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Roger Kimball’s article was fantastic. Please assure me he had it written earlier. It is beyond comprehension that someone could write such an article in just a few hours time.

the armies of the night was perhaps his best, and it held forth the promise of something he never delivered on: ridiculing the left.

i remember reading about the parties associated with the protest and feeling that deep down mailer saw that they were all phonies, posturing.

sadly, as he got older he got more loony leftish – the opposite of what most wise people do.

“…commemorate the polyphiloprogentive wife-stabber and booster of homicidal misfits.” What a superb phrase! Great piece by Kimball.

Of course the Left will haver Mailerbasms all over the place. They love him the way they love Iraqi insurgents and other assorted terrorists who murder. Mailer embodied all that is insane with the Left.

As for Mailer and his fellow-travelers, it’s easy to posture as ‘revolutionaries’ when you have not much at all at risk. I’ve never been impressed by those who pretend to be that which they’re obviously not (whether revolutionary or macho or poor) when it is soooooo obviously just a pose.

When I read Roger Kimball’s piece, I wondered how Norman Mailer maintained his prominence decade after decade in view of all the statements he made which seemed to deliberately offend feminists, as well as many people who do not self-identify as feminists but who care about women.

The following post by Scott Johnson includes the unusual story of Norman Mailer going to then-friend Norman Podhoretz’ apartment for help after he stabbed his wife, reportedly almost killing her. It seems almost unbelievably bizarre to me that a prominent intellectual was welcomed on talk shows after doing something like this, especially considering Roger Kimball’s description of Mailer’s earlier expression of admiration toward a man who had “courageously” stabbed his mistress. Try to imagine a conservative author staying on the talk-show beat after something like that. There is also a reader vignette in Johnson’s post which may help explain how Mailer survived feminists opposition. He seems to have been a self-promoting, audacious performance artist as well as a writer. Perhaps that was his greater gift.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2007/11/018993.php

Some of the information in the Scott Johnson and Roger Kimball posts made me wonder if perhaps Norman Mailer had a personality disorder which limited his capacity for empathy toward people with whom he did not identify closely, while increasing his lionization of people he imagined to be like himself, including some of the characters in his books. Sometimes people with personality disorders (and even full-blown sociopaths) have considerable charm.

So much macho posturing; so much crappy prose.

Seems that during the later 60’s all I read was Mailer, Hentoff, Goldstein, Rosenbaum and whoever else The Village Voice was byling. It passed the time on the Sea Beach Express.

I moved to SoCal in 1971 and gradually dug myself out of the depths of the Voice and the subway, eventually voting for Reagan.

About the only good that remains from all those Mailer reads is the excuse I use for doing a lame Lindy:

Tough Guys Don’t Dance

That Mailer has done some good work is a fact. The Executioner’s Song was a brilliant handling of Schiller’s source material. Coincidently, I listened to a taped version of his Hitler book recently and found it valuable.

His short piece on the Griffith/Paret fight is the best short fight piece ever written.

Everyone else can go on about Mailer’s voluminous rubbish productions and the intellectual flaccidity in his later years.

What really captures my attention is this: Too few post-war GI writers and politicians really delivered on their experience. I’m praying that those returning from the current wars will form the potent core of America’s intellectual, cultural, and political future. But, Mailer, Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy, Vidal, Agnew, Nixon etc. didn’t do that well.

That last para isn’t as clear as I could make it, but it is a difficult reality to express.

What you describe as a nice-jewish-boy trying oh-so-desperately to be cool Hitchens describes as having chutzpah.

“The Naked and the Dead” alone makes Mailer worth remembering. That he became a boring Has Been doesn’t matter. I have always regarded his later ramblings as a fear of not being able to repeat is prior successes. He lost the courage to do what is very difficult (writing) and took up the easy life of celebrity agitator.