Kimball on Mailer—and Monroe

I’ve just read Roger Kimball’s long article about Norman Mailer at Pajamas Media, where he has his own weblog. It’s a useful overview of the career and character of Mailer, whom Kimball persuasively describes as a “moral cretin.” While Kimball’s critical points about Mailer as a progenitor of the destructive counterculture have been made innumerable times over the last 40 years, many younger readers will be unfamiliar with Mailer, and I recommend the piece to them. (Here are my own thoughts on Mailer.)

However, I must take exception to this passing observation by Kimball:

In real life, Marilyn Monroe was an unhappy sexpot, a sometimes amusing but distinctly mediocre comic actress whose air-headedness was almost as much of an attraction as her pneumatic bustline. The unhappy truth, as Clive James observed, is that Marilyn Monroe “was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.”

Is there not a lack of sensibility, an excess of censoriousness, in a cultural critic who could look at a unique comic talent like Marilyn Monroe’s and see nothing but mediocrity? Monroe was a sparkling, magical presence who lit up the screen, but Kimball looks down his nose at her, blind to her charm, as well as to her charms.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 14, 2007 10:12 PM | Send