Despite my ignorance of most of Norman Mailer’s writing and my muted distaste for his caricature of a public (and evidently private) persona, I was saddened to learn today (via Ruchira) of his passing. It signifies more than a loss of an individual writer of great merit, but of a type of literary author, albeit a mythical type. His life and his writing were intertwined in ways most writers’ are not, despite their devotion to their craft. At least, that’s how he chose to market his books: as embodiments not just of his creative energies, but of nearly all of his energies. As Louis Menand put it in yesterday’s post to the New Yorker, "Beginning with his comeback book, Advertisements for Myself, in 1959, he bled his life and his personality into his writing."
I read only the Oswald book and Harlot’s Ghost, not much of a sample of Mailer’s entire output, although the latter weighed in at 1300 pages. Menand mentions that Mailer thought it was one of his two favorites of his own books, "great literary pyramids that no one visits any longer." The other favorite was Ancient Evenings, which remains somewhere on my list of books eventually to get around to reading. Christopher Hitchens, whose self-serving reminiscences appeared today on Slate, deems Harlot’s Ghost Mailer’s masterpiece. So perhaps my sample is as good as two of his books’ll get you.
If in fact, as Mailer lamented, few visit Harlot’s Ghost any longer, then that too is a pity. I recall consuming it with uncharacteristic efficiency. I cringed at some of Mailer’s periods, but mostly reveled in his celebration of gin and mockery of the CIA, and enjoyed his depictions of personal and professional self-deception. To this day, I have recommended it when the opportunity arose. It is some consolation that now a few more readers will enlist.
Accidental Blogger 
10 responses to “Tough Guys Don’t Blog (Dean)”
I share Dean’s sadness. Mailer was one of the few major American authors who balanced his writing with political engagement in a way that didn’t cheapen either endeavor.
While I certainly can’t claim to have read everything he wrote, some of his books meant a lot to me. In particular, Armies of the Night, which is a brilliant journalistic account of the utopian March on the Pentagon, complete with an account of the beatings. If I remember correctly, Norman gets arrested and is placed in a paddy wagon with a neo-Nazi. Funny stuff! This book also has the advantage of being very readable and reasonable in size.
Unwieldy but also brilliant is The Executioner’s Song, about a con named Gary Gilmore who tries and fails to re-adjust to society after his release, committing a couple of senseless murders in a Mormon area of rural Utah. It’s told in a flat, third-person omniscient point of view, and neither romanticizes Gilmore nor demonizes him.
Lastly, I’ll always remember the later Mailer as one of the few establishment figures willing to speak out bravely and articulately against Bush’s folly in Iraq. While most “serious” pundits on television and in the major American papers were toeing the pro-war line, and heaping abuse on those of us who recognized the self-destructive foolishness of unilaterally invading an Arab country that had nothing to do with 9/11, Mailer went out on Charlie Rose and pointed out how toppling Saddam would create more problems than it would solve. You can see the man here, articulately making the case for us doves. Would that our country would have listened to him: http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2003/01/29/2/an-interview-with-norman-mailer
Also on the subject of Iraq, he published a piece in the NYRB arguing that the Administration invaded partially to give the American people a misplaced sense of revenge for 9/11, to distract from the rising unemployment from the dotcom bust, and also because in the past 30 years right-wing white American males had had their masculinity insulted by the economic and symbolic successes of feminism and the prevalence of African-Americans in the major spectator sports, and wanted to take out their frustration on something.
The essay is really classic Mailer in that it’s rambling and not carefully argued, yet nevertheless powerful in its willingness to bring up the ugly “realist” diffidence of the United States to Saddam’s mass killings in the 70s and 80s, and speak truth to power in a way that wimpy careerist journalists rarely do: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16470
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A terse and timely post on Norman Mailer – nice title too. I myself didn’t feel up to commenting on him having read only The Naked and The Dead in my twenties, a few essays, commentaries and third party gossip. But I get the idea of the man. As I said, I would have loved to have been a witness to the fisticuff between him and Gore Vidal; the latter I know is the more lethal with his tongue.
Andrew, I did see the Charlie Rose interview on Iraq. Vidal too was withering about Bush-Cheney’s misadventure from the very start. I cheered both literary veterans for their brave and unequivocal opposition to what many of us (a pitiful and bullied minority in 2003) had recognized as a criminal enterprise from day one.
The Hitchens piece which Dean calls “self serving” in the post and “sour” in his e-mail, is typical. (Except for George Orwell and P.G. Wodehouse, has any other writer been the beneficiary of C.H.’s unqualified admiration?) In this case, the last few lines speak volumes .
Instead, he frittered away a good part of the last two decades in half-baked essays and fictions on liberation theology—of all sorry things—and callow stuff on George Bush as the macho man gone wrong. Where the hell, I always wanted to ask Mailer, was the cultural risk in that?
Let me ignore the liberation theology of which I know nothing; in 2003, when most of America and an alarming chunk of its intelligentsia (Hitchens being one of the loudest) were cheering Bush as the macho man of the moment, Mailer’s outspoken critique was not only a cultural risk but a political one as well. Did Hitchens slip that in to cover up his own ignominy re: Iraq?
