Advertisements for himself
By Thomas Gagen
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Norman Mailer, who died Saturday at age 84, was a novelist of distinction and a pioneer in the New Journalism.
I was so impressed by him in the early '70s that I read about everything he had written up to that time. Then I came upon one of his lesser essays, "The White Negro," from 1957, which forced me to adjust my opinion.
Based on the awful experience of World War II, Mailer reasoned, one could easily be condemned to death in an atomic explosion or a concentration camp, or to "a slow death by conformity." The only viable choice was to live existentially - "to accept the terms of death . . . the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself."
He continued; "Psychopathy is most prevalent with the Negro . . . hated from outside and therefore hating himself." It was understandable if this psychopathic hatred turned criminal, Mailer contended. Even if it resulted in the murder of a hypothetical candy-store owner.
"Courage of a sort is necessary, for one murders not only a weak 50-year-old man, but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one's life."
The essay veers into the pleasures of sex and, aside from the racial stereotype, sounds like something Mailer picked up in the cafés of Paris.
But it was published just as a wave of violent crime was about to engulf the United States. I was living in Baltimore, a city devastated by riots and murder. Encouraging the inner psychopath didn't seem advisable.
As the crime rate soared, Mailer applied a novelist's tools to nonfiction, in "The Armies of the Night" (about Vietnam protests), "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" (the 1968 political conventions), and "Of a Fire on the Moon" (the Apollo II landing). And in 1969 he found time to run for mayor of New York.
It was left to Tom Wolfe, another of the New Journalists, to lay bare an infatuation for criminals by people who should have known better.
Mailer wasn't there when Leonard Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers (chronicled in Wolfe's "Radical Chic" in 1970), but he would have felt at home as wealthy New Yorkers entertained gunmen who showed a veneer of radical politics.
As the years passed, Mailer didn't lose his sympathy for criminals. He helped Jack Abbott, a gifted writer and convicted killer, gain parole in 1981. Abbott killed a waiter at a New York restaurant a few weeks later.
Ideas have consequences, as Mailer should have known. Arguments similar to Mailer's, though less sophisticated, delayed an effective response to the crime wave - and created a backlash that conservatives readily exploited.
Mailer deserves to be read for his nonfiction and his early novels, especially "The Naked and the Dead." New Yorkers can be thankful, however, that he never got a chance to appoint the police commissioner.
Thomas Gagen is an editorial writer for The Boston Globe.
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The New Yorker
Norman Mailer
by Louis Menand November 10, 2007
No one would say of Norman Mailer, who died on November 10th, a the age of eighty-four, that he hoarded his gift. He was a slugger He swung at everything, and when he missed he missed by a mile an sometimes ended up on his tush, but when he connected he usuall knocked it out of the park. He was immodest about his failures an modest about his successes, which is a healthy trait for a writer an probably a healthy trait for life. He left a huge footprint on America letters
Mailer was a performer. He went on television talk shows and engaged in public debates and held press conferences; he directed movies and acted in them; he hosted wild parties and wrecked a few; he ran for mayor of New York City and did not finish last. It is important to acknowledge, though, that he was a singularly bad performer. He entertained and he instructed, but he also irritated, alienated, baffled, and appalled. He told dirty jokes that were not funny, and he tried on outfits and accents that were preposterous—a Jewish boy from Brooklyn, he sometimes dressed like a sea captain and affected a Texas drawl—and he had a few moments, deservedly notorious, of disastrous misjudgment. Even people who wished him well, and who loved the fact that, good, bad, or ugly, he was always in the game, were obliged to cope with a lot of moral and intellectual klutziness.
It is a decorum of modern criticism that there is the writer and then there is “the work”—that all that matters is the books, considered as stand-alone verbal artifacts. To apply this decorum to Mailer is to miss the point. Beginning with his comeback book, “Advertisements for Myself,” in 1959, he bled his life and his personality into his writing. He had enjoyed a precocious success eleven years before, with “The Naked and the Dead,” the first of the major Second World War novels, and written in the third-person naturalist style of James T. Farrell and John Dos Passos. Mailer was twenty-five when it came out, and was duly lionized. But then he produced two books that attracted few admirers, “Barbary Shore,” which is sort of about politics, and “The Deer Park,” which is sort of about Hollywood, and he was desperate to have a second act. His solution was to make himself—his opinions, his grievances against the publishing industry, his ambitions—part of his subject. He did this sometimes by inventing outsized fictional alter egos—the bullfighting instructor and Village cocksman Sergius O’Shaughnessy, the wife killer Stephen Rojak—but mostly by making himself a character in his nonfiction writing: “The Armies of the Night” (about the 1967 march on the Pentagon), “The Prisoner of Sex” (about the women’s movement, a phenomenon not readily assimilable to the Mailer cosmological system, at no time a flexible instrument of analysis), “Of a Fire on the Moon” (about the Apollo space mission), “The Fight” (about the Ali-Foreman championship bout in Zaire, and one of Mailer’s finest books).
