19. LUCKY, THE THREE-TIME LOSER
WOULD YOU LIKE more of an ending? Here is an African tale. A tribal chief lent a sheep to a friend of Father Tempels. One morning the sheep was found dead. A dog belonging to the friend was found eating it. There was no evidence the dog had killed the sheep, indeed it probably died in its sleep. Still, the friend, whose name was Kapundwe, happened to be a chief himself, and he made reparations to the first chief. The animal, after all, had been in his care. So he gave back not one sheep but three and added a hundred francs. This large repayment was to compensate the first chief properly for his feeling that he had suffered something more than the mere loss of an animal. The shocking disappearance of his possession had disturbed his vital force. “His peaceful enjoyment of life” had been “wounded.” The payment, therefore, was to recognize his natural rights to a “restoration of being.” Both chiefs understood the transaction perfectly.
We are speaking of the economy of mood. Maybe it is the only economy in the play of forces between those who are living and those who are dead. Of course, we will hardly know until an African becomes emperor of the moon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in 1923 in Long Branch, NJ, and raised in Brooklyn, NORMAN MAILER was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.
By Norman Mailer
The Naked and the Dead
Barbary Shore
The Deer Park
Advertisements for Myself
Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)
The Presidential Papers
Cannibals and Christians
Why Are We in Vietnam?
The Deer Park—A Play
The Armies of the Night
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
Of a Fire on the Moon
The Prisoner of Sex
Maidstone
Existential Errands
St. George and the Godfather
Marilyn
The Fight
Genius and Lust
The Executioner’s Song
Of Women and Their Elegance
Pieces and Pontifications
Ancient Evenings
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
Harlot’s Ghost
Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery
Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
The Gospel According to the Son
The Spooky Art
Why Are We at War?
Modest Gifts
The Castle in the Forest
On God (with J. Michael Lennon)
Mind of an Outlaw