The death yesterday of Norman Mailer at the age of 84 robs the American literary world of an outrageous genius who wrote some of the finest books of the 20th century while exhibiting a seemingly insatiable taste for volcanic public provocation.
As a prolific author who competed ferociously for the title of America’s Greatest Living Writer, Mailer proved a formidable but frequently erratic novelist and a brilliant but often self-indulgent journalist.
Yet his literary exploits were repeatedly overshadowed by his tumultuous private life. He feuded bitterly with fellow writers, he stabbed one of his six wives, headbutted Gore Vidal, bit a chunk out of Rip Torn’s ear and often declared that he couldn’t get started on a new book until he’d had a good fistfight.
Mailer will be remembered as the creator of masterpieces such as The Naked and the Dead, his searing debut war novel based on his experiences fighting the Japanese in the Philippines; and The Executioner’s Song, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the execution of Gary Gilmore. He was also a radical left-wing political activist who campaigned against the war in Vietnam and once ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York.
Yet it was his gargantuan appetites for wine and women, and his extraordinary talent for picking a fight, that lifted him from the ranks of his mostly reclusive literary rivals and turned him into a New York legend. It often seemed about Mailer that if there wasn’t a handy world war to write about, he would try to start one himself.
The stories of his macho posturing are legion, from the time he dismissed America’s leading women writers as “fey, old hat, quaintsy and dykily psychotic”, to the day he encountered a passing punk while walking his poodles in Brooklyn.
According to Peter Manso’s biography of Mailer, the punk incautiously suggested to the burly author that his poodles were homosexual. “Nobody’s gonna call my dog a queer,” Mailer exploded, before throwing himself at the punk and almost losing an eye in the ensuing altercation.
He seems to have inherited his belligerence at least in part from his revered mother, Fanny Schneider Mailer, who once marched to his school and ordered his teacher to change his C grade to an A because Norman wasn’t capable of mediocre work.
When Mailer later attacked his second wife, Adele Morales, after getting drunk at a party – he stabbed her with a penknife, narrowly missing her heart – his mother stoutly defended her son’s outburst on the grounds that he was not an ordinary man, and that marriage to him was not for an ordinary woman. When Mailer won his first Pulitzer for The Armies of The Night – a factual account of the Vietnam protest movement – Fanny complained that he should have won the Nobel. IN the course of a career that produced 40 books, Mailer was both lionised for his natural, accessible prose and ridiculed for his occasional excursions into mind-numbing fantasy. Harlot’s Ghost, his 1991 novel about the CIA, was rubbished in The Sunday Times as “night-marishly bloated and entirely insubstantial . . . [it] seems the appalling manifestation of a defunct talent”.
His most recent novel, The Castle in the Forest, imagined Hitler as a bed-wetting adolescent coopted by the Devil. The book outraged German and Jewish critics, one of whom described it as “clumsy and embarrassing”. The fuss provoked a characteristic response from Mailer, who showed that even in his eighties he still relished a scrap. “What’s the point of being a writer if you can’t irritate a great many people?”
To another interviewer, he expressed himself differently: “One of the advantages of getting old is, you really don’t give a f*** any more. What are they going to do, come and kill me? Fine, make a martyr of me! Make me immortal!”
Mailer was born to a Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey in 1923. He was only 16 when he went to Harvard to study aeronautical engineering. After he graduated he was drafted into the army and sent to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese in 1943.
His second world war experiences formed the basis of The Naked and the Dead, a towering achievement that some critics argue he never subsequently surpassed. Mailer often talked in his early years about writing the Great American Novel – the one that would place him definitively above rivals such as William Styron, Saul Bellow and John Updike as the undisputed heavyweight champion of words.
If he never quite convinced his critics of his own – and his mother’s – sense of his worth, he had no trouble turning his life into a champion display of excess. By the time he was 40, he had been married four times, the third time to Lady Jeanne Campbell, the daughter of the Duke of Argyll. He went through brief marriages with an actress and then a singer before subsiding gently into a surprisingly calm union with his sixth and last wife, Norris Church. He accumulated nine children in all.
In later years, he enjoyed reminiscing about life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, when he failed to become the city’s mayor despite promising to stage gladiator contests in Central Park. He would wander the streets with Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood, and get up to all kinds of trouble. He once described being led by Capote to a club named Corpse, which Mailer discovered to his horror had taken its name from a cadaver displayed on a slab in the middle of the dance floor.
Mailer screamed at Capote in disgust, but his diminutive companion shrugged, “Oh Norman, don’t be angry, they change the body fresh every day.” It turned out that the club had a deal with the city morgue.
Gore has less happy memories of his encounters with Mailer. The two authors were due to appear on a television chat show in 1971 when they got into a fight as they waited to appear. Mailer headbutted Vidal, giving him a serious nosebleed just as they went on air.
Little made Mailer happier than to pick a fight with feminists, and in 1986 he excelled himself by declaring at an international writers’ congress that “there are more men who are deeply interested in intellectual matters than women”.
Mailer came to be seen by the feminist movement as the antichrist of chauvinist piggery, a reputation that seemed richly deserved when the details of his marriage to Adele were laid bare in her subsequent book. She described how he punched her in the stomach when six months pregnant, how he urged her to take part in group sex then flew into jealous rages and ended up stabbing her.
Yet somehow Mailer managed to subside into a reasonably respectable old age. He would complain of being “irked” when critics preferred his journalism to his novels – “I think the novel is a higher form,” he said. “An earl does not want to be called a count.”
As he entered his sixties he told one interviewer that he knew he had a reputation “as a wild man, a crazy man . . . I’m not saying it’s a bum rap, but it’s an old rap. It’s certainly not true of the last 10 years”. WITH Mailer’s death will inevitably follow a worldwide literary effort to determine his true place among America’s literary giants. “When you’re a serious writer, there is a natural tendency to think that you may be the best,” he said this year.
Stephen Amidon, the British writer, said yesterday: “For a novelist of my generation, Mailer was an icon in so far as he was someone who combined being a great novelist with being a great engaged, political and cultural figure. He really was an action man, a public figure in the tradition of Hemingway. I don’t think we will see anything like him again.”
Jules Feiffer, the artist and playwright, summed up long ago the position of Mailer’s star in the firmament. “Remember in the 1950s and early 1960s, novelists were thought of as very important people,” he said.
“Back then one still thought of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis as having incredible stature, and Mailer was one of two or three Americans clearly destined to follow in their footsteps. And one treated him that way. He was also one of the few novelists who had a political philosophy, who was an original and radical political thinker.”
Back then, Mailer also had a role in breaking cultural taboos, particularly in Britain. