The news that the novelist Norman Mailer died earlier today at the age of 84 has already elicited little hagiographical murmurs. That hushed choir will doubtless turn into a deafening chorus of praise in the coming days and weeks–how much space do you suppose The New York Times will devote to its (I predict) front-page obituary? What grand superlatives will be dusted off and rolled out to commemorate the polyphiloprogenitive wife-stabber and booster of homicidal misfits? “Genius” will be paraded early and often, I’ll wager, as will the extended family of adjectives emanating from the word “provocative.” One early notice described Mailer as “the country’s literary conscience and provocateur” and characterized The Armies of the Night as one of his (presumably many) “masterworks.” Perhaps, before the celebratory paeans entirely drown out critical judgment, there is room for a few dissenting observations.
Mailer epitomized a certain species of macho, adolescent radicalism that helped to inure the wider public to displays of violence, anti-American tirades, and sexual braggadocio. It didn’t start out that way. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1923, Mailer was brought up in Brooklyn, “a nice Jewish boy,” as he once put it, from a middle-class family of first-generation immigrants. It was a background from which he had long endeavored to escape. “Mailer,” Norman Podhoretz observed in his memoir Ex-Friends, “would spend the rest of his life overcoming the stigma of this reputation as a ‘nice Jewish boy’ by doing as an adult all the hooliganish things he had failed to do in childhood and adolescence.” After a dutiful childhood, Mailer matriculated at Harvard in 1939. His parents had made a “big sacrifice” to send their intense, studious son to the elite institution, and he was “not going to let them down.” Although he did some writing in college, he majored in aeronautical engineering, graduating in 1942. In 1944, he married for the first of six times; and then from 1944 to 1946, he served with the U.S. Army in the Philippines and Japan.
In 1948, when he was only twenty-five, Mailer’s war novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published. For most critics of war fiction, The Naked and the Dead ranks somewhere between the novels of Herman Wouk (e.g., The Caine Mutiny) and James Jones (From Here to Eternity). It is more pretentious, but less well-crafted, and its narrative develops less momentum. Its heavy-handed psychologizing and use of four-letter words were thought smart in 1948; most contemporary readers will find them quaint if not downright embarrassing. Nevertheless, The Naked and the Dead was an immediate and immense success. The novel catapulted its young author to an atmosphere of wealth, adulation, and celebrity from which he has yet to descend. Whatever else can be said about it, the reception of The Naked and the Dead is an object lesson in the perils–what it might please Norman Mailer to call the “existential” perils–of early success. Mailer himself has never recovered.
For readers who did not witness his elevation to the role of literary-political culture hero, it is difficult to appreciate the awe with which Norman Mailer was regarded by the literary and academic establishment from the 1950s through the 1960s and into the 1970s. A typical paean is Diana Trilling’s convoluted 1962 essay on “The Radical Moralism of Norman Mailer,” which concludes by comparing Mailer to the prophet Moses “with a stopover at Marx.” “His moral imagination,” Mrs. Trilling assured her readers, “is the imagination not of art but of theology, theology in action.”
Which means . . . ? Very little, alas, although talk of “theology in action” (as distinct, perhaps, from “theology asleep”?) doubtless sparked interesting vibrations in susceptible souls. As Mailer more or less admitted in what is probably his best-known collection, Advertisements for Myself (1959)–a title that could be used again for his complete works–he was a sucker for mystification: “mate the absurd with the apocalyptic, and I was captive.”
No one combined critical regard, popular celebrity, and radical chic politics with quite the same insouciance as did Mailer. From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania. Although he modeled his persona on some of the less attractive features of Ernest Hemingway–booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads–he managed to update that pathetic, shopworn machismo with some significant postwar embellishments: reefer, radicalism, and Reich, for starters. The glittering example of Mailer’s commercial success was obviously the cynosure that many aspiring writers set out to follow: his neat trick was to combine cachet with large amounts of cash.
In 1955, Mailer helped to found The Village Voice, which, though always riven by internal dissension, quickly became a megaphone barking New Left thought, such as it was, into the mainstream culture. By the mid-1960s, he had emerged as an established antiestablishment guru. The spectacular success of works like The Armies of the Night (1968)–Mailer’s bloated, “non-fiction novel” about the 1967 march on the Pentagon and his own role in the demonstration–bore witness to his gifts for literary demagoguery. Subtitled History as a Novel, the Novel as History, the book followed Truman Capote’s example in In Cold Blood (1966), deliberately blurring fact and fiction, a procedure gratefully seized upon by a public eager to sacrifice truth to the demands of ideological zeal. Indeed, it was a procedure that characterized the intellectual–or, more accurately, the anti-intellectual–temper of a generation battened on mind-altering drugs and taught to regard any appeal to facts as an unacceptably “authoritarian” threat. Among anti-Vietnam War radicals–which is to say, among nine out of ten establishment intellectuals–Mailer’s exercise in narcissistic psychohistory was greeted with ecstatic hosannas, and duly picked up both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Sample adulation from the critic Richard Gilman: “Mailer has opened up new possibilities for the literary imagination and new room for us to breathe in the crush of actuality.” From the writer Nat Hentoff: “Mailer has won clear claim to being the best writer in America.”
In fact, like almost all of Mailer’s books, The Armies of the Night is badly written–almost preposterously so. It has often been observed that Mailer’s early literary heroes were Hemingway and John Dos Passos. But his own writing totally lacks Hemingway’s lapidary craftsmanship and Dos Passos’s cinematic control. When The Armies of the Night was serialized in Harper’s, to the great excitement of the editor, Willie Morris, a young copy editor complained about Mailer’s prose and, as one witness recollects, asked, “I wonder what he writes like when he’s sober?” The unfortunate copy editor was promptly fired. But she was right: The Armies of the Night is a hyperbolic, self-indulgent mess that looks sillier and more naive with every year that passes. Its famous third-person narrative strikes one now as a facile gimmick: “Mailer discovered he was jealous. Not of the talent. [Robert] Lowell’s talent was very large, but then Mailer was a bulldog about the value of his own talent. . . . Nonetheless, to Mailer it was now mano a mano.” That “mano a mano” is about as close to Hemingway as Mailer got.
The adulation that greeted The Armies of the Night underscores an important fact about Mailer’s success. It was part of Mailer’s genius to have been able to calibrate his appetites and deficiencies precisely to the appetites and deficiencies of the moment. His obsessions have been celebrated as brave insights because they have mirrored the defining obsessions of the time. For a moment–but only for a moment–they appear to be revelatory insights. Well into the 1970s, anyway, Mailer instinctively knew exactly what register of rhetorical excess would galvanize the left-wing intellectual establishment. This talent made him an important figure in the long march of America’s cultural revolution. It proved to be immensely profitable, financially and in terms of prestige. By the time Mailer came to write The Prisoner of Sex (1971), he was widely rumored to be up for a Nobel Prize, a rumor that absorbed his full attention for the first thirty pages of that execrable book.
This is not to say that Mailer escaped criticism. His second and third novels, The Deer Park (1955) and Barbary Shore (1961), were widely attacked, as indeed was An American Dream (1965). An American Dream was the infamous novel in which the hero, Stephen Rojack, a savvy, tough-guy intellectual–just like Norman Mailer, you see–starts out by strangling his wife. He then walks downstairs and buggers his wife’s accommodating German maid, a former Nazi who declares, “I do not know why you have trouble with your wife. You are an absolute genius, Mr. Rojack.” (Buggery–another “B” to put alongside booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads–was to become an obsession with Mailer.) There are numerous Mailerian fingerprints in the novel. President Kennedy (”Jack”) calls to convey his condolences; Rojack’s wife is rumored to have had affairs with men high up in the British, American, and Soviet spy agencies; even Marilyn Monroe–who was to become another of Mailer’s notorious obsessions–makes a posthumous cameo appearance: when Rojack fantasizes about having a telephone conversation with a dead character, he reports that “the girls are swell. Marilyn says to say hello.” But the chief point of the book is that Rojack gets away with the murder. Such, Mailer wanted us to believe, is the real if unacknowledged “American dream.”
For those in the know about Mailer, the novel carried an additional frisson. A few years before, at a party he threw to announce his mayoral candidacy on the “Existentialist” ticket, Mailer got drunk and stabbed his wife Adele (number two), nearly killing her. (In 1969, Mailer ran for mayor again, this time on the “Secessionist” ticket, which included proposals that New York City become the fifty-first state and that disputes among young criminals be settled by jousting tournaments in Central Park.) Adele declined to press charges, and so Mailer escaped this outrage with a fortnight in Bellevue for observation.
Mailer’s obsession with violence against women seems to have had a long gestation. Carl Rollyson opens his biography of Mailer with the story of John Maloney, a drunkard and a friend of Mailer and William Styron. In 1954, Maloney stabbed his mistress and fled. He was later jailed but released when charges were dropped. Styron recalled that at the time Mailer said to him: “God, I wish I had the courage to stab a woman like that. That was a real gutsy act.” That tells one all one needs to know about Norman Mailer’s idea of “courage.”
What is perhaps most alarming about Mailer’s violence against his wife was that it seems to have titillated more than it repelled his circle of friends. In any event it brought very little condemnation. “Among ‘uptown intellectuals,’” Irving Howe wrote “there was this feeling of shock and dismay, and I don’t remember anyone judging him. The feeling was that he’d been driven to this by compulsiveness, by madness. He was seen as a victim.” Readers who wonder how stabbing his wife could make Mailer a “victim”–and who ask themselves, further, what Mailer’s being a victim would then make Adele–clearly do not have what it takes to be an “uptown intellectual.”
If Mailer’s attempted murder of his wife met with little censure, An American Dream did not escape so easily. It had its admirers. But the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, in a devastating review called “Norman Mailer’s Yummy Rump,” spoke for many when he judged it “a dreadful novel,” “infinitely more pretentious than the competition,” a book whose “awfulness is really indescribable.”
Something similar, in truth, can be said about all of Mailer’s books. The journalist Raymond Sokolov, writing about Mailer in 1968, said that “in the end it is the writing that will count.” Indeed. Sokolov that Mailer commanded “a superb natural style that does not crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and characters with real blood streams and nervous systems,” etc. What do you think? Consider The Gospel According to the Son (1997), Mailer’s effort at rewriting the Gospel story in the first person. It is after all a tall order to write not simply about but as Jesus. “I’m one of the 50 or 100 novelists in the world who could rewrite the New Testament,” Mailer said when the book came out, explaining that “I have a slight understanding of what it’s like to be half a man and half something else, something larger.” But breathtaking though Mailer is about The Gospel According to the Son, the apogee of his pretentiousness probably came with Ancient Evenings (1983). This phantasmagoric tale features reincarnation and is set in Egypt around 2000 BC. Mailer really indulges his fondness for buggery in this “novel,” picturing it–along with various other sex acts–taking place between and among various characters as they mutate in and out of existence. Actually having a body does not, for Mailer, seem to be a prerequisite for any form of sexual congress. The one thing that can be said for Ancient Evenings is that it displays Mailer’s great gifts for unintentional comedy. He is funniest when he waxes solemn:
“Let me tell you again. There is the magic we invoke, and the magic that calls upon us. Do you recall that Isis dropped the fourteenth piece of the body of Osiris in the salts of Yeb, and saw battles to come between Horus and Set? That was a warning to find a proper sacrifice or there would be no peace. She heard Her own voice tell Her to slaughter a bull, but as she killed the beast, Her voice also told Her that the sacrifice was not great enough to compensate for the evil powers of Set. She must add the blood of a more painful loss. She must cut off her own head, and replace it with the bull’s face.” Menenhetet now giggled.
Ancient Evenings illustrates why readers who came to Norman Mailer in the 1970s and 1980s have a difficult time understanding the reverence with which he was once regarded by literary intellectuals. Who could take the author of this book seriously?
“Even in the first years I knew Him, I do not believe He had many thoughts which were not of battle, prayer, Nefertiti, or His other true taste–the buttocks of brave men.
“After the Battle of Kadesh, however, He was like an oasis that finds new water beneath its palms and divides to a hundred trees where before there were three. Our good Pharaoh came back from Kadesh with more hunger for the sweet meat of women than any man I knew in all of my four lives. He must have gained the seed of the Hittites He killed, for his loins were like the rising of the Nile, and He could not look at a pretty woman without having her. But then, He could like ugly women as well.”
The truth is that Norman Mailer very quickly became a parody of himself. Since the Sixties was itself a ghastly caricature of political radicalism, few people at the time seemed to notice just how ridiculous Mailer’s preening exhibitionism and blustering political and sexual pronouncements were. But as the years passed and Mailer became more and more indiscriminate in his enthusiasms, Mailer the existential sage was gradually revealed as Mailer the buffoon.
