Norman Mailer: 1923-2007
by Matt Hanson

Norman Mailer, in many ways a character of his own creation, is dead. The news has traveled widely. Even those who aren't lit geeks or who weren't fans seemed to have noticed and registered the passing. It's enough to make one question whether the whining laments of those who claim that "nobody reads anymore" — or that the novel is dead — know what the fuck they're talking about.

This is the end of a fascinating career, the subtle but distinct passing of an icon. It came about in a very 20th Century American fashion, by being a million things at once. Mailer kept working and working, setting higher goals for himself than even he knew it was possible to reach. He was multifaceted as hell. He was consistently and honestly a novelist, journalist, social critic, screenwriter, film director, political analyst, provocateur, raconteur, lightning rod, theologian, poet, and visionary radical, but none the less so a writer. Part of what gets missed by reductive criticism is the fact that, like America, Mailer was always in a state of Becoming. Craving vitality — that American drug par excellence — he morphed relentlessly into newer and more complex forms as the books and decades passed. The fallout from this psychic strain could be both glorious and obnoxious, at best a fusion of the two. This is especially interesting, of course, when yanked from gestation in the private sphere and displayed loudly, publicly, for all to see. He was once pulled from a press conference for the Ali-Frasier fight because he wouldn't stop ranting that psychic winds were at work. He once ran for mayor of New York, promising jousting matches in Central Park and one day a week without electricity (he finished fourth, before being kicked out). Advertisements For Myself wasn't just a title, it was a style and a mode of defiance. It was all about the essentially personal, the individual — sex, death, Time, karma, Capital, Self. He lived for a long time out loud, naked, willing to embarrass himself if it brought new perceptions, and there can hardly be anything more American than that.

Part of the nobility and the failure of Mailer's work is tied to this very notion. He wanted to make Literature matter. Mailer sought decade after decade, fearlessly and foolishly, for that transcendent status of a truly national writer, the kind that survive, thrive and become a permanent color in the fabric of a nation. He wanted, as an American author, to be what Tolstoy is to Russia or Hugo is to France or James Joyce is to Ireland. He wanted to be a new textual super daddy and would not deny himself any experience to try and reach such Promethean heights. Mailer didn't. He shot extremely high and in missing his mark, he went higher than many would have dared. Honorably he kept fighting forward — towards Being, towards America. Luckily, he achieved enough in art throughout his cavalcade of searing perceptions and fighting words to earn himself the title of major American novelist. But not, sadly, The Great American Novelist.

The problem was this: quantity affects quality, a quote of Engels he truly understood. Six alimonies and nine children will take quite a bit of the moxie out of a professional writer's stamina. Mighty penman he was, but with a fatal flaw: He just had to narrate himself at work. Most of his bad writing withered under the looming pitfall of intense self-consciousness. Mailer succeeded most when he stood back, emptied himself, and let the words on the page do the talking. The Armies Of The Night puts the self on display, sure, and goes overboard at times in trying to achieve a voice from the streets, but it survives, and will survive, because his eye was transparent, sensitive, and took in everything.

The reader witnesses the 1967 march on the Pentagon and in doing so participates in what certainly seems to be a cataclysmic reckoning in the bowels of the nation in the crux of a bloody, billowing year. This is the hidden bloodstream of postmodern writing, a deeply poetic dialectic often neglected but always potent if handled with genius. The reader interacts with the character of Mailer and the historical context he inhabits as both artifice and experience, watching him dance along the wires of his own subjective experience and objective analysis. It's worth reading just for the scene where he's thrown into a makeshift jail with Noam Chomsky and a Neo-Nazi for company.

The same goes for The Executioner's Song, a weighty and solemn tome that details the death of the real life Gary Gilmore, willingly sentenced to death by firing squad. Mailer is magisterial. He doesn't sermonize, he doesn't demonize, he doesn't mope. He takes the reader firmly by the arm and leads him through the Utah wastelands of mountain and stone, introducing him to the marginal and underreported lives taking shape. Over a thousand pages describe one sorrowful life spent treading water above and below the tide's rim, struggling to stay alive and free as the structures of his world, past, and psychic pain adamantly pull him under. This was his second Pulitzer, ten years after his first.

Spiritual preoccupations are nothing new for Americans or American writers, but Mailer has his own way of doing business with the ineffable. Over the years he delved into juvenile Beat sociologies (The White Negro being a fine example), the Freudian psychodrama of violence and crime (An American Dream still sears and riffs like few other novels before or after it), the mysteries of Karma — endless stoned interviews that come back to the central theme of justice as played out by reincarnation. For Mailer, man is in contest with God equally as well as the Devil, and both divinities clash over what man makes of his own free will. Our actions are just as tied into the fates of the Gods as they are to our earthly existence. God is a creative being, and his creation is not entirely of his own control. Jesus is as frightened of his own Being's possibilities as Hitler. We challenge the terms of our existence, mass man and the corporate state, political malfeasance and sexual rapture in order to fight the calcification of what might be noble or wicked in our very bones. It's stimulating stuff, developed over endless brooding and experiment. When his prose hit the mark — in fiction as in nonfiction! — he was fabulous:

Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground: There has been the history of politics, which is concrete, factual, practical, and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences... and there is the subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely, and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.

This is a crucial part of Mailer's saga. Endless tantrums and drunken escapades were his way of trying to test the limits of reality. It was a way for him to risk, and to grow in the act or fail and regroup as a man and as a writer. Needless to say, he was a prick much of the time. He drunkenly stabbed his second wife in the arm with a knife after a party. Headbutting Gore Vidal wasn't the wisest of options, as he discovered after haranguing the audience and wasting an opportunity to defend himself after Vidal had cheaply compared him to Charles Manson. (For what it's worth, decades passed and the two men eventually made up and offered gestures of respect and appreciation). Throughout the feminist revival of the seventies, he kept braying fairly misogynistic crap long after he'd made whatever point he'd had in mind. He didn't understand women well enough to accurately criticize them, considering that he loved them so much. In the early eighties he wrangled to get the convict Jack Henry Abbot released from prison, only to see him lose whatever sanity he'd had one night and stab a waiter to death in a restaurant. To his credit, Mailer would eventually see the error of his ways and repent sincerely for his absurd attempts at enacting the sort of radicalism he could never quite accomplish outside of his prose.

Surprisingly, Mailer aged well. He had always worked, he had seen the value and — his word — the blessing of work and done more of this than almost anybody. His aphorisms and his interviews were constantly enlightening and never lost their verve. Staying interesting seems more and more diffcult to accomplish for many of us, particularly as the years wear on, and Mailer succeeded in the rare feat of aging well and staying in the game. The odd Victorianness of his prose, the recurring smoothness of his almost gentlemanly phrasing, evolved itself into the visionary flight of his fiction and made him wise and humble and funny. One of the most poignant things he ever wrote, from his extraordinarily rich and engaging memoir The Spooky Art was, characteristically, a quote of himself. "I wanted to forge a revolution in the consciousness of my times. I sure failed, didn't I?" This is the quiet good humor of a mellowed prizefighter knowing that every fight — even the biggest, forged in the thickest adrenaline — cannot be won. With this, he achieved an apotheosis. Neither beast nor God, he could not satisfy the hunger he'd kept burning for his ideal. Knowing this, he was able to grasp in a humble way what he would call the time of his time, and we are lucky to have had so much of its essence.

— Matt Hanson (junglegroove@gmail.com)