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138 11 Norman Mailer, Get Out of My Head! In this 1969 article about Norman Mailer for New York magazine, a hub of New Journalism then run by famed editor Clay Felker, Krim again wrestles with his demons as he simultaneously pants after and rejects success. “Norman Mailer, Get Out of My Head!” is a shrewd evaluation of celebrity culture and how it makes the anonymous feel less real. Krim fights back by targeting the celebrity whose fame made him feel less real: Norman Mailer. The essay bristles with the aggrieved ego of the would-be famous, a category that has become even more prevalent today. But its energy and tension are probably owing to the daring gamble with success and failure that went into its making. Krim’s friend and editor Peggy Brooks, who helped republish his Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer in 1968, urged him not to publish the piece. She felt it was career suicide to go after Mailer, especially since Mailer had written a generous foreword to Krim’s Cannoneer. And the piece did largely end Krim’s contact with Mailer, damaging Krim’s prospects. It was not the last time Krim would write an article that burned his bridges. But from today’s perspective what stands out is Krim’s clear-eyed understanding that celebrity, fame, and glamour is a poisoned apple no American can resist eating. I sit with Mailer’s The Armies of the Night to the left of my typewriter and Miami and the Siege of Chicago standing straight up beyond the roller so that it can look me right in the eye but I know that the books will be incidental to what I must say. These are Mailer’s latest writings and as an engaged literary man I must deal with them, especially with Norman Mailer, Get Out of My Head! . 139 the inspired journalistic-novelistic Armies which acts out themes that have been obsessing me for the last several years about the literary artist being in the center of actual history and shaping it with his voice, but the books have also become an extension of Mailer’s presence in New York life and it is this that is smothering me, raking me, bringing to the surface raw competitive feelings which have nothing to do with literature as an end in itself. For example: I had a good chance of getting planked one night about three weeks ago, I was looking forward to it because the girl was darkeyed , salty and keen, quick to judge and flaring in opinion but this seemed merely to open up wider the potential excitement of rocketing with her, when she started to rave about Mailer’s Barbary Shore. Barbary Shore! The novel is 17 years old and I have never done it justice; it struck me as a failure when I read three-fifths of it in 1951, a potentially fascinating probe into the shadowland of ex-communism but novelistically a fallen weight, and now this hip young literary snatch was carrying on about it in a way that would have offended Mailer himself. I lost my trick of the evening because of the stone I turned to after this Mailer-infected preacherette thrust him at me like the sacrament and now I must reread Barbary Shore myself to discover, beyond my ego, the worth of the book. Without wanting to I will become a Mailer scholar because I can’t move in Manhattan life today without having him imposed on me, and my own honor as a “man” demands that I break my behind to be just (or at least to try) even when my gorge is packed and rising. I have almost always been cool and appreciative of Mailer, for a decade now, and have felt detached and unruffled when brother bigtown editors and writers have told me of his being everything from a superficial and flashy writer, an overrated fighter, a potential suicide to a loudmouth, a prick, a maniac (literally), every conceivable rasping putdown with which we block off those who threaten us. We are all imperiled egos on the make in New York, the bigger the emotions we hold the more we suffer by being cramped and squeezed out of our ideal shape by someone else’s filling the available space at the top, and I have listened to such comments meditatively ; in my own smaller public orbit I have also been called crazy, arrogant beyond belief, a...

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