The point of no return was probably Marilyn (1973), a picture-book-cum-biography of the actress Marilyn Monroe. It is difficult to say with confidence which of Mailer’s books was really his worst: he has managed to be truly awful in several distinct ways. But Marilyn was certainly his silliest book. Over the years, Mailer’s fascination with the Star Who Slept With the Kennedys developed into another of his obsessions. In John Simon’s definitive description, what Mailer gave us with Marilyn was “a new genre called transcendental masturbation or metaphysical wet dreaming.”
In real life, Marilyn Monroe was an unhappy sexpot, a sometimes amusing but distinctly mediocre comic actress whose air-headedness was almost as much of an attraction as her pneumatic bustline. The unhappy truth, as Clive James observed, is that Marilyn Monroe “was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.” According to Mailer, though, Marilyn Monroe was a combination of Aphrodite and Ellen Terry. On the one hand, he says, Monroe was a “superb” actress who “possessed the talent to play Cordelia”; she was “Madame Bovary and Nana all in one”; “one might literally have to invent the idea of a soul in order to approach her.” On the other hand, she was “a very Stradivarius of sex,” “the angel of Sex”: “she had learned by Mind,” Mailer wrote, “to move sex forward–sex was not unlike an advance of little infantrymen of libido sent up to the surface of her skin. She was a general of sex before she knew anything of sexual war.”
No one in our sex-obsessed culture is likely to underestimate the importance of sexual gratification in the lives of most people. But Mailer advanced the idea that sexual gratification was the existential center of life. In the world according to Mailer, every activity revolves around sex. In Marilyn, he remarked in passing that “it is a rule of thumb today: one cannot buy a Polaroid in a drugstore without announcing to the world, one chance in two, the camera will be used to record a copulation of family or friends.”
One chance in two? Writing about Mailer in Commentary, Joseph Epstein observed that “it is a sign of the deep poverty of Norman Mailer’s imagination that the only climax he can imagine in any human relationship is really just that–a sexual climax.” It is all the more ironical, then, that Mailer should have displayed such a profound misunderstanding of sex. It is his one true subject, but he got it all wrong.
Indeed, if Marilyn Monroe is “the angel of Sex,” Norman Mailer is its Walter Mitty. He constructed absurd melodramas of sexual conquest and then cast himself as their inevitable hero. His ubiquitous descriptions of sex are wince-makingly embarrassing. In “The Time of Her Time,” for example–a fictional sketch that concludes Advertisements for Myself and of which Mailer was particularly proud–the hero refers to his penis as “the avenger” and is taken to saying things like “For her, getting it from me, it must have been impressive.”
Mailer’s penchant for bombast makes him a difficult writer to parody; one can never be sure that he hasn’t said something even more ridiculous than the caricature. Still, Elizabeth Hardwick caught something essential about Mailer in the parody she wrote (under the pseudonym Xavier Prynne) of The Presidential Papers (1963) for The New York Review of Books:
This 6th note was ignored by LBJ, but attacked by the Black Negroes and the FBI. One admits that a lot of it is lousy–I was having personal troubles at the time–but I still think it lousy but good. The Bitch Goddess didn’t quite get into bed with me this round, but at least she didn’t get into bed with Bill Styron either, up in his plush Connecticut retreat. All the Bitch did was blow into my ear–one of those mysterious pre-psychotic Jackie Kennedy whispers. My answer to the FBI would run this way: The existential orgasm would make atomic war and even atomic testing impossible . . .
The problem with this virtuoso performance is that it is virtually indistinguishable from the writing it set out to spoof. Its perfection as an exercise in mimicry renders it void as parody.
The unwitting comic dimension of Mailer’s writing is large. But its many sinister elements far overshadow its humor. Norman Mailer may have been unintentionally funny; he was deliberately repulsive. He was an important figure in the story of America’s cultural revolution not because people found him ridiculous but, on the contrary, because many influential people took the ideas of this ridiculous man seriously.
Mailer wrote a great deal about politics. Yet in the end, he regarded politics the way he regarded everything else, as a coefficient of sex. As he put it in Advertisements for Myself, “the only revolution which will be meaningful and natural for the twentieth century will be the sexual revolution one senses everywhere.” Even his identity as an “existentialist” was filtered through sexual anxiety: “a man is in a more existential position than a woman,” Mailer assured us: “he has to get an erection.”
In fact, in Mailer’s writing, the term “existential” and its cognates are little more than hortatory epithets, devoid of anything except sexual wish-fulfillment. He began his essay “The White Negro” by telling his readers that “the American existentialist” is “the hipster,” and then goes on to say that “to be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself–one must know one’s desires, one’s rages, one’s anguish, one must be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it.” Elsewhere he wrote that “we find ourselves in an existential situation whenever we are in a situation where we cannot foretell the end.” In other words, Mailer’s conception of existentialism is scarcely more substantial (though it is a lot less amusing) than Delmore Schwartz’s wry observation that existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.
It is in his ideas about sex, especially as he relates them to the rest of life, that Mailer was influential and most destructive. It would be difficult to overstate the crudeness of his position. In 1973, in one of the countless interviews he gave, Mailer was asked for his opinion about legalized abortion. Mailer thought well enough of his answer to reprint it in Pieces and Pontifications (1982):
I think when a woman goes through an abortion, even legalized abortion, she goes through hell. There’s no use hoping otherwise. For what is she doing? Sometimes she has to be saying to herself, “You’re killing the memory of a beautiful fuck.” I don’t think abortion is a great strain when the act was some miserable little screech, or some squeak oozed up through the trapdoor, a little rat which got in, a worm who slithered under the threshold. That sort of abortion costs a woman little more than discomfort. Unless there are medical consequences years later.
But if a woman has a great fuck, and then has to abort, it embitters her.
Whatever else can be said about this statement, it is the declaration of a moral cretin.
Indeed, it is one of the moral peculiarities of Mailer’s writings about sex that he seemed barely able to distinguish it from violent physical conflict. His depictions of lovemaking are almost always cast in terms of struggle and domination. There is scarcely any room for warmth or tenderness. Desire reveals itself first of all as a desire for conquest. No doubt this is one reason that sodomy features so prominently in his writings. Sex in Mailer is not so much an act of union as brute subordination. This is part of what makes it, for Mailer, so “existential.” As a macho existentialist, Mailer sees, or pretends to see, everything as a battle, a “war.” Indeed, despite his virulent anti-Vietnam War stand, “war” was one of Mailer’s abiding passions. It was part of his Hemingway pose: he likeed to bluster about life being a continual struggle–mano a mano as he might have put it–with the void.
In “A Public Notice on Waiting for Godot,” in which Mailer had the effrontery to tell us that he regards Samuel Beckett as “a minor artist,” he wrote that “man’s nature, man’s dignity, is that he acts, lives, loves, and finally destroys himself seeking to penetrate the mystery of existence, and unless we partake in some way, as some part of this human exploration (and war) then we are no more than the pimps of society and the betrayers of our Self.” Destroys himself? Pimps of society? “Betrayers of our Self”? Mailer was clearly the captive of a debased and self-aggrandizing Romanticism. He manufactured melodramas to ventilate the tedium of his comfortable, bourgeois existence. It is a familiar adolescent gambit. But Mailer managed to prolong his pubescent rage into his seventies. It is what made him so productive of comic relief. It is also what underlay his fascination with violence.
Many critics believe that The Executioner’s Song (1979) is Mailer’s best book. Subtitled A True Life Novel, it tells the In Cold Blood-type story of the arrest and execution by firing squad of Gary Gilmore, a psychopathic killer who spent most of his thirty-odd years in jail. Written in a clipped, unembellished style, the book contains some of Mailer’s most urgent and compelling prose. Considered as a moral document, however, The Executioner’s Song is profoundly repulsive. For Mailer does not simply delve into and display the humanity of the tortured killer he wrote about: He offers him up as a kind of hero, a courageous “outsider” who deserves our sympathy as a Victim of Society and our respect as an implacable rebel. Gary Gilmore, he said, was “another major American protagonist,” a man who was “malignant at his worst and heroic at his best,” implacable in his desire for (his clinching virtue) “revenge upon the American system.”
After Gilmore had been executed, Mailer’s attention was captured by Jack Abbott, a violent convict and self-declared Communist who began writing Mailer long “existential” letters about life in prison. Mailer loved them. He helped Abbott have them published, first in The New York Review of Books and then as a book, called In the Belly of the Beast (1981). In his introduction, Mailer described Abbott as “an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader, a man obsessed with a vision of more elevated human relations in a better world that revolution could forge.” It seems clear that Mailer’s interest helped to expedite Abbott’s release from prison: “Culture,” Mailer declared at one point, “is worth a little risk.” Abbott had scarcely set foot in New York when he stabbed and killed Richard Adan, a twenty-two-year-old Cuban-American waiter. Mailer testified on Abbott’s behalf at the ensuing murder trial. Asked about Adan’s family at a press conference following his testimony, Mailer said: “I’m willing to gamble with a portion of society to save this man’s talent.” A reporter from The New York Post then asked “who he was willing to see sacrificed. Waiters? Cubans?” Questions to which Mailer had no response but bluster: “What are you all feeling so righteous about, may I ask?” Clearly, he did not know the answer to his own question.
Mailer’s flirtation with criminals like Gary Gilmore and Jack Abbott must be seen as the fulfillment of his celebration of the “psychopath” as an existential hero. In “The White Negro,” first published in Dissent in 1957, and reprinted in Advertisements for Myself, Mailer definitively articulated an ethic that underlies not only his own view of the world in all his later writings, but also the view that would inform the cultural revolution of the 1960s. In tone, “The White Negro” is a panoply of “existentialist” rant. In content, it is a manifesto on behalf of moral nihilism. Mailer speaks casually about “the totalitarian tissues of American society” and invokes “the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years.” The only authentic response to this dire situation, he says, is “to divorce oneself from society” and “to encourage the psychopath in oneself.” This is the strategy of “the hipster,” who has “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and [who] for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.” (Mailer’s stereotypical portrayal of blacks as beastlike sexual athletes is one of the many distasteful things about the essay.)
One is Hip or one is Square, . . . one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.
The rest of “The White Negro” is a glorification of the hipster and his ethic of promiscuous sex, drug-taking, and criminal violence. The hipster, Mailer explained, is part of “an elite with the potential ruthlessness of an elite, and a language most adolescents can understand instinctively, for the hipster’s intense view of existence matches their experience and their desire to rebel.”
Mailer conjured up the image–it is what made the essay infamous–of eighteen-year-old hoodlums who “beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper.” For Mailer such behavior is acceptable, even laudable, because the psychopath, by murdering, demonstrates his “courage” and “purge[s] his violence.” To the objection that it does not take much courage to kill someone older and weaker, Mailer explained that
one murders not only a weak fifty-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly.
Mailer goes on to explain that “at bottom, the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love.” Not, however, “love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it. Orgasm is his therapy–he knows at the seed of his being that good orgasm opens his possibilities and bad orgasm imprisons him.” This is one reason that the hipster adores jazz: “jazz,” Mailer tells us, “is orgasm, it is the music of orgasm, good orgasm and bad, and so it spoke across a nation.” The hipster’s quest “for absolute sexual freedom” entails the necessity of “becoming a sexual outlaw.”
It is not only sexual morality that the hipster discards.
Hip abdicates from any conventional moral responsibility because it would argue that the results of our actions are unforeseeable, and so we cannot know if we do good or bad. . . . The only Hip morality . . . is to do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible, and . . . to be engaged in one primal battle: to open the limits of the possible for oneself, for oneself alone, because that is one’s need.
“The White Negro” adumbrates practically everything that went wrong with American society under the assault of left-wing radicalism in the 1960s, from the addiction to violence, drugs, pop music, and sexual polymorphism, to the moral idiocy, jejune anti-Americanism, and mindless glorification of narcissistic irresponsibility and extreme states of experience. It was, as David Horowitz notes in his autobiography Radical Son, “the seminal manifesto of New Left nihilism. . . . In New Left thinking, criminals were only ‘primitive rebels.’” Although many critics took issue with Mailer’s exoneration of violence, the real message of the essay–if it feels good, do it!–was just then beginning to sweep the country with irresistible force. “The White Negro,” along with some of Mailer’s other essays from the late 1950s, represented an important opening salvo in the war on convention, restraint, and traditional morality. This, not his literary accomplishment, was the ultimate secret of Mailer’s broad appeal. Mailer, as Joseph Epstein observed, “was one of the key men responsible for releasing the Dionysian strain in American life.” He promised his readers what they longed to hear: that ultimate, self-centered ecstasy was theirs for the taking. Mailer once said that he would “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” He did not make the revolution, but he assuredly became one of its most egregious abettors.
