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NORMAN MAILER |
 NORMAN MAILER ...dead at 84 |
Mailer will be remembered
for his life, not his books
of TheColumnists.com
Norman Mailer couldn't
help but be noticed as he raged and roared through a life more
noted for its vibrant colors than for its genuine contributions.
For awhile he seemed destined to be one of America's greatest
literary lions, but then he turned rogue and ended up in a cage
of his own making, just another circus performer left behind
as the wagons rolled out of town.
Mailer, who died Nov. 10 of kidney failure at age 84, was a great
writer, make no mistake about it. Though he wrote only one great
novel--his first one, "The Naked and the Dead,"
published way back in 1948--he also wrote great piles of non-fiction
that entertained millions and seldom was boring.
He was part of that great flood of new writing talents that emerged from the storm clouds after World War II. Mailer cast himself in the mold of Ernest Hemingway, a bold, larger-than-life adventurer whose life was designed to be even more exciting than his fiction. He kicked sand in the face of his wimpier contemporaries like Gore Vidal and Truman Capote. He swaggered through life while other promising young wirters like John Updike, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Irwin Shaw and J.D. Salinger seemed to be either tip-toeing or wearing bedroom slippers.
After the failure of his second book "Barbary Shore" (1951), a formless minor novel, and his third, "The Deer Park" (1955), a much-less-than-fascinating attack on Hollywood filmakers, Mailer turned to shorter forms of what might be called journalism today because they were published in periodicals like The Village Voice, which he helped found. But they were really just essays that read like personal opinioin columns. Many of these were collected in "Advertisements for Myself" (1959), a bizarre anthology of his work that pointed to what would be his future as a professional loudmouth. In one of the essays, he attacked virtually all his contemporary fellow authors, chewing them up and spitting them out. His ego swelled up out of that book to titanic dimensions.
It soon became clear that Mailer was a writer for hire who would tackle any job if the price was right. Still, he was a writer of great skill and once he decided to concentrate on non-fiction "novels" patterned after Capote's "In Cold Blood," he seemed to have found his metier. Two that I thought were masterful were "The Executioner's Song" (1979), his account of the life and times of criminal Gary Gilmore, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, and "The Fight," his account of the weird "rumble in the jungle" between heavyweight boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. He won an earlier Pulitzer for "Armies of the Night," his book on the 1968 peace march on the Pentagon by Vietnam war protestors. Most of these books were augmented versions of magazine pieces he had written on assignment.
His so-called "comeback" novel--"An American Dream" (1965)--was nothing of the kind. It pretty well established that Mailer was no longer a novelist of the first rank. Though he wrote others, they were not very impressive.
Though "The Naked and the Dead" was an absorbing story based on his war experiences fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific during World War II, he never again wrote anything quite so exciting and original in fiction. But that one novel caused him to be acclaimed as the new Hemingway when he emerged on the literary scene in the late 1940s.
I suspect Mailer believed all the hype and began to fashion a Hemingwayesque life for himself. He helled around quite openly and became well-known as a pugnacious kind of guy who liked to call people names and, if necessary, engage them in fights. I remember his TV debates with Gore Vidal, a witty and erudite gay writer who was the antithesis of Mailer. They were good television, if you like to see two grown men calling each other names for an hour or so. I always had the impression Mailer would rather have just thumped Vidal on the chest and challenged him to a fight than debate him on television.
Married six times, Mailer nearly ended his career when he stabbed his second wife at a drunken party. He attacked leaders of the women's movement and seemed determined to establish himself as America's No. 1 male chauvinist. He decided to become a movie director and disgraced himself by producing six films that challenged film critics to find new synonyms for "mediocre."
Will Mailer be remembered in another 50 years? I suppose so if "The Naked and the Dead" is still being read then. If someone could rake through all his non-fiction works and get rid of the truly awful stuff, the good ones that are left ought to keep his reputation as a fine writer afloat.
More likely, though, he will be remembered more for the crazy life he led than for his books. Like Henry Miller, whose best books were just accounts of his own sex life, both real and imagined. And like Hemingway, whose fascination with bullfighting, hunting on safari in Africa and big game fishing in the Caribbean made him a celebrity of much greater stature than his few simple novels of quality would have done. Mailer was a character and I'm afraid that will be his legacy.
©2007 by Ron Miller. This column first posted Nov. 12, 2007.
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