A Century of Norman Mailer: A Man Who Became His Own Most Enduring Character
Norman Mailer, the lapsed titan of American letters and culturally pervasive provocateur who won the Pulitzer Prize for both Fiction and Nonfiction and remained a reliable bestseller throughout his career (he had one or more for each of seven consecutive decades), has, in recent years, faded from public consciousness. Or, rather, his credit as a writer has. When he is discussed, it is usually as a belligerent and bellicose nutjob, which he certainly sometimes was. As a man, Mailer has eclipsed his own books, ultimately becoming his own most enduring character.
In the manly myth he crafted, deftly conjured with words and punctuation from an unsound imagination, you see hues of Hemingway, alpha male machismo tinctured with a self-loathing that clashed with his ego. What has been lost in the rare occasions when he does come up is his actual writing. Few writers have put together an oeuvre as fascinating, as frustrating, as profoundly American as Mailer’s. He wrote with a singular brilliance that matured as he aged, yet his words remained imbued with lunatic passion. His best work throbs with fervid curiosity for whatever it is he’s writing about, especially himself, and, at its best, his prose bombinates with a shameless braggadocio that you don’t often find in bestsellers and award-winners anymore.
Mailer was part of a new breed of young, mid-century American scribes: virtuosic, libidinous, and all concerned, in their own ways, with masculinity and the indescribable definition of what it means to be a man in or from this country. These included the WASPy John Updike, as inconsistent a novelist as Mailer but an exceptional critic, and with a style unique in its poetic logorrhea; the post-Faulkner southerner William Styron, a better novelist, but far less prolific, and a master of traditional fiction rather than an innovator; the Jersey Jew Philip Roth, who never won that Nobel; and the Canadian-born, Chicago-made Saul Bellow, a more consistent and nuanced prose stylist and edified intellectual, but later a bigger bigot, who did win a Nobel. Mailer was a star from the beginning, when his acclaimed bestseller The Naked and the Dead, a story based on his tribulations in World War II, was published when he was just 25. While an impressive debut, it’s also hampered, at 700 pages, by bloat and juvenility, and in need of harder editing.
Mailer’s sophomore novel, Barbary Shore, a story about an aspiring writer in Brooklyn, bombed. It’s his most harmless effort, his most disposable. The failure hurt. After that, he displayed stylistic progress, deploying language that is simple and restrained compared to subsequent novels but which still insinuates the loopy, even manic syntax to come. He achieves a smart, stylish kind of casual prose, with his sardonic The Deer Park. This is also where we see a maturing of dialogue, no longer stilted and artificial. The novel spurred controversy with its depiction of the sordid festivities of the film world in the desert outside Los Angeles and did moderately well, spending 16 weeks on the bestseller list. ut it was met with unanimated enthusiasm from critics and readers, few of whom responded well to Mailer’s cynical perversions, the insalubrious endeavors of the affluent. The disappointment (relative to expectations) of this new novel crushed him further. He didn’t write long-form fiction again for ten years.
His most significant work during this lacuna betwixt novels was the essay “The White Negro,” a text so knotty with complications, so troublesome yet sincere, problematic and progressive and significant to 20th century American literature, I won’t even try to discuss it with just a paltry sentence or two. I’ll just leave you with this: William Gass once made the distinction between an “article,” which proposes answers, and an “essay,” which desires to be more and provokes the soul. Mailer wrote the latter.
Fiction was his favorite form and the one which, despite its lessened reputation, he wanted to be remembered for writing. His return after a decade’s worth of essays was the sick-o masterpiece An American Dream, his first great novel and a work of rampant, ribald amorality. Written in Dickens-like monthly installments before being edited and published in book form, it’s a deranged entertainment chronicling the iniquitous exploits of a man who personifies American success and masculine deviancy, the dark side of Mailer manifest in vivid, lurid prose. Mesmerized by the manipulative intonations of the moon that beams in the light-polluted New York night, he kills his wife, then promptly has unsettlingly graphic, almost sinister sex with the housekeeper in the next room. If you can stomach the intensity, the murder scene is a prolonged, anxiety-inducing set piece, the kind that Alfred Hitchcock wished he had been allowed to make.