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152 Comments
1. Infinite Monkeys:Norman Mailer, RIP
The pretentious, overrated American novelist and “provocateur” is dead at 84. I’ve never been able to get more than 50 pages into a Mailer novel, and at 36, I am too young to recall what the hell the hubbub was…
Nov 10, 2007 - 11:36 am 2. Irfan Khawaja:I’ve never read Norman Mailer. I used to be embarrassed to admit that. Not anymore.
Nov 10, 2007 - 12:37 pm 3. Gregory Koster:Dear Mr. Kimball: This is remarkable. Mailer has been dead for less than 12 hours, and you’ve produced a 5300 word bombardment, complete with no fewer than 7 extended quotations and many more shorter one, covering his entire career. Fess up: how much of this had been written before Mailer died, awiting the day when it could be fired, in the face of numerous hosannas?
I agree with you that Mailer was a dreadful fraud, the more so because unlike Hemingway, none of his prose works has the impact that Hemingway’s 1925-1940 work did. It was not in Henry James’s phrase “The Real Thing,” though maybe it was in the Coca-Cola sense. Why did it make such a splash then? Personality, nothing more. Mailer’s life is best seen as one long bit of performance art, amusing in that so many were fooled for so long, depressing in that the virtues of persistence (”Never give in!” as the poster of Winston Churchill tells us) were hijacked to serve perversion. Not for Mailer the dribs and drabs of Joseph Heller, but always a flood of hymns to glorious Me. It would have been instructive had Mailer ever really been knocked down. Why oh why didn’t Adele press charges? If Norm had done five years in Sing Sing, complete with that buggery he was always roaring for, we might have seen a genuine metemorphosis in the manner of Albert Speer’s writing, looking back, flinching perhaps, but looking back at the monster he once was, and asking, How could I have done that?
Sincerely yours,
Nov 10, 2007 - 12:54 pm 4. Nick:Gregory Koster
Agreed, with the exception of “Of a Fire on the Moon” that combines his engineering background with a New York sneer to give a jolly good insight into the men (WASPs all) who conceived and then carried out this amazing feat. His description of what the “light on” really meant — that Armstrong had just seconds of fuel left in which to land or crash — and not as Cronkite droned that the “lights were landing lights” makes it worth the read, even today.
Nov 10, 2007 - 12:59 pm 5. Woody Hochswender:This is an absolutely dead-on, ruthlessly truthful assessment of Mailer and his literary accomplishments, if any.Have never been able to finish a single one of his books, though I have tried mightily, especially as a young man, feeling then that I needed to know his work. Later, Mr. Mailer wrote a piece for a magazine where I worked as an editor, for which he was paid $50,000 (a shocking amount, then and now). The literary lion had trouble delivering and had to be given a conference room at the magazine (Esquire) and an “assistant” to help him meet his deadline. The piece was a routine interview. The final result was such a horrific mish-mash that, once again, I couldn’t finish it without much determined skimming. All in all, he seemed to have no special talent for either long-form works or routine culture pieces. So what was his talent anyway? Self-promotion, I guess.
Nov 10, 2007 - 1:01 pm 6. J. Wilde:Of course Norman Mailer enjoyed the company of and support for psychopaths like Gilmore and Abbott. If you were to run Roger DePew’s Psychopathy Checklist on the details of Mailer’s life and his mind (which he was happy to put into print at every opportunity), you would in fact find another psychopath.
Nov 10, 2007 - 1:01 pm 7. Russell Seitz:Gosh, Roger, I wish I had the courage to stab a dead novelist like that , but my late fencing master might not approve.
About halfway through your panegyric, I suspect he , like many others, would join in the epiphany that so long a recitation of a writers faults can only arise from having read every word he ever wrote.
Nov 10, 2007 - 1:03 pm 8. KHS:Wow. Truly an epic blog post. And news of Mailer’s death is quite recent, so it must have been composed in just a few hours. It sent me to the dictionary once or twice as well.
I haven’t read any of Mailer’s work and now I am not sure if I want to bother.
Nov 10, 2007 - 1:09 pm 9. Letalis Maximus, Esq.:Yeah? And Oscar Wilde screwed Egyptian boys. Boys, not men. Why people like Wilde and Mailer are heros to the Literati are beyond me.
Nov 10, 2007 - 1:46 pm 10. Graham Christian:You will be relieved to learn that the NYT obituary is not as adulatory as you fearfully predicted it might be. Mailer’s fame has always been incomprehensible, given his abysmal prose and incoherent politics. At his best, he had the strange compelling quality of a madman–but no sensible reader was ever as interested in Mailer’s ego, or his psyche, as he was himself.
Nov 10, 2007 - 1:50 pm 11. sherlock:Thanks for the comment on “Of a Fire on the Moon” – I had forgotten that book which I always intended to read. Curious that the author of this article did not mention it that I could see.
I hope it is worth my time to read it… when I read of Mailer’s sponsorship of Abbott and it’s tragic consequences, I lost interest in ever reading anything of his. The epithet “limosine liberal” seems to have been crafted just for him.
Nov 10, 2007 - 2:01 pm 12. Philip Brantingham:Dear Mr. Kimball,
Nov 10, 2007 - 2:07 pm 13. tbogg:Amid the universal blather that has marked the death of Norman Mailer, yours is the voice of reason. Mailer has been a running joke, except among his radical pals. His last few novels have been so awful that only a NYT critic could love them.
I remember being very impressed while in high school with “the Naked and the Dead”, I still think it the best thing he ever wrote. His later political screeds, posturings, swaggerings, and general baloney, made him not the literary Talk of the Town, but the Bad Joke of the Town.
I don’t blame the media for this, but that gang of lefty-liberal critics who thought he was cute–that pseudo-radical chap. And propped him up for all these years.
How could he have survived terrible books like those on Marilyn Monroe and Picasso without them? As the Italians say, “La commedia e finita.”
Didn’t you write basically the same post when Susan Sontag died?
If you only have one note to play, it would be nice if it wasn’t just a blast of gas from a stuffed shirt.
Nov 10, 2007 - 2:12 pm 14. David:To sum:
1) Wannabe Hemingway
2) Self-promotion master
3) His works will not survive much longer.
Face it, Boomers. Unlike Hemingway, or a real novelist, Mailer only looms large because the Boomers thought his “rebellion” was cool (i.e. Althouse). No one, not even the Boomers actually READ his stuff, and no one will now.
He’ll be forgotten in another generation, after the Boomers follow him to the dirt.
Nov 10, 2007 - 2:14 pm 15. Alec McAulay:Once, when midnight smote the air,
Nov 10, 2007 - 2:14 pm 16. O. Cromwell:Eunuchs ran through Hell and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon great Juan riding by:
Even like these to rail and sweat
Staring upon his sinewy thigh.
Mr Koster –
Every media outlet in the world has a file cabinet full of obits for eminent personages, waiting only the date and cause of death.
I think I’ve seen bits of this essay in Kimball’s other writings, and I’m happy for the opportunity to reread it on the occasion of the expiration of this entirely regrettable person.
Nov 10, 2007 - 2:24 pm 17. Blog-o-Fascists:Norman Mailer, RIP
Power Line
I met Norman Mailer when he visited Dartmouth in the spring of 1973 shortly after the infamous party at which he’d celebrated his fiftieth birthday and drunkenly recounted the dirtiest joke he knew, according to the colorful sto…
Nov 10, 2007 - 2:29 pm 18. Ken McCracken:Of course this piece was written ahead of time. What is so unusual about that? Major newspapers have shelves of pre-written obits just waiting to go.
Norman Mailer wasn’t going to live forever, after all.
Yes, he was considered a major literary figure – though god only knows why – so what is so unusual about a critic reading his every word?
This piece nails Mailer to the wall, and he deserves it.
Nov 10, 2007 - 2:34 pm 19. Fred Mecklenburg:I’ve always felt that Norman Mailer was influenced by a criticism that Marxist author C.L.R. James made of his characters in The Naked and the Dead. James wrote that Mailer had succeeded in depicting the fascist personality, in Sergeant Croft, but not the personality that could oppose him. James said of Mailer: “He is familiar with the ideas of Marxism. But a writer creates from levels far deeper than his consciousness of political ideas.”
Much of Mailer’s subsequent work seems like an effort to create that new revolutionary character. Both in his writing, and in his own life, with his exercises in “hip morality.” It led to some interesting documents, like The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song (which does contain some fine writing) as well as truly awful things like The White Negro.
It’s still hard to dissociate the good and copious bad among his writings, tied as it all became to the Mailer persona. In the end you might argue that he became the Captain Ahab of his own body of work.
Nov 10, 2007 - 2:40 pm 20. JZ:This post was a more enjoyable read than any of Mailer’s tripe. But…
…Gregory Koster is on to something: clearly Mr. Kimball has had this one in the can for a while. If it wasn’t obvious by it’s length (if only I could crank out 5,000-plus words in less than 12 hours!), it would be by the fact that after a few paragraphs, it refers to Mailer as still alive. No shame in doing pre-mortem obituaries, as it’s well-known that news outlets nearly always have obituaries pre-written and ready to run for many famous and well-known people, but not updating this essay post-mortem makes the author look rather sloppy and foolish.
Nov 10, 2007 - 3:05 pm 21. Three Sources:De Mortuis nil nisi bonom
I have barely recovered from the hagiographic obituaries that Arthur Miller’s death invoked. Now, Norman Mailer has passed. Thankfully, Roger Kimball has beaten the New York Times Review of Books to the punch. No one combined critical regard, popular c…
Nov 10, 2007 - 3:21 pm 22. Jonathan Stone:Dead fugging right you are
Nov 10, 2007 - 3:25 pm 23. X:Mailer’s like most of us. Some of it
Nov 10, 2007 - 3:33 pm 24. E. O'Neal:good, some great, some dreadful. But he had panache. Kimball, you are a mama’s boy. Nice bowtie…
Excellent critique of a writer once widely admired who is no longer much read and who will soon be forgotten. Sadly, the damage caused by the ethos Mailer helped to create will last much longer.
Nov 10, 2007 - 3:57 pm 25. Elena:Well, I’m glad I never picked up his books. Strange, though – all those years of hearing his praise, and nobody mentioned the foulness of his language…
Nov 10, 2007 - 3:58 pm 26. Patrick Treacy:Kimball,
Without disagreeing with your position I must say it seems to me that you’ve done little more than dusted off your equally acerbic Susan Sontag obit from FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE circa 2004 changing little for the record but the characters.
I quote the first graf:
Susan Sontag: An Obituary
By Roger Kimball
NewCriterion.com | Wednesday, December 29, 2004
When a friend called me yesterday morning with the news that Susan Sontag had died at the age 71, just about the first thing I thought was, “well, we’ll have a huge, hagiographical, front-page obituary tomorrow in The New York Times.” Check to see if I am correct. In the meantime, as you prepare yourself for the Times’s litany about 1) what a penetrating critical intelligence Sontag wielded and 2) what a “courageous” and challenging “dissident” voice she provided (those quotation marks are proleptic: let’s see if the Times uses those words), here is another “courageous,” “penetratingly intelligent” dissident voice, that of Salman Rushdie, who provided this bouquet in his capacity as President of the PEN American Center:
Nov 10, 2007 - 4:02 pm 27. Dan:If some of you folks were familiar with Mr. Kimball’s work, you would know that this essay was taken from his book The Long March.
Nov 10, 2007 - 4:10 pm 28. buzz:Geeze Russel, is that irony?
“Gosh, Roger, I wish I had the courage to stab a dead novelist like that , but my late fencing master might not approve.”
What with his approval and admiration of a man who had stabbed his wife, the fact he himself nearly killed his own wife by stabbing, and then the Abbot thing where he killed the waiter (by stabbing).
Nov 10, 2007 - 4:14 pm 29. Bruce Brower:I have never read Mailor, and am unlikely to do so, given the number of classic texts I have yet to read. But I feel it is rather rude, and unkind, to write this up so soon after his death. Why not let Mailer’s family, friends, and supporters have their say for a bit? Conservatives used to be genteel and refined, now all the stress seems to be on “making points” by being nasty.
Nov 10, 2007 - 4:37 pm 30. R Riley:You skipped “Tough Guys Don’t Dance.” An utterly awful book, Mailer wrote and directed the film adaptation. It is rarely seen, otherwise it would be well accepted as one of the worst films ever made. It has one of the worst line readings ever – Ryan O’Neil’s “Oh God, Oh Man” and an actual flashback within a flashback.
