Richard Bradford’s Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer reveals that the writer would often adopt a Texas accent while talking to colleagues at the Village Voice.
A variation of this “Texas brogue” persona later emerged as the narrator of Mailer’s 1967 novel, Why Are We in Vietnam? In Tough Guy, which is due out Jan. 17, Bradford describes the Dallas-based protagonist as “the spawn of Joyce, Beckett, Burroughs and Shakespeare entrapped in the idiom of hard-nosed Texas masculinity.”
On the eve of 1967′s march on the Pentagon, the New Jersey-born Mailer delivered a dinner party address in a voice that “shifted into an accent that was a blend of Texas cowboy and Southern Confederate gent,” Bradford writes.
Mailer’s obvious belief in the toughness of Texans was no doubt bolstered on the set of his 1970 movie Maidstone, when actor Rip Torn, a native of Temple, Texas, attacked him with a hammer in an unscripted scene that stayed in the picture.
“The police were not called,” Bradford writes, “but had Torn been charged with assault he would probably have been the first person to be found not guilty by reason of postmodernism.”
Mailer’s interest in Texas extended to the Dallas killing of President John F. Kennedy. Mailer wrote a biography of Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, with 1995′s Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery. After his death in 2007, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner left his archives of more than 1,000 boxes of papers to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.
Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer
By Richard Bradford
(Bloomsbury Caravel, 304 pages, $28)