The novel begins with a simple statement: “I met Jack Kennedy in November 1946.” This declarative plainness is reminiscent of how he begins The Deer Park and instigates the use of real people as characters which would define the rest of his career. But soon—by which I mean the next page—the inner monologue of Mailer’s narrator, a real red, white, and blue winner, bored with the quotidian routine of the successful, makes obvious Mailer’s significant progression of style and vision. Our storyteller makes prolific and proficient use of the word “intimation”, which is fitting. It marks the beginning of his move towards an intense commingling of deranged bravado and strange, even stupid but always compelling pseudo-philosophical ruminations, as well as his lifelong obsession with craven carnality. While the novel is a sordid melodrama, the most messed up thing about it is that Mailer was inspired by his own psycho stabbing of his wife, for which he suffered only minimal punishment.
He followed up An American Dream with the experimental Why Are We in Vietnam?, a fascinating and necessary failure, showing Mailer’s swelling ambition and dissatisfaction with the already-dated, traditional style of literature with which he earned his fame, as well as his desire to be taken seriously and transcend his wunderkind reputation. In doing so, he set himself apart from the other horny smart scribes of his generation. His puerile tendencies and the beckoning freedom to be vulgar (The Naked and the Dead uses silly substitutions for curses, like “fuggin’”) are sometimes aggravating here, but you must applaud the attempt at doing something audacious. Bellow never approached this height of artistic experimentation.
It was in 1968, at the age of 45, that, as a journalist who aspired to write serious literature, Mailer hit his peak. He finally shed the Hemingway influence (at least the iceberg theory prose influence; he retained, with commendable consistency, all of his manly proclivities), and etched his legacy into the firmament of American literature. From ephemera, he extricated eternity in his best book, The Armies of the Night, which, along with Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, is one of my two favorite books on American politics.
By navel-gazing via third-person faux-objectivity, Mailer makes himself the main subject of an ostensible report of the 1967 march on the Pentagon, and in doing so captures and analyzes (in that trenchant, lacerating way of his, now at its apogee) the tumult of the moment. He acknowledges the unconventional approach in the book: “To write an intimate history of an event which places its focus on a central figure who is not central to the event, is to inspire immediate questions about the competence of the historian. Or, indeed, his honorable motive.” His political pontifications are sometimes a little silly (though still a joy to read in Mailer’s voice), but he is more often astute and poetic: “Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History.”
His prose, both here and in that same year’s also-essential Miami and the Siege of Chicago, has blossomed into the bravura, long, winding sentences that seem to accumulate disparate ideas as they pour across the page, digressions that end up elucidating everything around our uncontrollable guide. He doesn’t make an argument; he just argues. Mailer comes up with some metaphors that are Melvillian in their unabashed, playful flaunting of dexterity, and frightening in the many inexplicable ways he finds to describe and dissect people, places, ideas, even himself. With his profoundly subjective, at times solipsistic nonfiction narratives, he turns himself into a conduit to understand the systems that govern this country and uses those systems to analyze himself.
Since the ’50s, with his fabled essays and eccentric reportage, Mailer set his gaze, his incisive armchair analysis, on a dizzyingly eclectic panoply of subjects. His prose style evolved over time, becoming more diverse in technique, though always remaining intensely his own. Consider his self-selected opus, Ancient Evenings, from 1983, a supernatural, mythical, spiritual story about ancient Egyptians with an odious air eddying about. It’s violent and rife with incest. He researched it exhaustively and wrote for a decade. He writes in a voice of baroque verbosity, whose self-importance is only occasionally annoying, and which often reaches hysterical heights. The opening two-page prologue makes good on Mailer’s experimental flirtations in the ’60s, an intensely poetic, Dante-y passage. The rest of the novel isn’t as poetic, but rather ambitious literary, meaning that it can only exist as literature. It’s insane, and insanely detailed, from the VistaVision images to the articulation of carnal scents, the fetid air of bodies burning in the Egyptian sun, bodies burning with lust. Anthony Burgess, another sex-crazed linguist, loved it. The research involved is staggering.
