Dancing with the Gods. Kent Nerburn

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      RECENTLY I RECEIVED a note from a young woman named Jennifer who was questioning her decision to pursue a life in the arts. She had a dream, she felt a calling, but she was feeling alone and misunderstood.

      ‘Is it worth it?’ she asked. ‘Is it possible? What advice can you give me?’

      Her letter touched me. It mirrored the doubts and yearnings of my own youth. Though I couldn’t tell her what to do, I wanted to respond.

      This is what I wrote to her:

       Dear Jennifer,Thank you for your kind letter. You honour me by thinking that I might have some advice to offer on your questions about devoting your life to the arts. It takes great courage to reach out to a person you don’t know because something in their work touches a chord in you and resonates with that private, unspoken place of your dreams. I know, because I did the same when I was younger. In my case, it was to Norman Mailer.

       Why I chose Norman Mailer, I don’t know. I certainly didn’t find his emotional sensibilities attuned to mine. His work, though powerful, was not consonant with my own literary spirit. I think it was because there was a muscularity in his intellectual manner that I felt was lacking in my own life. I had just begun a graduate programme at Stanford University, and the combination of the intellectual demands of the academic life and the shock of a new living and learning environment – graduate school, at least at that time, was a far different animal than undergraduate school – made me feel ever further from the living streets and ordinary people where I felt most vibrant and alive. Mr Mailer’s work probably gave me hope that there was a way to be intelligent without being an intellectual, and that a life on the streets did not negate a life of the mind.

       Whatever it was, I wrote him, and though I do not have a copy of the letter, I can guess what I said. It was likely very much like your letter – confessional, almost pleading, a lifeline thrown to a person whose life and accomplishments seemed to resonate with what I wanted for myself and what so few others seemed to understand. I suppose I wanted a helping hand, or maybe an occupational road map, or maybe just the simple acknowledgement that my plight and dreams were real and worthy.

       I do remember that I asked if I could come to New York and work with him – a request that makes me blush even now when I think of it. But Mr Mailer, gruff though he might have seemed in his public persona, wrote back with gentle compassion.

       I have the note still today, written on a manual typewriter and signed with a fountain pen. I’ll share it with you in its entirety because it speaks to the generosity of the man: