning, always contrarian, which means that the essay ends up more dialectic than polemic. Despite everything he's said, Mailer can't help remembering isolated incidents in which he's perceived something profound or transformative about television, in which its uncanniness seems to work for the good. There are the Frost/Nixon interviews, for example, in which Mailer decides that Nixon has finally become a great actor, Edward G. Robinson in fact, and that whatever else, the transformation suggests that even a dull and untalented man can become great at something. Or there's the night in '66 when Mailer's friend, the boxer José Torres, is losing a fight for the light-heavyweight championship in Las Vegas, losing badly, until Mailer starts to scream instructions at the screen (Torres has inexplicably gone away from his left jab), and it's almost as if Mailer has been transported to the corner of the ring, as if Torres can hear him...

But let me try to add a slightly more sober piece of evidence to that side of the argument. Here's a short clip of Mailer from the early 2000s, on TV, making a point that very few people, right or left, were making at the time; if you made it, in fact, you were broadly considered to be unpatriotic, and viewed with suspicion. Easy point to make now that consensus has shifted, of course, but not then. Say what you will about the man, but we need more people these days who are willing to say unpopular things. Perhaps this was at least one instance in which he managed to dramatize his ideas and not himself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7LUk...

[Vel Veeter]

A longer essay told in the third person, specifically dealing with Norman Mailer's attempt to reconcile himself with the television self that he can watch. I thought this essay was especially good at given that Mailer is mostly looking at the ways in which television (especially for a writer) allows for and demands a secondary version of a figure when they appear on tv, and that new version is distinct from and different from the personal version and the writerly version. He discusses several of his famous (infamous) television appearances. Sadly, this was written in the late 1970s, so he wasn't able to comment on his strange and terrible (wonderful?) appearance on Gilmore Girls, where he's mostly known for drinking iced tea.

Here though he's looking back especially at his tv appearance with Gore Vidal, where Gore Vidal keeps bringing up Mailer's infamous assault on his wife (with a knife!) and Mailer's inability to move past the moment in the show. The other famous moment comes from the panel show he did with Dorothy Parker and Truman Capote in the late 1960s. I think the occasion of this writing though instead comes from his watching the Frost/Nixon interviews where Mailer feel Nixon not only dominated the interviews (despite the readings and films after) and became, to parphrase Mailer, the greatest actor in history. Previously he discusses how Nixon was like television, in that he had a deadening effect on the American public, stamping out nuance and intelligence, and basically give us what we deserve. It's an interesting idea, but like the other Mailer essays I've been reading is muddle and scrambled up with the ideas of identity and persona in other parts of the essay.

Mailer seems at part struggling with how to be "authentic" on television, and how to account for the ways in which television seems to flatten people and remove personality for them, while also creating new versions of them.

[Downward · Rating 5 out of 5]

mailer is always at his best when he's using a subject (boxing, the moon landing, the '68 democrat national convention, ali/foreman, john kennedy) to write about himself, which is a roundabout way of writing about masculinity and its entropy. here he's writing about TV, using memoir to evaluate all his television appearances and concluding that because he comes off badly on TV it's likely that TV is poisonous for all of society. and it would be a disaster if it ended there, but there's no writer more self aware than mailer, and no writer more willing to investigate his own flaws. and in those flaws you get the actual investigation of tv that are still effective as criticism today: it's a medium that lacks nuance and favors the punchline to sincerity. that if you attempt to move the culture in a direction via television, you had better be at your fighting weight as determined by debord and mcluhan. this appeals to a specific incarnation of mailer, but he's constantly trounced by his peers when appearing on TV: mike wallace; william buckley; dick cavett; truman capote; janet flanner; david frost; cynthia ozick; david susskind. and the reason is that his masculinity, for all its brutal and vile invective, simply doesn't translate. and because that brutality doesn't translate (but the softer brutality of vidal's wit, or capote's flash does) then we should retreat from it. it's brilliant, even in its wrongheadedness, but the thing about mailer is that he recognizes the wrongheadedness and basically goes: "ah yeah fuck me, i guess."

[Luke Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The studio audience began to hiss with real anger; he looked back in equal anger and said: “Did you all go to high school?” The remark came out faster than his mind, and it was cruel: it went to the heart of the secret. For this audience had a common denominator. Something in their faces spoke of high school as the summit of their lives, the end of their development. These lumpy, dull-necked, dead-eyed people, with their flower-print blouses and acetate shirts, their big-beamed slacks for the women and pinch-cheeked slacks for the men, were living in the kind of torpor that encouraged spending three hours on line to get into a TV show; yes, high school had been the most exciting few years of their lives, and just as they hated him for scoring such an unhappy secret, so did he hate them because he had not had a good time in high school and felt deprived for thirty years thereafter."


man, Mailer can write. I mean, it does come off a bit unhinged. Maybe that's what he was going for? I mean, he has the childlike, parodic manhood of Hemingway, and none of the subtlety (and a good deal of the writing skill) - but it's turned up to 11. like the bits where he's going on about how much it bothers him that Gore Vidal says he hates women... I mean, the man did stab his wife. "not all women" I guess?

But he really is an entertaining writer, and the way he describes TV is... pretty great, I think.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically the result of someone who went on TV and didn't like the image they saw in a mirror, so they make it everyone else's problem.

[Jack Burnham]

could have been half as long for fuck's sake