THE AUTHOR
Throughout history, few authors have influenced a nation's fabric as much as Norman Mailer. During the turbulent Sixties, he developed a form of journalism combining actual events such as those in autobiographical and political commentary with the rich tableau of descriptive words endemic to the novel. Mailer's works aroused controversy because of their stylish nonconformity and his contentious views of American life. Poet Robert Lowell praised him as "the best journalist in America," although he was less lavish when evaluating the author's fiction.
Born of immigrant Jewish parents in New Jersey on January 31, 1923, Mailer moved with his parents to Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in a tough neighborhood where he quickly learned to fend for himself.
At the age of nine, the youngster wrote a 250-page story, Invasion from Mars, the first indication of his budding literary prowess. Graduated from Boys High School in 1939, he studied aeronautical engineering at Harvard University from 1939-1943 and received his B.S. degree.
While at Harvard, Mailer took several elective courses in literature and worked on the university's literary journal, The Harvard Advocate. When the story, "The Greatest Thing in the World," was selected as the winner of Story's annual contest for college students, Mailer began toying with the idea of turning his avocation into an occupation.
In 1944, Mailer married his first wife, Beatrice "Bea" Silverman, shortly before he was inducted into the U.S. Army. While he was in training as an artilleryman, L. B. Fischer published his novella "A Calculus at Heaven" in the anthology Cross-Section: A Collection of New American Writing.
During the war, Mailer served as a gunnery sergeant. He was disappointed when he wasn't chosen to be among the first wave of invasion troops in Europe and was sent, instead, to the South Pacific. There, he served in Japan and in Leyte, Luzon, where he became an astute observer of the fighting. In his letters to his wife, he described various battles so vividly that she claimed she could “practically hear the shellfire.”
Mailer was discharged from the service in 1946. Taking advantage of the G. I. Bill, he enrolled in several classes at the Sorbonne after completing work on a manuscript entitled The Naked and the Dead. The book was published in 1948 when Mailer was twenty-five. It’s triumphant release made him an overnight international celebrity. "Its success rips away my former identity," Mailer said about the publishing phenomenon. The Naked and The Dead drew upon the author's combat experiences in the Philippines and quickly became the definitive literary novel of the era.
"Nobody could sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach ... All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead."
For three years, Mailer rode the crest of popularity. But his next novel, Barbary Shore (1951), flopped, and critics began spreading the rumor that Mailer had been simply a flash-in-the-pan, a one-book wonder who had failed to live up to his promise as a writer. Barbary Shore, set in a Brooklyn boarding house, depicts the conflict between a former radical and a federal agent. Time Magazine called it "paceless, tasteless, and graceless."
Distraught over the bad reviews and his recent divorce from Bea, Mailer took a break from his screenwriting job in Hollywood and moved to New York's Greenwich Village where he met and married artist Adele Morales while working on his third book, The Deer Park, about the corruption of values in Hollywood. In the thinly veiled story, Mailer depicts his tumultuous relationship with his new wife. Several publishers refused it outright, and Mailer's depression grew worse. He spent his days listening to jazz and nights smoking marijuana and drinking. When the book was finally published, it, too, was panned.
Chaos ruled the next few years of Mailer's life. The author grew increasingly violent and less productive. The low point came in 1960 when he stabbed his wife "with a dirty three-inch penknife" after an all-night Manhattan party. He was given a suspended sentence after she refused to press charges.
With Advertisements for Myself (1959), Mailer wrote one of the most startling self-confessional books ever published. It was the story of his ambitions and fears, an examination of the violence, hysteria, crimes, and confusion in American society as portrayed through the fashionable framework of existentialism. He wrote, "Like many another vain, empty and bullying body of our time, I have been running for President these last ten years in the privacy of my mind ... The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time."
In 1962, the year his divorce from second wife Adele was finalized, Mailer married Lady Jeanne Campbell. It was a short-lived affair that produced one daughter, Kate. The following year, Mailer and his third wife divorced, and he quickly married Beverly Bentley. That union brought about two sons, Michael Burks and Stephen MacLeod.
By the mid-1960s, Mailer had grown increasingly concerned about the state of American politics. He co-founded and named the Village Voice, one of the earliest underground American newspapers, as an alternative sounding board to conservative commentary. He wrote a column ("Big Bite") for Esquire (1962-63) and Commentary (1962-63) and served as a member of the executive board (1968-73) and president of P.E.N. American Center (1984-86). In 1969, he ran unsuccessfully as an independent candidate for the office of mayor of New York City.
With The Presidential Papers (1963), Mailer became one of the most vigorous and influential essayists in America. In The Armies of the Night (1968), he used fiction techniques to study current events. The work won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. In the same vein, he wrote Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968) about the convention-day riots. He followed that up with Of a Fire on the Moon (1970). In Cannibals and Christians (1966), he condemned American writers for not being able to produce works that "clarify a nation's vision of itself."