Mailer was a polyp, and the literary world is well rid of him.
Nov 10, 2007 - 4:41 pm 31. Tinian:Roger Kimball:
Thank you very much for speaking truth to power.
Nov 10, 2007 - 5:33 pm 32. J. Wodbower:Norman Mailer was a great writer. Period. Mr Kimball’s opinions, predicatably cramped and wrong-headed, belie a lack of familiarity with the man’s work. Mailer was a brilliant story teller, I defy anyone who has actually read his books, see Harlot’s Ghost or Of Fire On the Moon, to say that they weren’t galvanised by the prose, did not feel that unmistakable euphoria one feels when in thrall to a great work of art. Did he do and say some crazy things? Sure, but he more than made up for it with his writing. Those who have not read him, give it a try, make up your own mind.
Nov 10, 2007 - 5:34 pm 33. william:It appears that Slaughterhouse 5 and Catch 22 are the lasting books of WWII. I read The Naked and the Dead long ago, when one still read books for the hot passages. Even on this level I remember the book as a disappointment. I’m not that familar with much of Mailer’s work, but I get the sense that he knew more about the anxiety of sex than the pleasure of it. He was closer to Gene Krupa than to Verdi. For a moment he caught the rhythmn of his generation, and then the moment passed and no one will ever want to play it again.
Nov 10, 2007 - 5:41 pm 34. Brad:Friend sent me a link to this. This is what I told him, and its what I’ll tell you:
I don’t like Norman Mailer. You know what else I don’t like? The Who. But, when/if Pete Townsend dies, I’m not gonna compose a Rock Opera telling the world how middle-of-the road I think they are. I’ll just do what I’ve always done: Not listen to their music. I understand that this is what you do and get paid for, talk talk talk about nonsense and the like, but the guy just died and here you stand with a fresh-brewed cup of jargon to hurl at his memory. I guess you could say I’m kind of doing the same thing to you, by wasting my time to come here and tell you what I think. But I won’t be citing any references or reading your entire catalog to do it. After this, you won’t even be on my register, and if for some reason you manage to pop up in mainstream culture, I’ll just do to you what I do to The Who: Not listen.
Nov 10, 2007 - 5:42 pm 35. John:Thank God I didn’t waste my time reading any Mailer. Doesn’t sound like I missed a thing.
Nov 10, 2007 - 5:44 pm 36. ELC:“About halfway through your panegyric, I suspect he, like many others, would join in the epiphany that so long a recitation of a writers faults can only arise from having read every word he ever wrote.” Duh.
Nov 10, 2007 - 6:01 pm 37. RHM:Regardless of your opinion of the deceased, regardless of his virtue, or lack thereof, decorum dictates that a gentleman withholds criticism. One does not speak ill of the dead. You only bring scorn upon yourself for doing so and thereby diminish your otherwise salient argument. You have all of eternity to criticize. Wait until the body is cold, for Heaven’s sake.
Nov 10, 2007 - 6:09 pm 38. Bleepless:The 1960s were not Mailer’s introduction to totalitarian politics. He was a vocal participant in the USSR’s Waldorf Conference.
Nov 10, 2007 - 6:30 pm 39. Roger Godby:Russell, weren’t you the grad student teaching my required undergrad composition class?
I suspect the “courage to stab a dead novelist” is actually only a reaction to an uninvited mnemonic prompt: Mailer’s death. While he was alive, or at least pretended to be, he was easy enough to ignore and thus forget (I note the most recent work cited here was from 10 years ago). Even if one who detested the guy stayed constantly alert to Mailer’s existence, why would that person want to boost Mailer’s ego/career/rep by writing about him while he was alive?
Nice try, Russell, but (in my view) no cigar.
Moreover, are you suggesting that critics should not discourse on a certain author’s works and life with the authority that comes from having read and watched them but from a point of unsullied ignorance? You know: “I know it to be true because it feels so.” My, that sounds progressive.
I admit I’ve not read anything from Norman Mailer. Before reading this, I had little knowledge about him being anything other than a writer who was a vocal lefty, which is fine. Now, I’m curious to read him for entertainment; however, since he’s dead, maybe I’ll check him out from the library; I’ll read him in a way that won’t necessitate putting money into him or his estate.
Nov 10, 2007 - 6:49 pm 40. mikewoldman:Only two things become clear from this critic’s comments (sorry neglected to get his name}.
Nov 10, 2007 - 6:56 pm 41. J Thelen:The first is that if he thinks Norman’s comedy and buffonery were unintentional, he didn’t understand a word he read. The second is that, judging from the way he writes, he would in reality give up his balls (if he had any) to write like Mr. Mailer, of blessed memory.
I’ve despised Mailer ever since he helped put the knife in Abbott’s hand to murder Adan, and then smirked about it being excusable in the name of culture. An odious man.
Nov 10, 2007 - 7:15 pm 42. scott spencer:Mailer is a genius.
When I was a university sophomore, watching Mailer give a lecture at the Art Gallery Of Ontario in Toronto regarding his book on Picasso, I asked a typically sophomoric question, asking Mailer if there were any similarities between Picasso and the subject of his previous book, Lee Harvey Oswald.
The snooty artistes laughed and groaned at my silly question — but Mailer answered it, thoughtfully and clearly, and he did much to heal a wounded boy’s ego.
The secret of Mailer’s talent is that he had a voracious mind that was willing to examine the entire range of human existence. Some of it was genius, some of it was awful, but my god, look at the range of his subjects: Jesus, Hitler, Oswald, Picasso, Ali, Monroe, World War II, the C.I.A., ancient Egypt, the voyage to the moon, the war in Vietnam.
His hubris was off-the-charts, but so was his willingness to dare, to dive deep, to examine himself and the world around him.
I think it’s telling and sad we can so easily dismiss a man who truly tried to stretch the limits of his own talents and literature itself.
If you haven’t read Mailer, do so. You will be rewarded, not dismayed.
Nov 10, 2007 - 7:28 pm 43. George Rickerson:This is not meant as defense of Mailer – I find your essay compelling and accurate – but, as one of the first baby-boomers, I remember my belief in the values that developed in the 1960s and my disgust with the utter absence of integrity or talent or even competence that was characteristic of so many of the “leaders” of that revolution. In many ways Mailer epitomized these poseurs, and I view your piece as justice at last.
Nov 10, 2007 - 7:31 pm 44. Charles H. Booker:Mr. Kimball, unlike some of your other readers, I do not care if you oomposed this piece in anticipation of Mailer’s death. Your assessment is right on the money. I have lived through the years of Mailer’s career and I cannot morn his passing. Again like some of your reader’s, I could not finish a Mailer book or article. Even early on he was a blowhard and bore. That he prospered so long is not so much a condemnation of him but of the literary “establishment”, the precious New York intelligentsia. I hope they are next.
Nov 10, 2007 - 7:34 pm 45. David Hammer:This is pompous and wrongheaded. Who reads Mailer, who ever read Mailer, as a serious thinker? Who even reads him as a major novelist? But to be blind to the excellence of his journalism, or his purely literary gifts — that is quite an achievement.
When Mailer reported real-life events, whether or not they were political, he was not a blow-hard. Reporting on real-life events disciplined his mind and brought out some qualities that Mr. Kimball might emulate: a surprising fairness in describing people with different politics, an admiration for heroism wherever it appeared, and an extraordinary talent for metaphor. And one thing more: while Mailer was a provocateur, he was without cruelty or cowardice, something that cannot be said of Kimball who, as others have noted, waited for Mailer to be dead before he plunged in his dagger.
Nov 10, 2007 - 7:52 pm 46. George T Karnezis:I recall reading ARMIES in 1969 and finding it moving, especially the ending; I also recall, again, many years ago, THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG, a worthy work in many ways. Some of the political convention reporting is classic. I suspect Mailer will be read and remembered in years to come; Kimball will be forgotten, deservedly so, I think.
Nov 10, 2007 - 8:02 pm 47. Chris S.:One wonders at your opinion of Pynchon.
Nov 10, 2007 - 8:10 pm 48. ahem:Kimball’s right. Waiting another week or two to publish this is not going to make him any less right.
Nov 10, 2007 - 8:51 pm 49. Heather Cook:Good-bye Mr. Mailer. Your leaving made the world a better place.
Nov 10, 2007 - 8:58 pm 50. Paul G:I won’t argue with critque of Mailer’s writing style.As for substance…he always tackled subjects that were daring and daunting.I myself, am a fan of the man.Yes,he had a colossal ego and most peolple either revered him or reviled him.I suggest a veiwing of the PBS documentary Mailer on Mailer.An American Masters presentation.If you are not entertained and, or enlightened then join the ranks of gloating, ghoulish,celebratory wimpy crowd.It’s easy to kick a monster when he’s dead. And it’s easy to hurl insults at a genuis whose rapier wit has been silenced.Norman had his feet held to the fire many times in life and now his cold feet will toasted again.I will miss a true original 20th century master.
Nov 10, 2007 - 9:21 pm 51. jum1801:Devastating and spot on. I have always detested Mailer’s clownish arrogance, and still see him as the complete buffoon, so grotesquely swollen with ludicrous and unearned vanity as he was.
That said, I find I must read “Harlot’s Ghost” every 5 years or so. His “history” of the CIA in the 50’s and up through the Bay of Pigs is fascinating for its study of historical events as well as both actual persons and thinly disguised fictional characters.
But my God, even in a book about the Cold War and its warriors, he can’t stop himself from throwing in a goodly sampling of sodomy. What IS it with that man and his obsession with buggery in all its variations? While the Freudian answer is almost too obvious and easy for credit, it appears to be the most likely as well.
Nov 10, 2007 - 9:23 pm 52. John Boyle:Thanks for the insight. It is comforting to know that the spiritual bankruptcy of this age did not spring naturally from the American experience, but had deliberate fabricators who had to oppose the American experience in order to gestate their horrid creation. The now almost universal acclaim heaped on artistic charlatans and intellectually bankrupt degenerates is explained and put into historical context.
May Mailer sleep without rest in the eternal backwards embrace of the likes of Gilmore and Abbott. They deserve each other. Although, in the long run, their crimes are nothing compared to his.
Nov 10, 2007 - 9:23 pm 53. Matthew Patton:A lot of what you wrote about Norman Mailer and his writing was on target (I remember an article about Mailer that quoted one of his ex-wives who noted that for all of his macho bluster, he was basically a mama’s boy; “all we ever did was have dinner with his mother”).
But although he was something of a literary celebrity, his influence on even left-wing thinking and writing in this country was pretty limited; however much he may have impressed the 30ish, male magazine editors in New York, on most college campuses, he was regarded as a middle-aged has-been trying to muscle in on The Action and the girls (I have this on good authority of two English teachers of mine over the years, both of whom described themselves as fairly radical during their 60’s college days, and both of whom thought of Mailer as a gassy, horny fraud). If there WAS a middle-aged writer who appealed to the pseudo revolutionaries, it was Kurt Vonnegut, who wasn’t a terribly deep thinker either, but was a lot more modest and one hell of a lot more readable.
As for me, the moment when I realized that my lack of respect for Mailer was on fairly strong ground came in an interview connected with the writing of THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG. He loftily announced that he hadn’t written much about the two men that Gary Gilmore killed because they were “very good,” which struck me as code for “very boring.” In short, Mailer lacked the literary talent to make good, quiet people as interesting as violent, messy ones. If Mailer hoped that this book would be his equivalent of IN COLD BLOOD, then he had fallen very short. Whatever its other imperfections, Truman Capote made the Clutter family as vivid in his book as the two men who killed them,
Nov 10, 2007 - 9:32 pm 54. JunkYardBlog:Don’t Let The Screen Door Hit You
Have you ever read Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals? Good book. It is a deconstruction of the deconstructionists, an unsparing look at the lives of those who have claimed the mantle of virtue and reform. It’s a great read, ands shows you…
Nov 10, 2007 - 10:02 pm 55. Comment:Roger – Sad to say, your dissent is bitter – You should have waited a few days and thought things over a bit.
Nov 10, 2007 - 10:07 pm 56. Freddie:Yeah. Because long after Norman Mailer has fallen into the dustbin of history, the name “Roger Kimball” will ring throughout the halls of academe.
Right?
Nov 10, 2007 - 10:11 pm 57. Michael Sherman:I couldn’t agree more. I have always thought Mailer grotesquely overrated.
Nov 10, 2007 - 10:46 pm 58. Neo-andertal:I hate to be gross, but that certainly was a mighty hurl upon Mr. Mailer. Absolutely withering, though I can’t say really unjustified! Anyone else, and I would say you were unfairly trashing a dead man. I can’t help to think though that it is fair that Norman receive such blistering criticism from somewhere, after a life of unrelenting nastiness. I do believe you’ve hit upon most of the major points. After all, there will never be another chance to tell Mailer to “Fold it five ways and put it where the moon don’t shine.”
