book about the 1967 march on the Pentagon, “Armies of the Night,”
when Robert Lowell tells Mailer, “Norman, I really think you are
the best journalist in America.” Mailer, taking slight umbrage,
replied that he sometimes thought of himself as “the best writer in
America.” (I love that “sometimes”; Mailer thought he was the best
every waking minute of the day and in his dreams.)
I think what Lowell meant was that Mailer
was the best
writer precisely because he was the best
journalist – that
he had invented a new kind of journalism more vital than the
fiction being written by their contemporaries.
“Norman Mailer, a Double Life” – I assume the subtitle has
something to do with what Lennon calls “Mailer’s desire for fame,
and his distaste for it” — spurred me to an orgy of reading and
rereading Mailer’s massive oeuvre, and in the end I was beaten. The
early novels meant no more to me than they had when I first read
them in college, though I admit “The Naked and the Dead” was better
written than I remembered. (I was amused to find that Lennon had
dug up comments from V.S. Pritchett and George Orwell in defense of
it after the British attorney general denounced Mailer’s first
novel as “foul, lewd and revolting.”) Mailer’s own assessment of
the book was probably correct when he wrote, 20 years later, that
“It had a best-seller style, no style… I knew it was no literary
achievement.”
I couldn’t finish “Barbary Shore” or “The Deer Park,” both of which
seemed contrived and overblown. Marilyn Monroe, of all people, may
have shown more insight into Mailer than Mailer showed when writing
about Marilyn when, after reading “The Deer Park,” she commented
that Norman was “too impressed by power.”
Of the later novels, “Why Are We in Vietnam?” still crackles and
“The Executioner’s Song,” all 1100-plus pages of it, remains
awesome, but I simply can’t read the huge, floppy,
shapeless novels – such as “Ancient Evenings,” “Harlot’s Ghost” and
”Oswald’s Tale.” As Lennon’s biography makes clear, these
were the books in which Mailer poured the purest distillation of
his own soul. Or as he put it in “Cannibals and Christians,” “A man
lays his character on the line when he writes a novel.”
What bullshit. Mailer didn’t put his character on the line when he
wrote his
best books? He told Lennon in an interview
(collected in “Pieces and Pontifications”) that “The Armies of the
Night”
“was written in a towering depression … I did it in
two months, and those were some of the worst weeks in my life.” In
order to establish the book’s greatness he couldn’t think of it as
journalism: “I always think of ‘The Armies of the Night,’
”
he told Lennon, “as a nineteenth-century novel.”
Tipping us to the truth that “The Executioner’s Song” (surely one
of the best three or four) was more a nonfiction work than a novel,
he said during a 1981 interview at Columbia that “more than any
other book I’ve ever done, was an exercise in craft. I’ve never
felt close to it.” Hemingway, Mailer thought, looking over his
shoulder at the ghost of his icon, “would have called
‘Executioner’s Song’ bad Hemingway.” If so, Papa can go to hell – I
call “The Executioner’s Song” American Stendhal.
I wish Lennon had
not shared some of his subject’s
literary taste; perhaps it’s impossible to chair the editorial
board of The Mailer Review and not think like Mailer. Could Lennon
really feel that huge, dark, amorphous unfinished mess “Harlot’s
Ghost” “may be his finest novelistic achievement, one of the last
high peaks of his writing…”? I mention this because it’s one of
Lennon’s few lapses in an extraordinary biography of an
extraordinary life, easily the best of the swarm of books Mailer
has inspired over the years.
Norman Kingsley Mailer was born on Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch,
N.J.; it must have tickled him no end that his father Barney had
immigrated from South Africa and had not applied for American
citizenship when he married, meaning he and Norman were technically
British citizens. (Lennon describes Mailer’s father as “an elegant
impoverished figure out of Chekhov.”)
Growing up in Brooklyn, Nachum Melech, his Hebrew name – Melech
means king – had as reasonably happy a childhood as could be
expected. “I was close to my parents,” he told Lennon in a 1980
interview, “I didn’t have to break away… My mother and my father
treated my sister and myself as important people. At home, we were
the center of their universe.” Consequently, his own childhood
never interested him much, and he never wrote about it.
He was a brilliant student at Boys High in Brooklyn and read
voluminously, including the wonderful potboilers of Rafael
Sabatini. He then went to Harvard, writing
his mother a
letter that said, “It’s all happening too easy.” Fanny Mailer
preserved it in a scrapbook with other memorabilia of her son’s
accomplishments.
It
did happen too easy. Mailer seemed to read more for
gratification than to expand his horizons. His prose style was in
large part formed by what Lennon calls “A ‘triangle’ – Hemingway,
Faulkner, and Farrell.” But at, I think, a price: “The influence of
the three was heightened because Mailer never took any courses in
English or continental literature except for a drama course in his
senior year… during his four years at Harvard, the only contact he
had with European literature came when he sat in on some classes on
Proust, Mann, and Joyce. Mailer had scant interest in
eighteenth-century British poetry.”
