Peter Manso (1940–2021)

An interesting concept. Virginia Woolf in the role of a spy. It’s 1917 and the Great War (WWI) is on. Virginia is recovering from a nervous breakdown, under the close eyes of her husband.

When she reads a short article about a Belgian woman’s suicide, Virginia becomes very curious and decided to investigate. Between her over-protective husband and her doctor it is close to impossible for her. She also has moments where she questions her own sanity.

Through persistence and a friendship with a female reporter, she makes progress on her investigation, but also finds herself dealing with traitors and spies from both sides.

Various contemporaries of Woolf are part of the cast of characters, along with locations people visited. These elements give life and support the time frame of the story.

There are many twists, turns and red herrings woven into the whole, which means you need to pay attention. An enjoyable read for me.… (més)

It’s sad but almost universally true that any persecuted group will turn around and become persecutors themselves if they gain power. Author Peter Manso chronicles this in Ptown, a collection of linked stories about Provincetown, Massachusetts. Provincetown is on the very tip of Cape Cod; for most of its history it was a quiet village of Portuguese fishermen. Henry David Thoreau visited and commented on the isolated beauty of the place, but by and large it was both a figurative and literal backwater. Starting around the 1920s or so, it began to attract artists and authors and others of “bohemian” lifestyle, who could live inexpensively in driftwood shacks on the dunes and sculpt and paint and write. The local government was tolerant of eccentricity, and Provincetown gradually acquired a reputation as a place where you could be gay or smoke dope or engage in other practices that were Banned in Boston as long as you weren’t too flagrant about it.


Manso describes the change with the stories of Tony Jackett, a straight fisherman, and Jay Critchley, a gay artist, plus interspersed chapters on other aspects of Provincetown history and culture. Jackett can’t make a go of it as a fisherman, a result of his own casual work ethic and increasing government regulation on where and how he can fish, and makes a stab at drug smuggling instead. Critchley starts out an altar boy – his family is “Catholic Family of the Year” in Massachusetts – and ends up as an artist and activist; his art consists of encrusting various objects in beach sand and his activism involves protesting pollution by dressing up as the Statue of Liberty with a gown made out of tampon applicators washed up on local beaches. While they are going about their lives, gays and lesbians gradually take over Provincetown. Wealthy gay couples buy up all the available land for trophy homes, leaving Provincetown in the weird position of having some of the lowest per-capita incomes in Massachusetts combined with some of the highest property values. The local government is entirely taken over by gays and lesbians; the town has over 40 citizen boards that must permit applications for building permits, business licenses, and zoning changes and those permits simply aren’t granted to straights (the tactic is not to deny the permit outright but to keep requesting more changes or information until the applicant gives up). The local tennis pro, a straight, has his lifetime club membership revoked and then is forcibly removed from the property as a trespasser. The local doctor, a straight, says he doesn’t feel welcome in his town anymore and refuses to patronize any business that displays a rainbow flag, comparing it to Confederate or Nazi banners. People opposed to local government programs – the case cited is widening the road to the local airport to make it easier for wealthy airplane owners – are accused of homophobia. The “old-time” local gays are appalled by this, but are priced out of the market; many of the newcomers don’t live in Provincetown, making enough money from summer and weekend rentals to pay their mortgages.


I visited Provincetown once, about the time Manso was writing this book (published 2003); I didn’t feel unwelcome but it was definitely an interesting place. The glacial geology was fascinating, and several species of whale sported offshore. Manso’s arguments are mostly anecdotal and could be cherry-picked; they resonate with me, though, since I’ve seen exactly the same thing he describes in the Chicago area where I grew up (except it was the Democrat political machine rather than gays and lesbians). People obsess about national politics, but if you control the local zoning, business, and building departments you control who lives in your town and what they do.… (més)

Whether you admire him or abhor him, it's awfully hard not to be awed by him -- Norman Mailer. He may have been a megalomaniacal legend in his own mind, but his both brilliant and obnoxious life, if not all his novels and new journalism, will probably remain legendary for all time.

Peter Manso encyclopedically captures that life, from his childhood in Brooklyn; through Harvard; the army; the crafting and enormous sensation of The Naked and the Dead; Hollywood; politics; Marilyn Monroe; Vietnam and anti-war protests; failed marriages and spousal abuse; boxing; failed collaborations and embarrassing interviews; the out-of-nowhere success of The Executioner's Song (only to find out later that Mailer may have taken too much authorial -- and definitely, research -- credit for it!); to the desultory, poor-selling novels of the '90s (Harlot's Ghost, which I actually liked, and that Oswald disaster that was a second-rate Libra); and finally, to the bitter, cash-strapped, "Crap in the Forest"* end.

Thank goodness for Peter Manso that Mailer: His Life and Times was an oral biography, impeccably sourced and cited (if not recorded) by family, friends, and heavyweight literary and cinematic luminaries, when Mailer, after its publication, decided, even though he'd approved the final drafts, nevertheless to launch a smear campaign against Peter Manso and the accuracy of his Mailer-biography's claims.

Never mind that Manso and Mailer had been friends for decades; that Manso and his wife even lived with Mailer and his family for parts of two years during the biography's composition, and even took on a mortgage together for the construction of a new house that would be theirs, together; that rabies-ridden-rottweiler-of-a-man, amidst graceful greyhounds -- the chronically disloyal and myopic Mailer -- still badmouthed and lied and, lied so well about his good 'ol pal Manso, that crucial sources for Manso's next biography (that he was already entrenched in) on Marlon Brando, opted out and refused to be interviewed for it. Mailer had effectively blacklisted Manso through word-of-mouth and the press in an attempt to derail both the Brando biography and, more detestably, his career.

Manso reveals the complete drama -- and how he regained his good reputation as a truthful biographer -- in the latest edition of Mailer: His Life and Times' afterword, "Alas, Poor Norman (1985 - 2007)".

Even if you're not a Norman Mailer fan; even if you, for understandable and righteous reasons, hate the guy, I don't see how you can't love this book. It's fascinating to hear what people like E.L. Doctorow, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg and others, thought of him.

*The real name for the novel is The Castle in the Forest.… (més)