The Time of His/our Time: Chance Meetings with Norman Mailer

I SIT DOWN TO WRITE THIS BRIEF FOOTNOTE to time of his time just as TV series Mad Men begins its run on BBC4 bracketed by a slew of documentaries recalling rise of Madison Avenue in early sixties. How remote it all seems and yet it was right then and there that greed game was given a new set of rules and just about time when I began fumbling around looking for a place to stand. All my Cambridge peers who had a yen to be creative, rather than to go into Foreign Office (like they were s'posed to), were dashing off to learn how to follow in footsteps of king of Madison Avenue, a professional Englishman in New York by name of David Ogilvy who was responsible for Shweppervescence, Man in Hathaway shirt, and other such towering contributions to western civilization. It's no accident that my discovery of Norman Mailer came with Advertisements for Myself--the title itself his own wry comment on buttoned down hubris of those who were busy inventing the big idea on Madison Avenue. I dimly remember what a profound effect it had on me and since I started to reflect on my odd, brief relationship with Norman, I've been trying to figure out why. I had read The Naked and Dead and those other American war stories in thrall to Papa Hemingway and his notion of courage, but for a London kid whose father's soul had been all but destroyed in not one, but two world wars, there was something sickening about kind of heroism being sought. On other hand, living in shadow of evil embedded in history of European nation states, so well conjured up by Camus, Sartre, and Beckett, scared shit out of me. The Beats' form of escape, although seductive, didn't fill need--the best minds ... ? I doubted it. In any case, I could never forgive them for their love of Chet Baker and his bleached version of music that seemed to me to contain only truly authentic voices of defiance and freedom out there--Miles and Monk and Mingus, Sonny and John C. There was something about Advertisements which felt like bebop. It was a brash, arrogant, and, in some ways, a naive and stuttering language, blue notes and endless quotes, but always, always intensely, sometimes embarrassingly, personal on an urgent search for a beat beyond 4/4. It seemed, what's more, to stand against any pretence at epic sweep, seemed, for example, to undermine grandiosity and pretension of quest for The Great American Novel. In truth, The Novelist was probably just taking a break, trying to figure out his next move in that direction but, whatever, I was hooked. And then, of course, it contained essay The White Negro. I have black friends who still remember their anger at being defined and colonized yet again, this time to be used as a poetic metaphor for something they had many reasons to be suspicious of. Yet despite its potential exposure to sneering of hindsight, there was something heroic in attempt to capture something alive in that moment. Many years later I made a film with James Baldwin who, one night while listening to a great jazz guitarist in his brother's bar, threw his hands in air and exclaimed if only I could write like that! Baldwin was, of course, referring to music and, it must be said, was no great fan of Norman's but, nevertheless, it was bebop in Norman's writing that got to me. In meantime I got lucky. By being in right place at right time, I was able to document several of seminal events in emergence of what came to be known as Swinging London--Christine Keeler, The Beatles, etc., etc., gaining a certain amount of notoriety in my dealings with British television. A group of us, operating as independents, managed to extract enough money from networks in US, Canada, Germany and UK to make a series of portraits of artists. I chose to attempt to chase two: The Novelist and The Prince of Darkness, Miles Davis. …

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