Unfortunately, I have waded my way through a few of the mans works, or parts at least. I often found the perverse point of view so heavily applied as to be an overwhelming distraction. I often wondered if the primary appeal for many people was the pompous bombast, especially in his later work.
Nov 10, 2007 - 11:25 pm 59. BMOON:So his genius resides in making anal intercourse into some kind of a revolutionary statement? EeeeeeeeeyaaaAAAAAWN! He always reminds me of that image of Nietzsche (surely Mailer’s intellectual priest,) – pale, pathetic and perversely Messianic – writing feverishly about supermen and the liberation of the will through amorality- while he languished away in tiny rooms, in delusions of degraded grandeur, in pathetic narcisstic self-aborption, while the rest of the world moved on and grew up.
Nov 11, 2007 - 12:12 am 60. Dawn:How can we forget his ‘film’ where he and some friends spent the entire time ‘improvising’ such complex emotions as being drunk on camera? He claimed that the dialog came from the ‘native wit’ of his pals. I suspect that even a colossal ego like Tom Cruise would be reluctant to put together such a worthless vanity project.
If his writing hadn’t been propped up by the lefties, he’d have sunk into the obscurity he so richly deserved.
Nov 11, 2007 - 12:35 am 61. Mike Hudson:Aside from speaking ill of the dead, what purpose, exactly, did this post serve? Clearly, this was started some 10 days or so ago, when Mailer was hospitalized and one of his former wives said she expected the worst. And aside from three morons who’ve admittedly never read Mailer, you’ve found no one who agrees with you on your own blog.
Nov 11, 2007 - 12:41 am 62. JM:Bravo, and spot-on.
Nov 11, 2007 - 12:47 am 63. cowhand214:I have not read any of Mr. Mailer’s works and did not feel a need to before or after his death. I will say this though, that this column is only of interest in response to the generous outpouring of eulogies that are forthcoming.
To me, this column only resounded with the criticism of a movement that history has passed by. The real anger here is not with Mailer but with the habit of mind the Mr. Kimbell believes he engenders.
And so what if he does? Mr. Mailer did not create the world that he wrote for though he might have encouraged and reveled in its existence. Where did this column get us? Any farther than we were before Mr. Mailer’s death? Were we informed of anything of interest or should be of interest? Did Mr. Kimball provide us with the tools to understand the world after Norman Mailer? To understand the world before? Are such tools needed or is it much vitriol about nothing?
Mr. Kimball has not convinced me (as someone who did not live through Mailer’s heyday) that Mailer was worth the effort he has expended .
This piece was written before Mr. Mailer’s death and it seems to me perfectly fair to have presented it in conjunction with the many obits/eulogies that have been waiting in the wings.
Nov 11, 2007 - 1:09 am 64. Judith W.:After reading your spot-on, eloquent & insightful analysis of Mailer & his writing, couldn’t help compare it to what passes as revolutionary “art’ among today’s respected museums & art critics. In a word, Mailer & so much of the “in-your-face” shock art, devoid of substance & merit, is merely derivative…unoriginal pseudo-creative energy for the sake of championing oh-so-cool nihilism…as if sex & violence held on a pedestal is something new under the sun. Mailer, & most self-absorbed celebrated elephant-dung-on-the-Madonna type artists, are merely rebelling against G-d, soul & a life that is challenged in pursuit of nobility & purpose. To Mailer, such a quest for a redeemed lifestyle is quaint…to me, his derivative writing, embracing feel-good-in-the moment anarchy, is just boring, heavily unoriginal & anything but progressive or enlightening.
Nov 11, 2007 - 2:58 am 65. John:I tried to read Mailer in the ’50s….not a hope. I tried again in the ’70s….no way. He’s dead.
Nov 11, 2007 - 3:34 am 66. Maggie's Farm:Sunday Links
Norman Mailer: Roger Kimball and I are on the same page.Evangelicals rethinking divorce? Yahoo News (h/t, News for Christians)Rove: Pelosi’s House is a mess. I prefer it that way.Blogworld update, from Rick Moran in Vegas.Liars on infant mortality. D…
Nov 11, 2007 - 4:27 am 67. Maggie's Farm:Sunday Links
Norman Mailer: Roger Kimball and I are on the same page" over-rated.Evangelicals rethinking divorce? Yahoo News (h/t, News for Christians)Rove: Pelosi’s House is a mess. I prefer it that way.Blogworld update, from Rick Moran in Vegas.Liars on in…
Nov 11, 2007 - 4:49 am 68. Maggie's Farm:Sunday Links
Norman Mailer: Roger Kimball and I are on the same page." Mailer is greatly over-rated.Evangelicals rethinking divorce? Yahoo News (h/t, News for Christians)Rove: Pelosi’s House is a mess. I prefer it that way.Blogworld update, from Rick Moran i…
Nov 11, 2007 - 4:49 am 69. Maggie's Farm:Sunday Links
Norman Mailer: Roger Kimball and I are on the same page." Mailer is/was a greatly over-rated would-be hipster.Evangelicals rethinking divorce? Yahoo News (h/t, News for Christians)Rove: Pelosi’s House is a mess. I prefer it that way.Blogworld u…
Nov 11, 2007 - 4:50 am 70. dora_rice:I thought the observations and analysis of Mr. Mailer was correct until I read the part of Marylin Monroe not beeing a good actress. Not so. She was an excellent comic, and actress. With a good director she could excell to being even a great actress. Since the author totally missed an honest observation of Marylin his research of Norman Mailer therefore is also questionable .
Nov 11, 2007 - 5:01 am 71. dora_rice:Mailer was in the 50’s , 60’s and even 70’s the sign of times. America saw it self as the greatest country in the world (and it was), arrogant buffons were all over the place, and instead of contributin to the world, Amerca took what it could get regardless of the consequences. Mailer portraid this in his writings. Today we all know better. A little late.
Nov 11, 2007 - 5:13 am 72. Sean:Mailer did not write America’s best World War II novel, but he may have written our best Vietnam novel: Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). Mr. Kimbell does not mention this book, but if you are new to Mailer this is a fine place to start.
Nov 11, 2007 - 5:31 am 73. Mrs. Jackson:Mr. Kimball, your splendid essay brought to mind what the late Malcolm Muggeridge once penned about Hemingway :
“…and Earnest with a self-made hole in his head; the only shot he ever fired that found its target!”
Thanks.
Nov 11, 2007 - 5:45 am 74. Dennis Bedard:Dear Roger. This obit brings back memories of the polemic that Mencken wrote about another blowhard while the corpse was still warm: William Jennings Bryan. Mailer was important for reasons beyond himself. He epitomized effete liberalism’s defining characteristic: self absorption, narcissism, and the denial of moral absolutes. Think “radical chic.” In fact, Mailer could be compared to Tom Wolfe, without the talent.
Nov 11, 2007 - 5:50 am 75. J. D. Daniels:The characteristics of a Grand Old Man of Literature are fourfold, and obvious. He must be a man, he must be old, he must be literary, and he must be grand. Mailer scored two out of four: impressive but insufficient. A book about Marilyn Monroe, a book about Jesus, a book about Muhammad Ali, a book about ancient Egypt, a book about the Kennedy assassination, a book about Hitler’s toilet-training—that’s not literature; it’s up-all-night cable television programming.
After the old lion is dead, any dog can nip at him. What needs saying is that the lion had been dead for more than forty years. Consider these lines from 1966’s Cannibals and Christians:
“Now I will give you a set of equations. They are not mathematical, but metaphorical; and therefore full of science. I repeat: they are equations in the form of metaphor; so they are full of science. It is just that they are not scientific. For they are equations composed only of words. I am thus trying to say my equations are a close description of phenomena which cannot be measured by a scientist. Yet these observations are clear enough to say that interruption is shock, and shock deadens mood, but mood then stirs itself to rouse a wave. Why? Well, the sum of one’s experience might suggest that it is probably in the nature of mood to restore itself by raising a wave.”
That’s vintage Mailer: the empty annunciations of now I will give you, I repeat, I am thus trying to say. The saying itself rarely happened; and, when it did, we were none the wiser for it. (See the facing page in the same collection: “A whore was a-scorch / Gorge was the cheese and ass the itch / Of Pussy and Pick-nose / And swish out the twitch [...] Snatch squinch and squeeze / Ear-wax and dingle / Fuck tit and dong [...] One cannot give a funeral service to the fart.”) Reading Mailer was like watching a man have a seizure.
Consider the pattern set by his first decade: The Naked and the Dead, perhaps necessary though not quite readable; Barbary Shore, boring and unreadable; The Deer Park, boring, sexy, and unreadable; and Advertisements for Myself, so deliriously wretched as to have its own peculiar charisma. Average men commit average sins, but only fantastic creatures are capable of fantastic wrongheadedness. The experience of Advertisements, as of so much Maileriana, is one of being transfixed by negative wonder: you can’t tear your eyes from the burning wreck.
Adjusting these proportions, we can sift Mailer’s career into three tolerable books, including The Executioner’s Song; twenty-five books beyond the second chapter of which I am almost certain few people have ever bothered to read; and seven books that make an Advertisements-style virtue of their vices, so egregious that by camp transvaluation they become “good” or otherwise meritorious again.
Anyone else hitting three for thirty-five would long have been looking for another line of work. But Mailer was not really a writer, he was only a personage; and even in death he remains on the front page, above the fold, which tells us as much about contemporary culture as anything Mailer himself ever managed to say.
Nov 11, 2007 - 6:07 am 76. Joshua Sharf:And so what if Mr. Kimball began by predicting a Times hagiography, as with Ms. Sontag? It says more about the Times than it does about Mr. Kimball.
Nov 11, 2007 - 6:31 am 77. Anthony Steyning:Mr Kimball’s largely right and if he has read Mailer more than me it’s that I could stomach so much less than him.
But rewarding Mailer with wealth and fame are the people whose exposure to ‘life’ was through the window of that one cab they took from Washington Sq. to E. 76th St. some 30 years ago. Those who ‘recognize’ and admire the ‘authenticity’ of Mailer’s ‘rebellion’, the ones quite blind to his narcissistic, neurotic, disjointed, bombastic nonsense as that of the self-indulgent, self-obsessed Vidal, Roth and others. The same people who would send Sean Penn on a 10 day trip to the Congo after the Cannes film festival and breathlessly await his take on African society, or think a 800 page tome is always 4 times more brilliant than a 200 pager. The part of American society that simultaneously celebrates the disgusting violence of its cinema, its TV screens and so much of its music, because the two, you see, go together.
Miles Davis took to speaking like a hoodlum to cover up being a well-off dentist’s son, which was supposed to reflect his ‘pain’ and far from quiet ‘suffering’, but at least he could play a lyrical trumpet and whereas Wynton Marsalis cuts out the bullshit and limits himself to simply being generous and brilliant.
Mr Mailer was the Hugo Chavez of American letters, while not dumb deliberately cleverly stupid. Having suffered very little he also frequently snapped under the weight of his own inherent dishonesty and utter inability to express true compassion and wisdom.
Nov 11, 2007 - 7:34 am 78. Robert D.:I’m glad to see that the urge to lionize another public (literary?) figure upon their death has not gone unremarked upon. On the basis of the excerpts from Mailer’s work here alone, it seems his desire early on to purge himself of bad writing (by writing 3000 words a day–according to the NYTimes piece) was mere wishful thinking. Bravo to a well stated, timely antidote to the encomiums that will likely proliferate in the months to come.
Nov 11, 2007 - 8:09 am 79. Elroy Jetson:Anyone who stabs his wife and leaves her for dead and carries himself through life like Mailer did deserves to get “piled on” before he is 6′ under. He should have spent the 60s doing time for attempted murder instead of enjoying the spotlight and acclaim. What a loser!
Nov 11, 2007 - 9:45 am 80. maria horvath:Wonderful, just wonderful.
Can we expect a similar “the emperor has no clothes” analysis about another blowhard, the odious Gunther Grass, when the time comes?
Nov 11, 2007 - 10:09 am 81. Anthony Steyning:Not wanting to be influenced and only now reading over your other comments I don’t think it’s a matter of dancing over someone’s grave but a general misgiving about the artist and the incomprehensible celebrity culture which is America’s phenomenon. With the tenured and the Pulitzered just as guilty, of course, as mechanical print and electronic media outbursts.
I do like J. D. Daniels’ comments in particular; even more if his given name’s Jack.
From Spain, where I live,
Cheers to you, Sir
Nov 11, 2007 - 10:21 am 82. jgmurphy:All I can say is:
Wow.