Mailer began writing about the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions in 1960. He placed himself at the center of American political and cultural life by reporting his observations on the civil rights movement, political assassinations, and other social upheavals. He published numerous essays in popular and men's magazines, including Esquire and Playboy, as well as in more intellectual journals, such as Dissent, Commentary, and the New York Review of Books.
In 1965, a decade after The Deer Park, the author returned to the novel with An American Dream, defining his obsessions more clearly than any other work of its time. In his profile of Mailer for The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors, A. O. Scott observed: “Mailer's worst novel--the novel whose place in his canon is therefore absolutely central--is An American Dream. All of his characteristic preoccupations--Manichean theology, political power, nostalgie de la boue, anal sex, and the subterranean connections between them--are on display, knit together in a plot that veers from the incredible to the incomprehensible. Yet the book's chaos seems now to be a vivid and indelible reflection of the disorder of its time and place. It is a work of sublime bravery.”
In 1969, Mailer and his fourth wife separated. With the publication of The Prisoner of Sex in 1971, the author found himself the controversial center of the conversation again. By proposing that gender might determine the way a person perceives and orders reality, he painted himself as the quintessential male chauvinist pig, and author Kate Millett proclaimed him so in her book, Sexual Politics. Mailer went on to write the highly successful true-life novel, The Executioner's Song (1979), a wandering yet richly detailed tableau exploring the mind of career criminal and convicted killer Gary Gilmore.
Writing about the book for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, James R. Frakes noted, “There's no such thing as a minor figure in this panoramic study of crime and punishment, madness and greed, sex and religiosity, karma and universal guilt. All turn out to be complex, quivering human beings because of Mailer's compassion, a quality rarely attributed to this writer. The author calls it ‘A True-Life Novel.’ I call it a masterwork.”
Mailer followed that up with The Fight (1975), a coolly received account of the legendary bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.
When Italian director Sergio Leone started to work on his gangster film, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), he asked Mailer to help with the screenplay. The film was based on the 1953 novel The Hoods by Harry Grey. Mailer barricaded himself in a Rome hotel room with several bottles of whisky and spent three weeks penning the script. "We could hear him singing, cursing and shouting for ice cubes from about ten blocks away!" Leone said later. Grey, a former Sing-Sing prisoner, met the author in New York and was not happy with his adaptation of the book. Leone agreed: "Mailer, at least to my eyes, the eyes of an old fan, is not a writer for the cinema."
In 1980, when his divorce from his fourth wife, Beverly, was finalized, Mailer married a fifth time. As short-lived as the author's third marriage to Lady Jeanne Campbell had been, this marriage to Carol Stevens--which also produced a daughter, Maggie Alexander--ended in divorce after less than a year. That year, Mailer--an unabashed lover of women and the mystique that surrounds them--published a giant cloth-bound fictional picture biography of Marilyn Monroe. The book is a series of thinly framed interviews with the screen star, written in what purports to be Monroe's own voice. Mailer was attacked on all sides for his presumptuousness.
Late in 1980, Mailer married for the sixth and final time to Norris Church. This most enduring of his relationships with women produced one son, John Buffalo. The author’s ambitious novel, Ancient Evenings, released in 1983, was set in ancient Egypt (1290-1100 BC). Mailer had worked on it for eleven years. It was characterized by Anthony Burgess as "one of the great works of contemporary mythopoesis ... Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existence in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is."
By the mid-1980s, Mailer had become disenchanted with the state of American politics. He traveled to the Soviet Union, which he realized was not "the evil empire" that Americans had been taught but, instead, a "poor, third-world country."
With Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984), a thriller, Mailer returned to the movie business. He wrote the screenplay and directed the film. The protagonist, Tim Madden, is an unsuccessful writer addicted to bourbon and women. He awakens with a hangover. He remembers practically nothing of the night before finding the severed head of a blonde in the nearby woods. "Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought. Waking from nightmares and sleeping in terror, I climbed at last onto one conclusion. Assuming I was no part of this deed--and how could I be certain of that?--I still had to ask: Who was?"
In 1992, Mailer published Harlot's Ghost, a 1,300-page chronicle of the C.I.A. that the author considered one of his best works. While researching it, he discovered previously unknown Russian documents that led to Oswald's Tale (1995), the exhaustive biography of Lee Harvey Oswald. Two years later, he wrote The Gospel According to the Son, retelling the story of Jesus. The book continued his series of portraits of well- known figures, from Monroe and Gary Gilmore to Oswald and Pablo Picasso. In 1998, his The Time of Our Time, an anthology of the author's fiction and nonfiction writings, led reviewer Michiko Kakutani to comment, "Yet what this volume makes clear, if it were not already quite apparent, is that Mr. Mailer's strength lies in non-fiction, not in fiction."