Now compare that to the unadorned sparsity of the Pulitzer-winning “novel” The Executioner’s Song, what Mailer called a “true-life novel” about an unremarkable murderer sentenced to die in Utah, after the 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty. One of the great 20th-century prose stylists wrote what might be the great styleless book, with prose so plain it makes Raymond Carver look purple. Ontology in simplicity—it just makes sense.. The profundity stems from the incisive precision, every tiny paragraph ending with a perfect, matter-of-fact observation that takes on a particular lyricism. It is the only Mailer book in which Mailer is not the main subject, a book that makes no pontifications or harrangues, but extrapolates through the reproduction of quotes, by unintrusive exposition, and the simple syntax of midwestern American recollections.
Everyone in Gary’s world, even if only in the periphery, is given an internal life while Gary remains mysterious. You find yourself wondering if he’s a psycho, or crazy, or stupid. (Everyone seems to think he’s brilliant, and as far as conmen and manipulators go, he is, in that sense, quite bright.) If Ancient Evenings is an epic work born from countless hours entombed in libraries, pouring over dusty books with brittle pages, then The Executioner’s Song is a work rooted in oral storytelling and the meaningfulness of honest exposition. Both represent a writer at the apogee of his powers.
Writing about Mailer’s triumph in what she calls tape recorder literature with the Pulitzer-winning true-life novel, the unparalleled Elizabeth Hardwick said: “The miserable criminal is not a scandal; he is too lowly for that. Instead, he seems to engage the sophisticated mind by his overwhelming thereness—that alone—a thereness that is itself a sufficiency. The sheer interest of such a man. This is what Norman Mailer takes to be the beginning and the end when he offers a hugeness of detail about the killer Gary Gilmore, and withdraws himself from it as quite unnecessary to the man’s totemic sufficiency.”
Mailer could write about anything compellingly and uniquely. Building off the opening of An American Dream, he used real people, not often depicted flatteringly, as a literary device in both his nonfiction and novels. He penned maybe the definitive book on boxing with The Fight. He wrote about Apollo 11, and a controversial, bizarre novel about Marilyn Monroe (after a bizarre “biography”) that, while perhaps morally icky, is still an accomplished, distressingly gripping text Near the end of his life, he wrote a novel of Jesus and, for his final work, a story of Hitler’s youth. His writing thrums with testosterone, the work of a man who loved his country enough to exhume its skeletons and use his skills to ghoulishly animate them. “Form is the physical equivalent of memory,” he writes in Cannibals and Christians. Harold Bloom opined that Mailer is one of the greatest American writers to never write a great novel. And, while Mailer’s nonfiction is his eternal legacy, I would rebut Bloom with An American Dream, Ancient Evenings, and the cinderblock history of the CIA, Harlot’s Ghost. (The Executioner’s Song is, again, not really a novel, but if you want to call it that, it could arguably be his best, most mature.) The redoubtable John Leonard wrote, after the publication of Mailer’s behemoth CIA tome: “When his battery’s charged, Mailer windmills from one paragraph to the next—baroque, anal, Talmudic, olfactory, portentous, loopy, coy, Egyptian; down and dirty in the cancer, the aspirin or the plastic; shooting moons on sheer vapor; blitzed by paranoia and retreating for a screen pass, as if bitten in the pineal gland by a deranged Swinburne, with metaphors so meaning-moistened that they stick to our thumbs, with ‘intellections’ (as he once put it) slapped on ‘like adhesive plasters.’”
Harlot’s Ghost is Mailer’s longest novel and the one that most satisfyingly conjures a cast of fictitious characters that feel human. Even his “real” characters from throughout his career, like Monroe and Hitler, Kennedy and Nixon, are self-consciously fabricated, existing only to serve Mailer’s writerly obsessions. The characters, real and imagined, are not lovable, of course, but, in their flaws and passions, seem to breathe and bleed. The prose is his most varied (there are multiple points-of-view, lenses peering through lenses), though some sections really drag. (It’s about 200 pages too long.) The sentences have some of the structural simplicity he had wanted early on, but the word choice, the similes, and trenchant wit are more mature, eclectic, and with the fewest of his irksome habits. And, of course, it is, like all of his best works, deeply, achingly American.
Greg Cwik is from Long Island. He has written for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Reverse Shot, Mubi Notebook, The Brooklyn Rail, The AV Club, The Village Voice, Lit Hub, and elsewhere.