This is truly virtuoso work, Roger. I have always felt that mailer was a pretentious jackass but I could never articulate my antipathy as skillfully as you.
Bravo.
Nov 11, 2007 - 10:30 am 83. Whitehall:What are critics for?
In this case, Kimball’s summation should serve as a warning for future authors – if you’re serious about your writing and its place in posterity, don’t be another Mailer.
Sure, Mailer could be entertaining at times but mostly as a surrogate fantasy maker. Who wouldn’t want fame and the vices one could exploit from it? Yet, Mailer went for the vices.
He was in the end, an intellectual whore selling himself to a decadent intelligensia. He had no shame.
I’ve tried to read some of his books – finished only the one about his running around Provincetown acting the drunk fool. I might attack the one about space flight.
Nov 11, 2007 - 10:32 am 84. Eric V.:To the guy who wrote that Slaughterhouse 5 and Catch 22 were the most durable novels of WWII: yeah, if you were a milk-fed, overeducated Boomer Brat who had never been near that war. S5 and C22 were among the Great Dorm Books discussed reverentially all night by mousy intellectuals tutored by self-important drop-outs from the Greatest Generation. Thankfully the internet has loosed the grip of such weaklings and their progeny over public opinion.
Nov 11, 2007 - 10:34 am 85. M J:Very wise of you Irfan Khawaja.
Nov 11, 2007 - 10:35 am 86. Increase Mather:Continue to let other people do the thinking for you.
I read “Naked and the Dead” when I was seventeen. Thought it was a great, great book, kinda like Moby Dick. Think Mailer would have liked that comparison.
Also read Armies of the Night, just god-awful, and Mailer’s take on Oswald and the JfK assassination. Oswald did it because “he was destined to do it”? In reality, it’s what happens when the CIA and FBI fire a President.
His Egypt book is trash. Maybe I’ll go back to “Naked/Dead” again. I’m a lot older than seventeen now.
Mailer was about a time and a place; he understood how to milk the largest demographic in the history of mankind. If he was a genius, that’s his genius. The Boomers were mesmerized.
Nov 11, 2007 - 10:52 am 87. Kenyon Harbison:I liked this piece — it’s a useful perspective. And funny.
But it’s marred by the author’s biases and assumptions w/regard to — among other things — the NYT, which he apparently chooses to think is still stuck in 1965. Has he actually read it since the late nineties? The National Review it ain’t, but update your thinking just a bit, so you don’t start to sound as dated as Mailer does. At the very least, the next time a Liberal Lion dies, don’t assume the NYT will be THIS one-sided!
Also, as has already been pointed out, who the heck even on the Left actually thinks of Mailer as one of the great American writers? I read a couple of his books on my own, and wasn’t impressed. But when I was an English major at Yale I took numerous contemporary literature courses, and he was never on the syllabus — not is novels, not his non-fiction, none of it. His non-fiction was regarded by many as being of far less merit than that of Tom Wolfe or Truman Capote. His novels weren’t even worth a mention. And Yale is no bastion on conservatism either. So methinks the continued existence of a so-called adoring liberal intelligencia is somewhat a straw man concocted by Mr. Kimball in order to stir the faithful.
Nov 11, 2007 - 11:48 am 88. Phil McKeister:A fouler and more representative avatar of an entire generation of perverse narcissists may not exist. In this, his passing may be notable. Gabriel’s trumpet calling the smelly hippies to the eternal dirt-nap.
Like many of the countless pseudo-intellectual frauds of his ilk, he reveled more in the adulation of the credulous than in the credulity of those who take literature seriously. He achieved the celebrity status of Capote without the talent. He achieved the debauchery of Hemingway without either the sincerity or style, and notably, without even the courage to drink himself to death.
His preening and overcompensating machismo, his overweening self-regard perfectly mirror the ethos of ten-thousand gray pony-tailed, volvo-driving, Captain Queegs of the hippie generation desperately grasping at the last straws of relevance, desperately trying to re-live their “great cheese incident” of 1968.
Oh joy! the unwashed generation is finally rounding the clubhouse turn.
Please hurry and join your “literary lion” you despicable sheep of the Baby Boom generation. America will be much better off without you.
Good riddance to a buggery-worshipping, wife-stabbing, psychopath-enabling moral-retard.
Mailer will soon be forgotten. None too soon.
Nov 11, 2007 - 11:55 am 89. Kenyon Harbison:Eric V, Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch-22, flew over 60 missions as a bombardier, and Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote “S5,” also fought extensively in that War and famously lived through the firebombing of Dresden, where he was trapped in a Slaughterhouse. Just let the record reflect all that, in case others here don’t know them…. And also, rather than merely parroting stuff you probably read on a blog much like this one, can you suggest any WWII writers whose novels that are MORE enduring? Hemingway is all that comes to mind for me.
Nov 11, 2007 - 11:55 am 90. Kenyon Harbison:As will no doubt be viciously pointed out, Hemingway’s most famous works deal not w/WWII. But as a war novelist, his work is the most enduring.
Nov 11, 2007 - 12:07 pm 91. The Shadow:Mailer was full of himself, wrote far too much gibberish, and was capable of odious behavior. Still, some of his writings were stimulating, even brilliant, his BS often fascinating in a world of bow-tied puds, and, after all, he did just die, his corpse still warm.
Mr. Kimball doesn’t flatter himself with this hatchet job, a fevered exercise exuding inferiority and under achievement issues. Further, Kimball plagiarizes himself and fails to correct tense in an obviously pre-written diatribe. Worse of all, he wears that bow-tie, a cringe worthy accessory that suggests an unfortunate incident while being separated from his mommy’s teat. I suggest switching to a dickie for a little more dignity.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out to those who haven’t read Mailer that you might refrain from falling over yourself agreeing with the author’s rantings until you have some experience to corroborate his opinion. This will risk your standing in the Lemming Community but just might free you from the fear of finding a leftist under your bed.
Nov 11, 2007 - 12:10 pm 92. Jonny Hunter:You misspelt “polyphiloprogenitive”.
Nov 11, 2007 - 1:22 pm 93. Tom B:I remember an article about Mailer trying to talk with Madonna. He had zero sense of her or her world. He ended up trying to talk pornography with her. She ignored him. He was a detestable little man. If even one of his works had some marginal merit, well, you know what they say about stopped clocks.
Nov 11, 2007 - 1:36 pm 94. Lynn O'Connor:This nasty, self-important man will not be missed by many except perhaps by his children and I doubt that.
Nov 11, 2007 - 1:58 pm 95. Voyager:To me, it rather sounds more as though the author has been well good and tired of hearing people wax ecstatic about Mailer’s works for many, many, years now.
Having read at least one of those “hagiographical” eulogies already, I can’t say that I find myself in must disagrement with Mr. Kimball’s assesment.
Harry Voyager
Nov 11, 2007 - 2:35 pm 96. Heller reader:Thank you.
I had heard only plaudits for Mailer. I’d heard so much about him that I assumed that he was deep, like Thomas Hardy, or Jean-Paul Sartre. I’m very relieved to know that I haven’t been depriving myself of anything worthwhile by avoiding Mailer’s prose.
Nov 11, 2007 - 3:34 pm 97. jgmurphy:“Freddie :
Yeah. Because long after Norman Mailer has fallen into the dustbin of history, the name “Roger Kimball” will ring throughout the halls of academe.
Right?”
So what are you saying—-that no “little writer” dare criticize any “big writer”? Who makes that determination—the NYT bestseller list?
Based on your logic, no one who is not already a literary celebrity can have any valid insights. This is the kind of artistic fascism that has led us into the sorry straits in which we are now stuck.
Nov 11, 2007 - 3:48 pm 98. Dawn:Greatest War Novels?
Hmmm…’Red Badge of Courage’ and ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ come to mind. No Mailer there, either.
And any man whose only way of defining women is via porn isn’t an intellectual, genius or artiste. He’s a creep at best. And Mailer never quite rose to the exhalted status of creep.
Nov 11, 2007 - 4:28 pm 99. Vox Populi:Is it possible to note that Mailer, like Susan Sontag, fits a well-established pattern: that of the Jewish egomaniac adulated and influential far beyond his or her deserts? Perniciously influential, that is: where Marx and Freud led, Sontag and Mailer followed.
Nov 11, 2007 - 4:51 pm 100. Elle:I would have called Mailer a latent homosexual based on his fascination with buggery but that would be to slander homosexuals who are not sexually stuck in adolescence. In spite of his own belief that his every utterance was golden, he was a purile hack who enjoyed the lionization of other middle aged narcissists and college kids (who at least come by their narcissism honestly as an ordinary phase of maturation).
Nov 11, 2007 - 5:38 pm 101. Edward Yang:RIP Mailer. You should have stuck with engineering. Perhaps you could hae expressed your “rebellion” by building falling bridges. Then people would have recognized your fakery and you would have died a penniless drunk, a fitting end.
Norman Mailer was everything wrong with American literature rolled into one hairy, unstoppable ball of fury. He was the apotheosis of a type of man that will hopefully be consigned to the dustbin of history, along with the whole detestable generation he comes from.
Nov 11, 2007 - 5:44 pm 102. Jane:I read the beginning of “An American Dream” and I regret that those hours are lost forever. I could have been vacuuming.
The differences between O.J and Mailer
1) Mailer was not as adept at killing his victim.
2) Mailer would get a premium seat at Elaine’s while dinning with the upper Eastside swells. O.J. would clear the place out.
Nov 11, 2007 - 5:56 pm 103. MrWonderful:You people who have proudly never read, and never intend to read, Mailer are cheating yourselves. Kimball’s hatchet job says some arguable (and even true) things, but relying on Roger Kimball for an assessment of Norman Mailer is like relying on a vegetarian for a trustworthy review of a barbecue joint.
Most of Mailer’s books were bad, but if you can’t find something excellent in The Armies of the Night or The Executioner’s Song, you’re not looking.
Instead, you’re probably looking to disguise a sense of moral superiority in the costume of literary analysis. It’s easy to deplore a lot of Mailer’s behavior and roll your eyes at his theorizing.
His metaphysics aside, he had a fantastic prose style that found and brought out connections–some plausible, some ludicrous–between highly disparate things. If that’s not a laudable writerly achievment, I don’t know what is. And he could be deliberately funny, which is something you can say about almost none of his detractors.
Of course, the conservative (not to say the reactionary) position is one which insists on equating the literary value of something with the “values” it embodies. Leave it up to those people, and we’d never have seen Ulysses or Lolita.
And that Elizabeth Hardwick “parody” was awful, not because it was so indistinguishable from its target, but because it simply–as bad parodies always do–repeated its target’s tropes without any feel for or ability to mimic its style. Elizabeth Hardwick is incapable of writing a good parody of anyone but herself, which she does on a regular basis.
In other words, what The Shadow said.
Nov 11, 2007 - 6:21 pm 104. Xanthippe:Brilliant article. I’ve long wondered why Mailer had his reputation; I’ve found him completely repugnant.
Reading many of these comments, I’m struck by the number with some variation objecting to trashing a deam man. At risk of sounding crass, death has not made him any more special than life did. We all die.
What better time than now to answer the praise for Mailer? He’ll be forgotten shortly.
Nov 11, 2007 - 8:45 pm 105. Monty S:One of the more maddening things about the far left is thier tendacy to choose scum for thier heroes. Mailer, like Jimmy Carter and Bill Walton was a friend and supporter of Abbie Hoffman. Abbie Hoffman was an anarchist who advocated random acs of vandalism. I would love to burn down all three of thier houses (when Norman was still alive of course) and when they compained, say I was just doing what your pal Abbie told me to do.
Nov 11, 2007 - 9:24 pm 106. Dana R.:I have two points I’d like to make.
First, while I have no admiration for Mailer’s works, I am mystified by people who say, “Well, I haven’t read any of his works, but I agree with you completely.” This seems akin to walking down the street, hearing a boxing match being held, running into a building, and starting to kick a man who has already been knocked out. At the very best, you’re simply going to get “booed” by the people who have paid the admission and understand the game. You certainly won’t be applauded for “being on the winning team”. It would also be easy to expound on the political consequences of the idea that, “I don’t need to have read it to have an opinion”, but this is really not the place.
Second, Mailer’s delusional thinking about his own importance and the awe in which not just the literati but EVERYONE was supposed to hold him is illustrated in an anecdote. This comes from “NYC Babylon” by Victor Bockris. I unfortunately don’t have it in front of me, so I’ll paraphrase. During the 70s, Mailer was mugged on his way to a dinner party in Lower Manhattan. Stumbling into the apartment with blood running down his face, he shouted of his attackers, “Don’t they know that I’ve always been a friend to the Negro?”
