A beautiful piece by Richard Brody on Mailer and letters in The New Yorker.

‘One of the best letters in the collection, to Diana Trilling, from 1960, is an offhanded masterwork of criticism. He argues that novelists “became great writers because of their infirmities,” and runs through those of such luminaries as Faulkner, Hemingway, Proust, Joyce, and James, before getting to his own, via a remarkable digression regarding Jewishness and the peculiar aptness of being a Jewish novelist in the “schizophrenic” twentieth century, an age in which “there is no meaning but the present.” And Mailer’s fecund “infirmity”? He writes: “My infirmity is that I had no emotional memory (still don’t—a dead love is never deader than with me). I was psychopathically marooned in the present.”’

(Read the complete article here.)

To have no emotional memory is an infirmity, especially for an author. But the remark “a dead love is never deader than with me” is beyond infirmity.

You will never be deader than with me, is an invitation.