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There’s a more insightful review of Mailer in Slate today by Jim Lewis. It’s certainly a far less insufferable review, notwithstanding it’s lack of unqualified admiration. I have to admit to deriving a bit of schaddenfreude from this description by Lewis, which must have Mailer rolling in his grave:
“Some years ago, paraphrasing Auden on Rilke, I described Mailer as the greatest lesbian writer since Gertrude Stein. It’s a judgment I stand by, with cheerful regards to all parties concerned. Because he wasn’t macho, after all, though that’s what he was usually accused of: He was butch.”
That seems to me not only funny, but also right, in the same sense that Dolly Parton has always struck me less as hyper-feminine than as a drag queen. But whereas that quality in Dolly has always endeared her to me (as well as to a large following of gay men), the performative yang to that yin always seriously turned me off: some combination of the hateful content of the performance and of the audience to which it played (other than Andrew, of course), I guess. I do appreciate the loss of the character, Norman Mailer, insofar as I prefer oversized and repellant personalities to those who live “without glory or infamy,” whom I always admired Dante for rejecting from both heaven and hell (Inferno Canto III).
In favor of Mailer as an author, Executioner’s Song engaged and stayed with me as only a small category of books have (I consider it one of my great, immoral acts still waiting to be rectified that I liked the book, which I’d taken out of the public library, so much, that I kept it past its due date rather than return it unfinished, then accidentally moved with it…three times. That was a decade ago, and I’ve never done that before or since; I still mean to return the book, someday). Lewis, like Hitchens and like Dean, considers Harlot’s Ghost Mailer’s masterpiece. I’m now inspired to read it, though perhaps I’ll purchase it rather than create more problems for myself at the library.
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Norman Mailer
Oh, fuck, not Norman Mailer… Yes, Norman Mailer. When I was twelve, I fell in love with The Executioner’s Song when I stumbled on a copy in my parents’ basement. They’d both put it aside because they thought, probably rightly,
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Alright, here is a Norman Mailer brawl on record. Came across this video that some one linked to at another blog.
Rip Torn (the other guy in the video) who hit Mailer first, got part of an ear bitten off I think. Given the pastoral setting, Mailer barefoot and barebodied in the grass and the unfortunate name of his victim, in hindsight that was unadulterated tragicomedy.
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Now, just a minute there, Anna! Them’s fightin’ words! Dolly Parton is all woman, not an ounce less (nor more). To boot, she’s a fine singer and songwriter, if a bit over the top with the C&W glitz from time to time.
As for the Lewis quote re: Mailer, I get a kick out of it, mostly because it’s funny, where Hitchens with his remark about Mailer’s alleged “obsession with sodomy” is just lurid and sourpuss. Or put it this way: I don’t see why Mailer should be picked on in this regard. Professional male athletics, for example, seem to me to be largely about the “butch,” less so the “macho” (assuming there’s a significant difference).
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Hey Dean, don’t you think you should be equally outraged by Anna “accidentally” decamping with a library book as with her casting doubts on Dolly Parton’s sex appeal?
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Outraged? No. When you’ve been at it as long as I have, you’ve seen it all. (You know, for example, there’s the patron who tries to negotiate the theft in advance by seeking an accounting of all of the fees she’ll incur in the event the book is “lost.”) Besides, there’s a bit of the prodigal library patron about Anna’s “I still mean to return the book, someday.” She will be welcomed back into the fold and will bask in the warm embrace of everlasting librarianly loving-kindness for having corrected her waywardness.
Just don’t fuck with Dolly Parton.
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Wait, when did I insult Dolly? C’mon now, Dean, you don’t think Dolly’s in on the “fake’s more real than real” humor of her unapologetic fabulousness, as well as its genuine appeal? When I saw her perform in D.C. in 2002 during her Halo and Horns concert tour, the audience was about equal thirds smalltown folks in for the weekend from Appalachia, alt-country hipsters, and adoring gay men. Each (admittedly, cartoonishly divided) segment of the audience may have sought something a little different from her, but the brass balls and rhinestone flash were, I suspect, a common thread of her appeal: her talent as a performer in addition to her talent as a singer, like Mailer’s talent as a performer in addition to his talent as a writer. My strong sense was that Dolly played knowingly for everyone– we were all welcome, with a wink, in the Dolly tent.
Like my love of Dolly, my remorse over the Executioner’s Song is, in fact, sincere. For ten years, I’ve felt sick with guilt whenever I pass the NYPL. I’m genuinely comforted to know that the host of library angels patiently await my return. That “prodigal child” fable has been my meal ticket on quite a number of occasions. Thank you, Jesus. I am also grateful that the book’s not edible, which raises the odds of my being able to make good on my resolution to make amends.
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I suppose it’s fitting in some orthogonal way that a tribute of sorts to the late Norman Mailer has morphed into an exegesis of the cultural phenomenon of Dolly Parton. Sometime before she became a super-duper celebrity, appearing regularly on talk and variety shows and the like, Ms. Parton was not at all particularly interested in the postmodern aspect of her career. Neither, I suspect, were two thirds of the cartoon characters in the audience with whom Anna recently enjoyed the show. My guess is that most Appalachians and alt-country hipsters fail to register the ironies of performativity as such. Adoring gay men are likely another story, but then I may very well be stereotyping across these three populations. My perception is skewed by a number of readings in a law and sexuality seminar a few years ago. But if alt-country was spawned in part by the likes of The Breeders or The Knitters, I am confident about my charge. The Knitters, in particular, are an iteration of the already humorless X, and proof that even X ultimately found X insufferable. My point is that Dolly’s singing is often a matter of real being more real than fake, i.e., pretty darn good.
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