Some readers found all these Normans obnoxious, a display of egotism. But Mailer was simply making apparent something that modern literature and, in particular, modern journalism preferred to disguise, which is that a book is written by a human being, someone with professional ambitions, financial needs, tastes and distastes, and this human being is part of the story whether he or she appears in the story or not. It was not important for readers to like this person; it was important to know him. Mailer did not put the first person into journalism; he took it out of the closet.
This was so even in what is, stylistically, his least Maileresque—and, for many people, most successful—book, “The Executioner’s Song,” about the execution, in Utah, of the murderer Gary Gilmore, in 1977. Half of that book is Gilmore’s story; half is about the unseemly scramble by publishers and television producers to buy the rights to tell it. People made money off Gilmore’s death, and Mailer lets you know that he was one of them.
Mailer liked to think of his books as his children, and, when asked which were his favorites, to name the least critically appreciated—“Ancient Evenings” and “Harlot’s Ghost,” great literary pyramids that no one visits any longer. He did not pretend that those books did not exist. He put himself, with all his talents and imperfections, before his audience. Not many writers have been so brave with themselves. ♦
Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007
Why Norman Mailer Mattered
By Richard Lacayo
"His consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom! and baroque in the style."
— Armies of the Night
You can't say he didn't live up to his own expectations. In ten novels and almost two dozen other books, Norman Mailer not only did it with boom. He did it with brains and wit and nerve. He became what you might call the foremost pronouncer of his time.
He was, of course, a great conundrum. There was paradox even in his voice, which hovered in some undisclosed location between the Brooklyn of his youth and the Harvard of his student years. He saw himself, in all his complexities, as some essential figure of his epoch, so that the arc of his own career was one of his perennial subjects. This was not just a measure of his egotism — which was boundless — but also of his certainty that the judgment upon him of public opinion was, itself, an important sign of the times. He could never stop measuring his reputation against every other writer's; he spent years waving his Brooklyn matador's cape at Hemingway, boxing with Tolstoy (and anybody else who got in his way) and always licking his own wounds. Mailer's forte was intricate readings of his own inner conditions. His mistake, sometimes, was to believe in them too much as a guide to the wider world. But as Mailer would have asked: What else do we have to go on?
He was just 25 when he became abruptly and unmanageably famous for his first novel, The Naked and the Dead. It was 1948, America was looking for its Great War Novel and there was Mailer with his jug handle ears and his curly hair and a teeming book based on his experiences as an infantryman in the South Pacific.
It became a huge bestseller. But fame turned fickle on him, or maybe vice versa. He turned out to be too flighty, too impious and vainglorious to fill the role of anointed American writer, the thinking man's thinking man. Various literary and media establishments turned against him. As the '50s wore on, Mailer published Barbary Shore, a middling novel about an amnesiac writer and some despairing Trotskyists in Brooklyn, and a better but still underrated Hollywood novel, The Deer Park. He helped found the Village Voice, the model for all subsequent alternative weeklies, or at least the good ones. But his standing kept falling.
When it appeared that his comet had stalled badly, Mailer took decisive action. He fashioned a collection of short pieces into Advertisements for Myself, a triumph of swaggering literary sales talk. It contained a couple of his best short stories, including "The Man Who Studied Yoga," and a choice selection of essays, including "The White Negro," which epitomized the headlong intellectual bravado, even to the point of absurdity, that we would eventually think of as Maileresque. (It was "The White Negro" that included the notorious proposal that a hoodlum who mugged a candy store owner might be thought of as "daring the unknown.") Advertisements for Myself wasn't a bestseller of the magnitude of The Naked and the Dead. But it got talked about in all the right places, and remains a treasure house of contrarian thinking. Mailer had now re-established himself.
And wouldn't you know it, the rich kingdom of 1960s was about to open before him. Its new standards of misbehavior, its ferocities, its treacheries, its Kennedys — all of it answered to Mailer's disposition. For Esquire and other publications he began producing peerless meditations on the sensibilities (and the treacheries and the Kennedys) of his time. In 1968, he found his stride with Armies of the Night, his brilliant "non-fiction novel" about the October 1967 anti-war March on the Pentagon. The first of two Pulitzers came his way. These were the years of Mailer at his most visible, when he took up every kind of public intellectual battle, and even ran a boisterous, quixotic and very entertaining campaign for mayor of New York.
