Dueling Memories

At Wordstock, the first annual Portland (Oregon) Book Festival, I was invited to open for Norman Mailer and introduce him.

"The thing I most admire about Mailer," I said, "is a combination of his courage as a writer and how much he respects the craft. He writes in longhand with a number two pencil, he told me once, because it puts him in more direct contact with the paper that he's writing on, and I felt so guilty because I was still using a typewriter at the time. You remember typewriters. In fact, I have a niece who saw a manual typewriter, and she said, 'What's that for?' I explained, and she said, 'Well, where do you plug it in?' 'You don't have to plug it in, you just push the keys.' And she said, 'That's awesome!'

"Anyway, one aspect of Norman Mailer's craft is that he chooses his words very carefully. Or, as he would say, 'One chooses one's words very carefully.' The thing that I recall, the words that he chose most carefully, of all the books he's written, was something that he said when I asked him how he felt about circumcision. He thought for a moment, then he chose his words carefully and, with a twinkle in his eye-one of his main characteristics-he said, 'Well, I believe that if Jews didn't have circumcision, they would break their babies' noses....'"

When Mailer came on stage, walking with the aid of two canes because of a severe arthritic condition, he received a standing ovation. He eased himself on to a high chair behind the podium. "Gee, Paul, I didn't know how to start tonight," he said, "but maybe you got me going. Now, if I ever made that remark-that the reason Jews get circumcised is to keep them from breaking their babies' noses-all I can say is that I must have been down in the lower depths of a very bad marijuana trip. But I think, even at my worst, I couldn't really have said that. Paul is a master of hyperbole. He loves hyperbole, as when Lyndon Johnson attacked the wound in JFK's head.

"At any rate, if I did say it, I would forgive myself now for having said it, because circumcision happens to be something that every Jewish male thinks about every day of his life. It makes us obsessive for a very simple reason. We don't know if it's an asset or a liability. And I'm not speaking of it lightly. I'm speaking of psychic castration that may make us smarter or it may not. We worry about things like that. So I will say categorically, that if I ever made that remark, I was out of my head, and to the best of my marijuana memory, I never made it. I want to thank you, Paul, for making that up and giving me a beginning tonight, and for warming up this audience...."