Mailer’s public existentialism rested on secondhand popular summaries, not primary texts

Evidence

Mailer apparently decided to put this into practice. Having announced a plan to run for mayor of New York City on an ‘existentialist’ ticket in 1960, he had to give it up after drunkenly stabbing his wife Adele at the party to launch the campaign. He ran for mayor again in 1969, but not as an existentialist. His grasp of the philosophical theory never seemed more than superficial. When the marginally better-informed English writer Colin Wilson asked Mailer what existentialism meant to him, he reportedly waved his hand and said, ‘Oh, kinda playing things by ear.’ His biographer Mary V. Dearborn has suggested that his knowledge of the subject derived, not from the as-yet-untranslated Being and Nothingness as he liked to pretend, but from a Broadway production of No Exit combined with a hasty reading of Irrational Man, a popular guide published in 1950 by William Barrett — the philosophy professor who had earlier written about Sartre for the Partisan Review. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 898

Categorization

• CANDY: ‘Oh, kinda playing things by ear’ as Mailer’s gloss on the entire existentialist movement is a perfect cocktail-party anecdote.
• XREF: connects to: Mailer reframed existentialist authenticity as a pro-psychopathy stance — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 897