One of the few English novelists he was influenced by in his
formative years was, of all people, William Somerset Maugham; later
he would read and admire Isherwood’s “Goodbye to Berlin.” After
reading Evelyn Waugh he grudgingly conceded, “That English fairy
can write, much as I hate to admit it.” As far as Lennon has
determined, he read no Kafka, no Virginia Woolf, little Proust,
little Joyce and, even after World War II, no Camus, a writer one
might think his sensibility would be attuned to. Mailer doesn’t
seem to have read much that connects him to one of his favorite
catch-all words, “existential,” as in running
for mayor on
what he called the “Existential Ticket” and
maintaining
“One’s condition on marijuana is always existential.” As Gore Vidal
famously cracked, “Norman uses existential like a truck driver uses
ketchup.”
He did love Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black” (and, in a
fascinating tidbit supplied by Lennon, tried to interest Montgomery
Clift in playing Julien Sorel. He also thought JFK’s decision to
run for president “worthy of Julian Sorel”).
When it came to the competition, he seems to have set his sights
rather low: “The only one of my contemporaries who I felt had more
talent than myself was James Jones.” Even into the late 1950s he
felt that “I can still say now that ‘From Here To Eternity’ has
been the best American novel since the war.”
He expressed
little but withering contempt for most American writers of his own
time.
Of J.D. Salinger: “I seem to be alone in finding him no more than
the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.”
Mary McCarthy: “’The Group’ is the best novel the editors of the
women’s magazines ever conceived in their secret ambitions.”
Saul Bellow: “I cannot take him seriously as
a major
novelist. I do not think he knows anything about people, nor about
himself.”
Ralph Ellison: “Essentially a hateful writer: when the line of his
satire is pure, he writes so perfectly that one can never forget
the experience of reading him. It is like holding a live electric
wire in one’s hand.”
Truman Capote: “A stylist and a very good writer, but he’s not done
anything memorable lately.” (This was in 1980. He did once call
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” “a small classic.”)
Jack Kerouac: “Lacks discipline.”
Gore Vidal: “A wit and a good essayist. Not a good novelist.”
Thomas Pynchon: “I’ve never been able to read him. I just can’t get
through the bananas in ‘Gravity’s Rainbow.’”
If the comment on Saul Bellow is a little bitchy, it should be
admitted that not all of Mailer’s critical opinions were wrong. It
should also be admitted that several of these criticisms could be
applied to Mailer himself.
Like so many of the writers who came out of World War II, Mailer
was obsessed with writing The Great War Novel – which, by their
definition would have meant The Great American Novel. This, of
course, would lead inevitably to the Nobel Prize — which, he liked
to pretend at times, he thought he was unworthy of. “Indeed,” he
wrote in “The Prisoner of Sex,” “it would be an embarrassment to
win. How could one really look Nabokov in the eye?” (Especially,
one might add, after Nabokov told Time magazine in 1969, “I detest
everything in American life he represents.”)
Willie Morris, the wonderful essayist and novelist from Mississippi
who edited Mailer at Harper’s (and who was fired for devoting an
entire issue to “The Prisoner of Sex”) once said to me, “Can you
imagine how many more great books Norman might have written if he
hadn’t wasted so much time making movies or writing plays or
running for mayor of New York?” (which he did – twice). Marlon
Brando was probably thinking along the same lines when he saw
Mailer at a Hollywood party and, according to Lennon, said,
“Norman, what the fuck are you doing here? You’re not a
screenwriter. Why aren’t you on a farm in Vermont, writing your
next novel?”
Certainly Mailer wasted a huge amount of energy with some
ridiculous films. Pauline Kael nailed him in her review of his
completely unscripted, “Wild 90″: “There are many movies
that are worse … but ‘Wild 90′ is the worst movie that I’ve stayed
to see all the way through.”
Of course, if we’re going to speculate, we may as well speculate on
how many more great books he might have written if he hadn’t taken
time to get married six times and had nine children
– every
detail of every relationship, including the myriad infidelities,
lovingly recalled by Lennon. An editorial writer to the New York
Times once quipped that Mailer was a “matrimoniac.”
My feeling, though, is that Mailer, whatever his other interests
and distractions, would have written better books if he simply
hadn’t been so hell-bent on writing Great Novels. “I wouldn’t want
ever,” he wrote in “Cannibals and Christians,” to be caught
justifying journalism as a major activity. It’s obviously less
interesting to write than a novel.” But not necessarily more
interesting to
read.