Nov 11, 2007 - 9:24 pm 107. henry:Roger,
When you croak, almost no one will notice and, outside your family, even less will care.
Carry on.
Nov 11, 2007 - 9:30 pm 108. Earnest Canuck:Arts and Letters Daily’s site states that Mailer is dead, tersely links to a score of obituaries, and at the end of that list says: there is “dissent from Roger Kimball.”
You click ‘cos, what, is this Kimball arguing that Mailer is in fact alive?
He nearly is. This is a great, fast-acting dose of venom, Mr Kimball, but it’s unlikely to kill off the Mailer cult, especially considering what a booster shot they just got.
Two things. You slight “The Executioner’s Song” overmuch; in fact, you barely consider it except as some funhouse reflection of the Abbott affair. But “Song” was a book first, an extraordinary one; even today it does not read like an act of convict-worship or murder-glam, unless you look at it through an extra-literary rear-view mirror.
Speaking of which, it’s been almost 40 years since the Doors released “Back Door Man,” so it may behoove us to be a little less pucker-mouthed about the deceased’s enthusiasm for anal, dontcha think?
Even for those of us who are prudish about spouse-stabbing and political nihilism, it’s a stretch to link Mailerism’s dark side to the common practice of going up a willing lady’s bum. It’s not a very deviant or even fetishistic act, really, is it?
One retires to consider these matters — later, one’s gonna read some more of Roger Kimball’s stuff, as you’re a helluva writer, sir, though you may wish to retire the term “buggery.”
Nov 12, 2007 - 1:50 am 109. The Sanity Inspector:He was an important New York City writer. I suspect he was whooped up into a national figure only because the NYC press tends to mistake their burg for the entire rest of the country.
Nov 12, 2007 - 5:58 am 110. Captain Hate:It’s pretty amusing how many people scurry to Roger’s blog to tell him how insignificant he is.
Nov 12, 2007 - 6:10 am 111. Mary G:Brilliant! I always wondered why no one dared to point out the racist assumptions of “The White Negro.” I boycotted the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics annual meeting when they had Mailer as their featured speaker.
Nov 12, 2007 - 6:21 am 112. Chester White:I never read much Mailer. All I know is that ANCIENT EVENINGS is one of the most godawful books ever written.
Made my skin crawl, not the author’s purpose I am sure.
Nov 12, 2007 - 6:54 am 113. Anthony Steyning:I don’t wish to be a bore, but this is how I opened a Godot critique several years ago, quoting an absurd Mailer:
WAITING FOR BECKETT
Subtitle: Any Godot Will Do)
by
Anthony Steyning
Tell him that you saw us… Didi pleads with the boy somewhere in the middle then gets reiterated just before the end, in Waiting for Godot—- easily the best line of the play. I first saw Godot some twenty years after it premiered in Paris: I didn’t understand it at all. Later on, I bought a paper-back copy of the work at W.H. Smith in Montreal, reading the play over and over again, still not understanding a bloody word. I was in my late twenties then, and mightily pissed off with myself for not fathoming a famous piece of work, praised by critics the world over, inquiring timidly about its meaning among Irish friends, all literate theatre buffs, who spewed out near mystical explanations that also went over my head. Certainly the work is noble, tender, a Buster Keaton stone-face burlesque show, containing great lines like Thank you for your society, and something or other Gives us the feeling that we exist…which I now know to be a common French colloquialism.
Pretty stuff, all of it, and not as such beyond my reach, but still, at the time I miserably continued not getting the whole of it. I remember people like Eric Bentley calling Beckett’s Godot a masterful creation, the quintessence of existentialism. And a Norman Mailer statement to the effect that Beckett had sexually(!) re-established Christianity. Despite those nonsensical contradictions I pretended I believed both of these chaps, just to be on the safe side. But as it turns out they were as flabbergasted as I was that a staged, moving, plotless tableau mesmerized, inventing those crazy descriptions of the work only to cover up their own pathetic befuddlement. Maybe someone’ll sexually re-establish Christianity on stage tonight. Wanna come?
But now thirty years on, on a recent visit to Canada, and thanks to a PBS channel in my hotel room, during a broadcast celebrating etc etc
Need I say more?
Nov 12, 2007 - 6:59 am 114. jum1801:I comment again only to quibble about a cultural allusion I believe to be erroneous.
Earnest Canuck said: “(I)t’s been almost 40 years since the Doors released “Back Door Man,” so it may behoove us to be a little less pucker-mouthed about the deceased’s enthusiasm for anal, dontcha think?”
Mr. Canuck uses “Back-Door Man” as the historical piton upon which to hang the assertion that discussions about and/or preferences for anal sex were mainstreamed in American culture at least by the time of that Doors song. (I wonder why buggery is limited in his comment to the heterosexual variety, inasmuch as Mailer certainly didn’t.) I’m sure the comment was delivered with a dismissive chuckle at the rigid and frigid upon whom Mailer’s invigorating sexual liberation is so obviously wasted.
Well, it may be that discussions of that love which historically dared not mention its path had been pushed into the mainstream of American popular culture by the time of the 1968 Democratic Convention (although I don’t recall it that way), but Mr. Canuck’s evidence does nothing to prove it.
The term “back-door man” has been used in American blues for almost a century, and has nothing to do with human geography. Rather, it refers to a lover of married women, who sneaks unseen into the marital house through the back door. Indeed, the song isn’t even a Morrison “poem”: it was written in 1961 by blues icon Willie Dixon, who without question was describing a man who was a most successful secret seducer of married women.
Even in today’s blues and popular music, the term retains its original meaning. Modern paens to off-road love employ a vast array of different picturesque words and phrases to describe anal sex. Yes, “backdoor” is used as an adjective describing buggery, but the term “backdoor man” is not.
So I think Mr. Canuck is in need of another example as support for his implicit claim that those readers bemused by Mailer’s fascination with the colon as sexual object are but Menckenian booboisie hopelessly ignorant of modern sexual practices. But I’d stay away from “Ancient Evenings”.
Nov 12, 2007 - 9:29 am 115. Doh-San:Norman who?
Nov 12, 2007 - 11:38 am 116. Doug:Mailer: Phony all the way.
Nov 12, 2007 - 11:55 am 117. R F Randall:Thanks very much, Mr. Kimball. I was searching all over the Internet for an honest appraisal of Norman Mailer’s oeuvre and yours is the best. I thought he was an ersatz Hemingway, who really didn’t have the talent to match one of America’s greatest writers. A friend should have pulled him aside and said, “Look, Hemingway is dead and you really do not have the talent to fill his shoes.” Mailer did win Pulitzer Prizes but, fortunately, the Swedish academy never selected him for a Nobel. That is difficult to understand in light of their current Nobel Peace prize choices. I’m happy to say I read very few of Mailer’s books. His epitaph?: Exit the Clown.
Nov 12, 2007 - 12:11 pm 118. Moonbattery:Obituary for a Moonbat: Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer is dead. Kudos to Roger Kimball for not pretending this is a national tragedy: Mailer epitomized a certain species of macho, adolescent radicalism that helped to inure the wider public to displays of violence, anti-American tirades, and s…
Nov 12, 2007 - 12:48 pm 119. John Black,:As a true veteran of WWII (1940-1945). Two tours of duty in the Pacific from Guadalcanal -Okinawa). I found Mailer a piece of crap. Guilt of complicity in the death of an innocent man by getting a killer released from prison on his influence. May he rot in hell! if there is one. What he wrote was like him, BS!
Nov 12, 2007 - 1:17 pm 120. Bill's Notes:Norman Mailer, RIP
Late on this. Former Jersey-Shore writer Norman Mailer has died (yes, I’m joking about the JS part. He was born in Long Branch, NJ, but grew up in Brooklyn.) Maybe now that he’s passed, I’ll read one of his books. I’ve only read a few excerpts. Reading…
Nov 12, 2007 - 1:36 pm 121. william:Last thoughts on Mailer: While not a great writer, he certainly knew how to play the part of one. He has certainly inspired a lot of comments–mostly unfavorable but still a lot of comments. He was anti-war, pro drugs, and pro wanton sex. I suppose wanton sex is relatively harmless, but if great sex did all the wonderful things Mailer claimed, pornstars would be philosopher-kings. And as for drugs, well drug abuse–not warfare–has been the slayer of several generations of American youth. It was not some existential demon that made Mailer stab his wife. It was booze. I come from a lumpenprole background. It was not drugs and sex that delivered me from a hard life, but my embrace of steady work and middle class values. Norman Mailer, Hunter Thompson, Abby Hoffman, and any number of rock stars advocated a half-baked kind of liberation that was more tawdry than the values they despised. They sent more young Americans to their deaths that McNamara and Rumsfeld put together.
Nov 12, 2007 - 4:28 pm 122. Tom Gray:To the above: “Even for those of us who are prudish about spouse-stabbing and political nihilism …”
Since when is objecting to spouse-stabbing “prudish”? As to political nihilism, it seems to have been quite fashionable, off and on, for some years.
Mailer’s main legacy to us, the common folk, is his unstinting praise of the perverse, particularly in himself. He was a shock-jock, and, despite the kudos from many, not an especially good writer. Unless you count befuddlement as a talent.
Nov 12, 2007 - 4:38 pm 123. Joseph McNulty:Mailer always was more self-promoter than artist. As a result, his life will be remembered fondly by Dick Cavett, but not by literary history. He was very much a creature of the Sixties, for good and ill. These days, it looks mostly ill, and his “journalism” looks very dated. Is there a single novel for which he will really be remembered as an artist? Or is there nothing beyond his boxing and screwing to talk about?
Nov 12, 2007 - 4:42 pm 124. diana:Wow, does this mean that James Wolcott won’t be writing things like “The latest New Criterion is ripe with splendors” anymore?
Nov 12, 2007 - 5:16 pm 125. Wanda:Ummm…about “Naked and the Dead” and four-letter words–I thought the big thing about that book was the joke that all the characters had head colds because they kept saying “fug you, you fugging fug.”
Nov 12, 2007 - 8:32 pm 126. Tony Donovan:I read that book; it was okay. So I read “Armies of the Night.” I guess you had to have been there. Read nothing else of his; he wrote like a bar drunk talks.
Oh–what’s the big deal about Hemingway being so much better? Are you guys kidding? “Across the River and into the Trees”…”Death in the Afternoon”…even the ballyhooed “Old Man and the Sea” (the great Dimaggio…oh, lordy).
No wonder nobody reads “literary” novels anymore if these poseurs are the best the form has to offer.
Everyone knows that “The Good Die Young” but do “The Bad Die Old”? The demise of Norman Mailer, aetat 84, would seem to answer my question in the affirmative.
I’ve never read any of Mailer’s works that I can remember but his name has been familiar to me in the same way that the name Eldridge Cleaver (Soul on Ice – which I also never read) remains in my mind.
In a sense, one never really had to read the literary works (for want of a better term) of the illuminati of the 60s. They all pretty much said the same thing: it was all “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” or similar concoction, more a noxious witch’s brew than a philosophy of life, and a lethal drug it was too, for the young and naive. For not only did many heed the call to “Drop Out”, they also, alas, as a result, “Dropped Dead”.
But the main reason I was never attracted to the writings of these lost souls is that they seemed to me to be unflinchingly infantile. Like, you know, they never seemed to grow up. In fact, the older they got, the sillier they seemed to act. (Allen Ginsberg features mightily in my mind in this respect).
There’s nothing more embarrassing than to view a pop concert today featuring “artists” well into their 60s running around the stage, dishing it out on their electric guitars, tight pants and all, as if they were still in their early 20s. Haven’t they already made enough money? Is there no self-respect left? Pathetic is the only adjective that I can think of that describes this sort of spectacle.
Thus too with Norman Mailer. He continued to be – or pretended to be – l’enfante terrible right up to the last, but the biggest joke of all was really on him in so many ways.
Someone once said “Anyman’s Death Diminishes Me” and in the great scheme of things, I suppose that’s true. But in my estimation, Norman Mailer can only be considered as the exception that proves the rule.
Nov 12, 2007 - 9:35 pm 127. Peter Ilich:With few books ever read (but thoroughly); living in a different country and uninformed about his political views and his most egregious excesses, I read Norman Mailer long time ago, translated (probably stylistically compromised). I cannot deny his talent. If nothing else, his “The Naked and The Dead” captures the essence of interpersonal relations in a profoundly dehuminanized environment as an army is; if you have ever been a soldier in an army you know what I am talking about. His other books I read, “An American Dream”, “Why Are We in Vietnam” are a little whacky but there was raw talent there. But hey — I bet Roger Kimball would make a lot better Party member than Norman!
