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.
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