“We have a funny situation at present in American letters,” he said
to Lennon in 1980, “there are no giants around. Once we had
Hemingway and Faulkner. Now, we’re all like spokes in a wheel.” And
Mailer, of course, wanted to be the entire wheel. He simply could
not see that the kind of novel he wanted to master was no longer of
great interest to American readers. His great talent was for
sensing the crest in the national mood and surfing out in front of
it. (As his arch-conservative friend William F. Buckley told him,
“You are a magnetic field in this country.”)
On the crests
of twentieth century fiction he was always hopelessly behind.
In 1980 he was asked who the most important writers of fiction the
world at that time were and replied, “Borges and Marquez… I
sometimes think Borges may do in five pages what Pynchon does in
five hundred.” And, “In ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ he created
not one word but a hundred. I don’t know how Marquez does it… in
ten pages he’ll create a family that has eighteen children and they
go through ten years, and you know every one of the children, and
all the events that occur in their life. In ten pages, I have all I
can do to get around one bend in the Nile.” In reading the Latin
Americans, he must have finally understood that the battle to write
the old-fashioned Great American Novel was over, yet he would
continue punching after the bell.
So what, then, is Mailer’s place in our literature, and what is it
likely to be for the next few decades? The novels, probably all —
except “Why Are We in Vietnam?” and “The Executioner’s Song,” will
fade, even the best of the rest forever consigned to the twilight
realm of the praised but unread. But the journalism has stayed
journalism. The grab-bag collections of essays, profiles, sketches,
interviews and self-interviews — “Advertisements for Myself” and
“Cannibals and Christians” — still read like intellectual popcorn
shrimp. His accounts of political conventions —
”Miami,”
“The Siege of Chicago,” “St. George” and “The Godfather”– continue
to send a charge from the page. Even though Mailer was so
spectacularly wrong about Goldwater in 1964 and McGovern in 1972,
sweeping to the nominations of their parties and then the
presidency. Pauline Kael, who had his number, wrote that “His
instinct is famous because it’s so often bad.” But Kael, who also
liked his book on Marilyn Monroe, which she called a “rip-off with
genius” also noted that “When it comes to reporting the way
American rituals and institutions operate, Mailer’s low cunning is
maybe the best tool anyone ever had.”
Collections like “The Presidential Papers” and “The Idols and the
Octopus” still make for exciting reading; as Pete Hamill said,
“Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Mailer’s first piece on
Kennedy, “went through journalism like a wave. Something changed.
Everyone said, ‘Uh, oh. Here’s another way to do it.’” It is, as
Lennon says, “A classic piece of reportage and a foundation stone
of the New Journalism.”
As for “The Armies of the Night,” a writer named
Sandy
Vogelgesang wrote, “Future historians must consult [it]
to
understand how and why the American Intellectual Left…
moved from dissent to resistance.” “Of a Fire on the Moon” is the
best nonfiction ever written on the space program. His books on
Muhammad Ali’s great fights
, “King of the Hill” and “The
Fight,”
are works that A.J. Liebling at his best couldn’t
lay a glove on; they will probably outlive the sport of
boxing.
Will these books appeal to future generations? That’s always a
tricky question; as Hemingway once snapped at an interviewer when
asked if he wrote for posterity, “Who the hell knows what posterity
is anyway?”
Mailer’s books aren’t history per se, but they go a long way toward
explaining the motivations and mind-sets of people who made
history. Compared to Mailer’s best work, the other avatar of the
so-called New Journalism, Tom Wolfe, seems facile and dated.
History doesn’t change, but what we want from it does. I think
those who want to know what caused the rumbles that
resulted in the eruptions of the 1960s and 1970s will always go
back to Mailer.
In the end, what does it matter whether a book such as “The
Executioner’s Song” is classified as fiction or nonfiction?
Himself, he called it a “true life novel,” probably to deflect
the inevitable enmity of Truman Capote, who thought that
with “In Cold Blood,”
he had invented a new genre, “the
nonfiction novel.” But Mailer did not need Capote’s torch to help
light his way.
If he fell short of greatness, it was
only by his own
standards. As Wilfrid Sheed put it, “Genius or nothing has always
been his proposition.” Any book that didn’t reflect genius was,
well, not likely to be Mailer that lasts. Sheed was probably
correct when he said that “In terms of artistic production, his
career is a disappointment.”
If his best books don’t quite constitute an artistic achievement,
they succeed as something else just as important, a genre no one
has yet been able to put a label to. The 1960s and 1970s were an
invigorating time to be alive, in large part because Norman Mailer
was there to help make it so. No event seemed complete, no vogue
validated until he had written about it. No other American writer,
with the possible exception of Mark Twain, so reflected and
effected his times. That ought to be good enough to ensure his work
to posterity. And if it doesn’t, what the hell is posterity
anyway?
Allen Barra cowrote
Marvin Miller's memoirs, A Whole Different Ballgame. His latest
book is Mickey and Willie: The Parallel Lives of Baseball's Golden
Age.