Nov 12, 2007 - 9:42 pm 128. Stark:I’m not a huge Mailer fan by any means, but I did find The Executioner’s Song to be a particularly excellent work. I’m pretty sure Mailer was more restrained in his treatment of Gilmore than Kimball here offers up. He toys with the idea that there might have have been something more to Gilmore: maybe something a little heroic, maybe something a little tragic. To suggest he was “Heroic at best, malignant at worst” is pretty low-key for Mailer, and just doesn’t seem to fit the mosaic of bombast and megalomania painted by Kimball.
I tend to be disgusted by the vermin who crawl out of the woodwork to gnaw on a fresh corpse like this, but I’m not here to defend Mailer as a person. I know little about him. For those who haven’t read it, or any of his work, and are so quick to judge, however, I’d encourage you to give him one shot as a writer and read Executioner’s Song. Draw your own conclusions.
Nov 12, 2007 - 10:59 pm 129. Kurtis:I’ll be honest, I don’t know all there is to know about Norman Mailer and I haven’t read all of his works. But the tradition of recalling all that is positive about the recently deceased is something I am quite fond of, and to see it ignored here by Mr. Kimball saddens me. In an age where prolonged success only sharpens the focus on your faults, I find it comforting to see a rosy picture painted of a passed on celebrity; we’ll get our fill of dissenting views in a few months when the “tell-all” books start to come out. But now thanks to the birth of the blog, we can have those attention-starved, publicity hungry trolls post their “true feelings” the second the time of death is declared, and I find this really depressing.
If Mr. Kimball even reads this comment, I’m sure he’ll have some highfalutin response that will no doubt put me in my place; I mean after all, how could I possibly compete with that bowtie? And my heavens, look at all those books he’s authored that he so graciously advertises to the left of the page! The guy obviously knows what he’s doing. But I just want it to be known that I think it should be required that anyone who dies should get at least a frigging day–24 hours–of uncritical thoughts. Is that really so much to ask?
Nov 13, 2007 - 2:46 am 130. Jack H:Since I use this article as a primary source, allow me to commend it to any interested reader:
http://forgottenprophets.blogspot.com/2007/11/norman-mailer.html
The upshot is, however facile Mailers intellect, he was an idiot.
Best,
J
Nov 13, 2007 - 3:12 am 131. Dirt:Mailer was a self serving patriarchal misogynistic pig who couldnt oink out an intelligent sentence, let alone a bloody novel.
dirt
Nov 13, 2007 - 5:49 am 132. Casey Cole:So Mailer was an asshole? Who isn’t? But there is a lot to love in Mailer’s prose. And his praise of the various criminals and psychopaths was a lot more nuanced than Kimball makes it out to be.
He would have loved to read the comments by the blowhards who so proudly proclaim that they’ve never read him but are fully prepared to weigh in on his value as a man and an artist.
Nov 13, 2007 - 9:08 am 133. William R.:An excellent screed. I will respectfully suggest two points of disagreement. First, as others have noted, Of a Fire on the Moon is probably the single best bit of writing about one of the most important events of our time. If Mailer did nothing else (which might have been preferable), he would deserve to be remembered for that. Second, I think you underrate Marilyn a bit.
Nov 13, 2007 - 9:23 am 134. Jay:Terrific piece. . .and right-on, in my view.
To those who praise Of A Fire on the Moon, I must respectfully disagree. It’s as bloated and pretentious a work as I’ve read. Within the first 10 pages, you’ll be longing for Tom Wolfe’s Right Stuff, flaws and all.
Nov 13, 2007 - 9:41 am 135. T. Hanski:ahem says :
“Kimball’s right. Waiting another week or two to publish this is not going to make him any less right.”
And, may I add, after a week or two Mailer would be long forgotten.
Nov 13, 2007 - 11:24 am 136. Randy M:“And one thing more: while Mailer was a provocateur, he was without cruelty or cowardice,”
Nov 13, 2007 - 9:28 pm 137. Ralph:Ummm… was Roger wrong about Mailer stabbing his wife? Or about him getting a murderer out of prison and then defending him when he murdered again?
People who piss on society don’t deserve their moment of silence.
I’ve never been able to get through more than a few pages of any of his “must read” books.
Nov 13, 2007 - 9:53 pm 138. Alan Davis:It’s amusing to see how distant the left-wing media echo chamber is from “the rest of us” – I doubt anyone actually reads the tens of thousands of front-page articles on the websites, except for fellow left-wing elite journos.
This so-called obituary (which I found via Paglia’s Salon column) is an ideological rant, as others have pointed out. The problem with Kimball is that I can predict what he’s going to write before I read it. That was only sometimes the case with Mailer, whose best work will be read and remembered long after Kimball is forgotten. Kimball was obviously scarred in rerverse by the sixties and has yet to put the era behind him. While there is often much to be said for restraint instead of posturing (though constantly biting one’s tongue can shorten it by an inch or two), Kimball is posturing at least as much as Mailer ever did – if you don’t have time for his rant, take a look at that bow tie in his photo – but there’s a difference; Mailer’s posturing, even at its most pompous, is always more invigorating and culturally valuable than Kimball’s predictable cliches about the sixties. He should get a life.
Nov 14, 2007 - 8:39 am 139. Jon:I agree with Stark re “The Executioner’s Song.” It’s a splendid novel (or whatever the hell it is). That was my first encounter with Mailer’s work, and I have been sorely disappointed in everything else I’ve tried. So what if he was an egomaniac? Who cares if he was (gasp) a misogynist and an all-around jerk? He wrote at least one great book, and that should be enough for any critic. If we were to write off every artist who was guilty of bad behavior, we’d be left with nothing.
Nov 14, 2007 - 8:46 am 140. Dan Kolis:Well, the Village voice seems to burn a new trail of thought regarding people a little out of the mainstream having access to mass media. This alone is a serious good thing.
Nov 14, 2007 - 11:09 am 141. Crawford Hart:Whatever else might go into a definition of true art, it must be capable of transcending it’s own era. For years (ever since the Dick Cavette show was cancelled, actually) it has been obvious that Mailer’s work will not accomplish this feat. As Kimball so clearly explains, it is impossible to understand Mailer’s prominence apart from the era that spawned him, an era into which he offered no insight or deeper understanding, but, rather, accepted at face value. His place in history will be up in the cheap seats, right next to Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Jefferson Airplane, and “My Mother the Car.” It wasn’t all a silly time, but Mailer embodies that faction that mistook its silliness for insight, excess for creativity and infantile expressions for a bold new direction. The 60s offered indisputable evidence of how things can really go wrong; the inevitable, subsequent corrections have, of necessity, been beneficial to the whole society. That Kimball’s essay, on Art’s and Letters, is the only one among the numerous Mailer obits listed under the heading “and a dissent” only shows that there is still a good bit of correction left to accomplish.
Nov 14, 2007 - 11:35 am 142. Rob Anderson:When I saw the message after clicking “Post”, I knew you wouldn’t publish my letter. I guess I was wrong about you. You’re not a coward.
You’re a chickenshit, which is infinitely worse.
Nov 14, 2007 - 12:34 pm 143. R.J. Torre:On war literature, George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia” is unmentioned, but should be read and can be re-read.
Nov 14, 2007 - 2:37 pm 144. DC in OC:Norman Mailer is Dead
On November 10th Norman Mailer shuffled off his mortal coil. He now stands before God and, I have little doubt, is attempting to explain what, exactly, was so chic about championing the cause of a murderer and stabbing your wife in a drunken…
Nov 14, 2007 - 6:19 pm 145. DC in OC:Norman Mailer is Dead
On November 10th Norman Mailer shuffled off his mortal coil. He now stands before God and, I have little doubt, is attempting to explain what, exactly, was so chic about championing the cause of a murderer and stabbing your wife in a drunken…
Nov 14, 2007 - 6:27 pm 146. Adrian:Re: Everyone who says we should lay off Mailer because he just died, a far greater writer than Mailer said:
“He that writes may be considered as a kind of general challenger, whom every one has a right to attack; since he quits the common rank of life, steps forward beyond the lists, and offers his merit to the public judgement. To commence author is to claim praise, and no man can justly aspire to honour, but at the hazard of disgrace.”
Nov 14, 2007 - 6:43 pm 147. Ludovico Fischer:(Samuel Johnson, The Rambler #1751)
If I may chime in somewhat late, I’ll say I have been a bit puzzled by this piece. It reminds of an observation in one of Susan Sontag’s earlier collections that, somehow, Mailer ‘was hard to take seriously’. I am puzzled because I think the interest of Mailer’s writing (I am writing this in earnest) is his particular brand of irony. Do you really believe that, for example, his bombastic flight of fancy about ‘America’ at the end of ‘The Armies of the Night’ is ’serious’? He often assembled jarring elements of style and substance, as if to say “Can this really work together?’ with a perplex stare, and at the same time, frenetically kicking it everywhere to make it work. But I believe he was, in part, conscious of this. Hence his fooling around.
On another note, I think defining Marylin Monroe as just a ‘comedic’ actress is limiting. Think, for instance, of her performance in John Huston’s ‘The Misfits’. And I wonder if Mr Roger Kimball is not projecting on the sixties (they viewed ‘any appeal to facts as an unacceptably authoritarian threat’), the kind of ‘discurse’ which became fashionable in the United States academia at hand of the children of the sixties, from the mid-70′onward. Mailer himself was too old to have held such language. He did not understand ‘existentialism’, and talked a lot about it, that was it for him.
Regards,
Ludovico Fischer
Nov 14, 2007 - 9:24 pm 148. Anonymous:I read the Executioner’s Song and came away with the impression that Mailer was “a moral cretin”. Of the two men that Gilmore killed weren’t any worthy of some remembrance by this “great author” ? How many pages of his door-stopper did Mailer devote to them? No sir, those young men were just putty in the hands of the artist Gilmore, like paint in Rembrandt’s hand. For a so-called deep observer of the human scene Mailer missed out on the baleful influence of Gary’s father. That man was the Devil incarnate. Mikhail Gilmore, Gary’s younger brother wrote about it in his own terrifying book Shot in the Heart.
Nov 15, 2007 - 12:49 am 149. Paul G:Norman is in the Provincetown ground now and may he rest in peace where the Pilgrims really first landed. I never seen such a vile outpouring of denigration for a writer that most of the posts haven’t bothered even to read.But they are quick to render hallow, mean-spirited barbs at the deceased artist.I wonder how well any of you detractors cotributions to the world would measure up aginst Mr. Mailer.I know you hate the prose from whence it sprouted.How much more ignorant and ridiculous could it be than to render judgements and pronouncements without an intimate knowledge of the body of work.Whatever happened to the adage….if you can’t say anything good about someone, it’s best to remain silent.Listen, no less a brilliant “conservative” mind as the esteemed William F. Buckley has just called Norman the “Master of the Metaphor” in his recent column. Enough said.
Nov 15, 2007 - 4:43 am 150. renminbi:Reat in eternal peace, we will miss your moral compass and conscience, Norman Mailer Esquire!
You walk into a restaurant and order a meal. The plate is brought to you and you see mold on the food. Do you have to eat it to know it is rancid?
Nov 15, 2007 - 9:40 am 151. Diogo:Mr Kimball,
Nov 15, 2007 - 9:46 am 152. The economics of good and evil « vulgar morality:I am not an american and I had never heard of you before. I have only read one half of a Mailer’s book (The Castle in the Forest). I expected more from the prose, but find the narrative wonderful. I say this, because I want to make clear that my motivation in writing to you is not to make a stand ─ for or against Mailer as a writer. My motivation comes from having read previous comments about this post.
For starts, I find it ridiculous that some of these people are criticizing you for stating your opinion about a recently deceased person. It’s the same as telling someone not to speak badly of the government while there are soldiers fighting a war. It is the sort of thing that signals a very simple mind.
Nevertheless what worries me the most are the people who state they are never going to read Mailer because of your portrait of him. I say of him because that’s what you really did. You define his work as awful, but what really seems to bother you is the man himself.
I have learned to mistrust people who evaluate an artist’s work in terms of his life. Readers of your post should do the same.
After reading it I felt more interested in Mailer’s work than before, not less. I cannot condone the praise of violence, I absolutely oppose it. I know nothing of the Abbott affair, had never heard of it. Still, your account of it reeks of moral righteousness, but I presume you wouldn’t consider this a bad thing.
All in all, after reading the post I have the feeling that Mailer, for all of his reported presumptuousness, was a very interesting person. For me anyone who has the courage to transcend the values of normalcy is interesting. Anyone who can envision the possibility of other cultures, other ways of being, is humble, not presumptuous.
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