Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings

by Norman Mailer

An unexpected collection from Norman Mailer—a book of his selected poems and more than one hundred of his drawings, most of them never before published. Modest Gifts is full of what the author calls “casual pleasures”—witty, naughty, and surprisingly tender verse and art. Lust, seduction, betrayal, jealousy, and even the banality of cocktail party chatter are depicted with humor, affection, and, above all, honesty. Here is an aspect of Norman Mailer unknown to many: lighthearted, prankish, whimsical, and often gentle, playfully sketching the intimate urban world that surrounds us. Modest, funny, and true, each poem and drawing shows a new side of one of the greatest writers of our time.

Genres: Poetry

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 2003

About the author

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.

Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.

Reviews

[Ted Burke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of us think Norman Mailer ought to win the Nobel Prize for literature because of the sure and quarrelsome genius of his books and the ideas they contained; like him or consider him an abberation in the culture, a number of the styles he took, particularly the novel, the essay and journalism, gave you a personality that was hard to ignore. Many who thought him a lout , a grind, an egomaniac had to admit, after reading him to counter his many assertions about many things, that Mailer was, after, a Great Writer. Joyce Carol Oates, an astute critic of Mailer, offered that Mailer's ideas were dangerous because he wrote so well.This, though, isn't one of those books," Modest Gifts" being, at best, a gussied up reissue of a lone book of verse he produced in the early Sixties,"Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Diasters)".
Now, as then, the pieces are slight, skeletal, un-propelled by anything resembling a notion that the reader cares about. For a writer who's composed some of the richest prose and lyric flights this side of Faulkner and DeLillo, these efforts are so minimal that even a verbal skinflint like Hemingway would call these gifts not modest ,but cheap. The poems were written in the early sixties when the author had several professional , legal and marital crisis hanging over him, a situation that had given him writer's block and which, as a professional writer, placed an additional burden on him. Brief, truncated in content, artless in the lack of interest of achieving the sort of ambiguity that is poetry's to apply to the senses, the poems are more like pained gasps of someone airing their gripes, bitches, and congested rage in a sequence of angular phrases. These are the kinds of things you might hear in an operating room when the patient's ether and pain killers wear off. The splintered style, rough and absent color, rhythm or graceful metaphor, is what Mailer wanted to present the public, though, and thought it in his best interest to write about his troubles in a language that lacked the elegant buttressing his essays and journalism could achieve. Of interest to scholars, perhaps, who can examine these puny bits in context with the larger body of work--many of his life long obsessions are to be found here--the reader desiring Mailer's talent for metaphor, adjective and metaphysical fancy had best look elsewhere for some of the brilliance some of us claim for him; this volume is an embarrasemtne in the late author's career.

Mailer explains interestingly that these were put together at a bad time in his life when he could not compose--stabbing your wife will tend to dampen your willingness to wax--and that he found something therapeutic in their existence, but there never has been a compelling reason for these things to be put between covers and sold. Unlike some, I think that a great writer's less great work, the unformed work, the jottings, the juvenilia,the notebooks, the scraps and orts, need to remain in the drawer, and not committed to the judgment of history. This poetry is so minimal that it can't even raise a stink.

[Kevin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nearly read all Mailer books now and I would say this one is really for the absolutists who like me are trying to read the lot, rather than one of the good ones. Having read a lot of Mailer I think this collection makes a bit more sense than it would have done otherwise but it is quite odd.

Essentially what he does here is provide us with a combination of poems and doodles he did, loosely linked around some broad themes, in a way that feels a little bit like he just went through the back of the drawer and dug out some things he had lying around and put them in a book. I am no poetry expert but I think Mailer's poetry is pretty bad - he even says as much by calling the book modest gifts. Then his silly doodles, often based around using numbers to draw faces, hardly seem to me to be conveying a great deal of meaning. There are quite a few about sex, some political ones, some about different social groups, but it didn't amount to any kind of overall coherent whole for me.

He includes an unused intro for his poetry book Death for the Ladies (where lots of this comes from I think) and explains that he created these non-poems when he was going through a bad period (which is I think when he stabbed his wife and got divorced). Perhaps he thinks that these little poems and drawings might help someone else in a bad place in their life. There may even be a couple of golden poems or drawings in here that I missed. The cynical side of me however suspects that he was just churning out another book by using a load of old stuff that he had lying around and if any of this had been submitted by anyone else no-one would ever have published it. Two more Mailer to go I think (including Death for the Ladies) so almost there.

[Arianna Boettger · Rating 1 out of 5]

Juvenile and boring

This book of poems was painfully dull, and the drawings looked like a drunk drew them on the napkins at the local watering hole. I’m glad he has passed and is unable to read my words of criticism.

[Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, I said to Aeschylus: "You don't understand the nature of Greek drama."

[Chantelle J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just neat.