All through his career Mailer would carry with him a few persistent preoccupations. One was that technology was the devil's instrument, the means by which everything that made us human would be gradually leached away. It wasn't just the atomic bomb that Mailer detested. He could write about "the scent of the void that comes off the pages of a Xerox copy." (You felt sometimes that there was no prose too purple for him not to attempt it.) He hated the telephone so much he wouldn't give phone interviews.
His other great topic was manhood, and the problem of how to achieve it in a culture subsiding into room temperature. Like Papa Hemingway, Mailer was fascinated by boxers and liked their company. He was also prone to drunken fistfights. As for women, he had something close to a mystical view of sex, of the female body as a mystery that a man must enter and possess. And his hatred of the emerging order of techno-rationalism extended to a distaste even for birth control. All that, plus the fact that in 1960 he had stabbed his second wife Adele — though badly injured, afterwards she refused to sign a complaint against him — made it inevitable that he would become one of the main targets of feminist writers in the late '60s and early '70s. His reply was The Prisoner of Sex, a defense of some of his favorite writers — D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller — and of his own embattled notion of relations between the sexes as a perennial test of strength.
For a long time another of Mailer's fixed ideas was borrowed from Wilhelm Reich, the apostate Freudian who was prosecuted in the '50s in connection with his claim that he could treat cancer with his magical "orgone" box, which he believed collected life energies. (Mailer actually built one for himself.) Reich believed that cancer was an outgrowth of sexual repression, the body's lethal reply to the denial of primal needs. Mailer could see that America was a repressed society, and couldn't resist joining in the conclusion that self-denial was literally malignant. It was an idea that effectively blamed the patient for the illness. In 1978, Susan Sontag would strike back with Illness as Metaphor, a book that demolished the habit of discussing cancer or tuberculosis in any such terms. Sontag had none of Mailer's percussive lyricism, but on cancer she was right, he was wrong.
But by that time Mailer was on to much bigger things. Gary Gilmore was a convicted killer who insisted that the state of Utah carry out its intention to execute him. The magnificent, haunting (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) book that came out of the Gilmore execution and the attendant media circus, The Executioner's Song, turned out to be the high-water mark of Mailer's career. There were many titles after that, but none with anything like the same power. The spare immensities of The Executioner's Song turned into the sheer endlessness of Ancient Evenings, his grand blunder into the Egypt of the pharaohs. (That book is also as a close as he got to producing the long promised but never delivered cycle of novels tracing the story of one Jewish family from ancient times to the present, which may be just as well.) There was Tough Guys Don't Dance, a detective novel that also became a movie, with Ryan O'Neal, one of four films that Mailer directed. There was Harlot's Ghost, a long novel about the CIA.
With all those ex-wives and children to feed, there was also no end of non-fiction literary shopwork — a dozen or more books on grafitti, Picasso, Lee Harvey Oswald, and a long one on Marilyn Monroe that borrowed heavily from other bios, at least for the bare bones of her story. The strenuous speculations on the meaning of Marilyn were entirely his.
There was worse. Mailer had always had the hipster's fascination with outlaws, including himself. What was The American Dream after all but an extrapolation from the interior life of Mailer after he had stabbed Adele in 1960? But after the great success of the Executioner's Song, it was Mailer's bad luck to run across another charismatic hoodlum. Jack Henry Abbott had spent most of his adult life in prison. In the '70s he started writing to Mailer, who was impressed enough by his furious and defiant letters about prison life to help him turn them into a book, In the Belly of the Beast. In 1981, with Mailer's help, Abbott was released on parole. Six weeks later he got into an argument with a young waiter at a restaurant in lower Manhattan, pulled out a knife and stabbed him to death.
The Mailer who romanticized violence — he hated that description, but it's the unavoidable one — was now the man who had aided and abetted it, however unintentionally. It had been one thing to take risks with his own dignity. This time someone else had paid with his life.
But make no mistake, when he died on Saturday, something important was lost. Even at his most exasperating and contrarian — especially at his most contradictory and contrarian — he was an indispensable cultural voice. And there is no one now even bidding to take his place with anything like the same force and originality of mind. My favorite Mailer quote will always be this one: "How dare you scorn the explosive I employ?"
Norman come back. Nothing is forgiven.
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