Mailer wrote in The New York Times Review of Books in 1998, "It is not routine to bring off a long novel when your ambition is more than major, when you will settle for nothing less than an attempt to write a great novel, and when you are into your sixties and not all that well."
Lauded as one of the greatest authors of all time and chided as an opportunistic hack, Mailer spent a lifetime honing a career that was nothing if not controversial. Some critics wonder whether or not his works could ever be fairly and objectively judged in light of the celebrity status of the man. Whether hobnobbing with stars or chastising politicians, he was never more than a written word or two away from international notoriety. From his first book to his last, flamboyance was something the world could count on from Norman Mailer. It is what kept the author going.
In 2003, Mailer celebrated his eightieth birthday in New York with the publication of The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing, in which the author collects a career's worth of observations on both the mundane realities and the abiding mysteries of his craft. In 2005, he received the National Book Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Norman Mailer died of acute renal failure on November 10, 2007, a month after undergoing lung surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.
THE ETHICIST
A tough, gruff, rough-around-the-edges scrapper born into one of the most violent neighborhoods in America, Mailer left few outright statements as to his humanistic and ethical beliefs. He fostered his gruffness at the expense of revealing his true self for the sake of promotion--and he did that better than most other writers in American letters. Fortunately, his plethora of both fiction and nonfiction works and tens of thousands of letters give us an insight into the man behind the image.
A number of Mailer's nonfiction works, such as The Armies of the Night and The Presidential Papers, are political. In the early 1960s, Mailer grew fixated on the figure of President John F. Kennedy, whom he regarded as an "existential hero." From the late 1950s through the 1970s, his work co-mingled autobiography, social commentary, history, fiction, and poetry in a way that influenced the development of the New Journalism.
Mailer believed that the Cold War hurt America by empowering the federal government to grow more invasive in people's lives through increased government spending and oversight. This, he argued, opposed the traditional conservative principles of lower taxes and smaller government. He believed conservatives were pro-Cold War because that was politically relevant to them and would help them retain office.
Mailer was un-apologetically outspoken about his mistrust of politics as a meaningful opportunity for change. In Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), he explained his view of "politics-as-property," likening a politician to a landholder who is "never ambivalent about his land, he does not mock it or see other adjacent estates as more deserving than his own." Politics is people trading their influence as capital to serve their own interests.
Mailer also likened politics to sporting events: "If you played for a team, you did your best to play very well, but there was something obscene ... in starting to think there was more moral worth to Michigan than Ohio State." Mailer thought that Nixon lost the presidency and was demonized because he played for the wrong team. President Johnson, Mailer believed, was as bad as Nixon, although his charisma led to people forgiving his shortcomings.
In September 1961, Mailer was one of twenty-nine original prominent American sponsors of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee organization with which John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald associated in 1963. In December of that year, Mailer and several other sponsors left the organization.
Four years later, Mailer was arrested for his involvement in a Vietnam anti-war demonstration at the Pentagon. The protest was sponsored by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. In 1968, he signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the war.
In 1980, Mailer spearheaded convicted killer Jack Abbott's successful bid for parole. Abbott had read about Mailer's work on The Executioner's Song and wrote to the author, offering to enlighten him about Abbott's time behind bars and the conditions he was experiencing. Mailer, impressed, helped to publish In the Belly of the Beast, a book on life in the prison system. Six weeks after his parole, Abbott committed murder in New York City, stabbing twenty-two-year-old Richard Adan to death. Mailer sagged beneath the weight of his prior support for Abbott. In a 1992 interview with the Buffalo News, he conceded that his involvement was "another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride in."
The 1986 meeting of P.E.N. in New York City featured key speeches by Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Mailer. The appearance of a government official was derided by many, and as Shultz ended his speech, the crowd seethed, with some calling to "read the protest" that had been circulated to criticize Shultz's appearance. Mailer, who was next to speak, responded by shouting to the crowd: "Up yours!"
In 1989, Mailer joined with a number of other prominent authors in publicly expressing support for colleague Salman Rushdie, whose The Satanic Verses led to a fatwa issued by Iran's Islamic government calling for Rushdie's assassination.
In a 2003 speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, just before the Iraq War, Mailer said: "Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it."
The words of this humanist and astute observer of society proved to be true then ... and continue to do so to this very day.
If you’d like a complimentary review copy of one of my latest books, check out my Website at www.djherda.org, as well as my current publisher at Elektra Press. I’ll look forward to hearing your thoughts. Meanwhile, happy reading!
NORMAN MAILER
It seems to me that Mailer was further proof of what Montaigne experienced: "I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind--and to work some of those contradictions out for myself."