In 1960, Norman Mailer contributed a foreword to Krim’s first collection of essays. It’s a good example of how a tough guy pays a compliment.
I think sometimes, as a matter of style, he is the child of our time, he is New York in the middle of the 20th Century, a city man, his prose as brilliant upon occasion as the electronic beauty of our lights, his shifts and shatterings of mood as searching and true as the grinding wheels in a subway train. He has the guts of New York, old Krim….
That “old Krim” is a bit of shtarke sentimentality. Like the “sweetheart” tossed around garment center showrooms by guys who know it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t bury you. They would, sweetheart.
Which explains how Krim went after Mailer in a 1969 article for Clay Felker’s New York magazine, where Tom Wolfe, Mailer, Jimmy Breslin and other top writers published the New Journalism.
I can only describe Krim’s piece as the literary equivalent of photographs that depict Zero Mostel’s transformation into Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. (The full set is in Max Waldman’s Zero by Mostel, but this gives you the idea.)
In Norman Mailer, Get Out of My Head, Krim turns himself into a snarling beast fighting off the then Mailerized climate of literary New York.
You see what I’m really asking is whether one man’s public triumph—which abstractly I approve of, welcome, see as a sign of hope when it has been made out of the materials of truth—is to be another’s heartache in this homeland of mine which puts such a premium on being IT that it even cripples those of us who should know better.
It’s a beaut. Find it in Missing a Beat.
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