The Journalistic Profile: Full-Face

Norman Mailer’s piece on the quintessence of Carter, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks before the election, makes a good object lesson on some of the occupational hazards of authorship. A less established writer would have covered his tracks; would have felt the need to camouflage, or at least retouch, the practical background of the interview. But Mailer, who doesn’t have to worry about looking foolish or vulnerable, tells us at some length what went on between him and Carter. They just talked—or rather, Mailer just talked, driven by a compulsion to proffer the sort of intimacies he should have been extracting. He was so embarrassed, afterward, at having flooded a busy candidate with junk Mailer that he wound up writing an article not entirely to the public, but also to Carter, in expiation. How like Mailer, eh, to show and tell Carter all, when he should have been plying Carter with questions?

And yet you don’t have to be a New Journalist with an ink-blot ego to yield to impulses of this sort. Writers frequently spend, and sometimes splurge, themselves in various ways to buy confidences and approval from their interviewees, although they may later regret their own zeal. It’s common, to varying degrees, even among those with neither the license nor the temerity to inflict themselves on other people quite so aggressively as Mailer. Mailer’s case is merely the exaggeration that calls attention to the rule.

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Susan Schwartz McDonald

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Norman Mailer’s piece on the quintessence of Carter, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks before the election, makes a good object lesson on some of the occupational hazards of authorship. A less established writer would have covered his tracks; would have felt the need to camouflage, or at least retouch, the practical background of the interview. But Mailer, who doesn’t have to worry about looking foolish or vulnerable, tells us at some length what went on between him and Carter. They just talked—or rather, Mailer just talked, driven by a compulsion to proffer the sort of intimacies he should have been extracting. He was so embarrassed, afterward, at having flooded a busy candidate with junk Mailer that he wound up writing an article not entirely to the public, but also to Carter, in expiation. How like Mailer, eh, to show and tell Carter all, when he should have been plying Carter with questions?

And yet you don’t have to be a New Journalist with an ink-blot ego to yield to impulses of this sort. Writers frequently spend, and sometimes splurge, themselves in various ways to buy confidences and approval from their interviewees, although they may later regret their own zeal. It’s common, to varying degrees, even among those with neither the license nor the temerity to inflict themselves on other people quite so aggressively as Mailer. Mailer’s case is merely the exaggeration that calls attention to the rule.