Longing for the Good Fight at the Norman Mailer Center Gala

By PAMELA PAUL

Where have all the fighters gone? This was the melancholy question that seemed to hang over Thursday night's award ceremony and fundraiser, the fourth annual event held by the Norman Mailer Center. More specifically - since Muhammad Ali himself was in attendance - where have the fighting writers gone?

In raising money for both the Norman Mailer Center and the Norman Mailer Writers Colony and honoring a number of young writers, many of them students, the occasion was ostensibly about the future of writing, particularly writing about social justice. That it took place in the glittering ballroom of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Manhattan and was underwritten by the jewelry firm Van Cleef & Arpels highlighted how much has changed since Mr. Mailer and Mr. Ali's fighting words of the sixties.

The past was nonetheless ever-present. “The ghost of Norman Mailer is certainly here tonight,” Joyce Carol Oates commented during c ocktail hour.

Called “A Meeting of Giants,” the evening, which continued with dinner and an awards ceremony, featured an eclectic mix of entertainment and literary stars. In addition to emerging writers, Ms. Oates, Robert Caro and the late Barnet Rosset, Jr., a former publisher of Grove Press, were all recognized for their contributions to literature.

Oliver Stone and Garrison Keillor both presented awards to young writers, and publishing luminaries like Dan Halpern, Harry Evans (standing in as presenter for his wife, Tina Brown, who had the flu) and Nan Talese were among the attendees.

“Some here are drinking extra hard tonight after last night's presidential debate,” Alec Baldwin, the master of ceremonies, said in his opening remarks. He then led the appreciative crowd in a mock breathing exercise.

But the evening's real star power emerged when Mr. Ali made a rare appearance. Seated on a small side stage and we aring sunglasses, Mr. Ali, who has Parkinson's disease, didn't talk and remained expressionless. But after chants of “Ali! Ali! Ali!” from the evening's guests, his wife Lonnie spoke about the two men she called “roaring giants.”

“Norman and Muhammad have a lot in common,” she began. “Norman had six wives and Muhammad has had four - he would have had a fifth but he decided he'd rather live.”

Both men, Ms. Ali said, were boxers; Mr. Mailer apparently once challenged Mr. Ali to a fight. He declined.

Still, Mr. Stone did his best to conjure a pugilistic atmosphere. In presenting the Muhammad Ali ethics award to Evin Hughes, a student at Georgia Southern University who wrote about the ethics of drone attacks, he said, “I miss dissent in our culture. The true spirit of America is rebellion.”

Dick Cavett capped a string of anecdotes about Mr. Ali with an old clip that showed Mr. Ali and the boxer Joe Frazier lifting Mr. Cavett up in mid- air during an appearance on his TV show.

Reminiscences about Mailer flowed throughout the night. “It used to be that no matter how crazy the world got, you could read Norman Mailer and know that you weren't nuts - he was,” Mr. Stone said. And when Ms. Oates accepted a lifetime achievement award, she recalled the first time she and Mr. Mailer met, about 10 years before his death in 2007. He was moderating an event at Lincoln Center where Ms. Oates was giving a reading.

“Joyce Carol Oates has written this extraordinary novel about boxing,” Ms. Oates remembered Mr. Mailer saying by way of introduction. “It was so good, I thought I'd written it myself.”

The audience, Ms. Oates said, burst into laughter. Mr. Mailer, however, had been entirely serious.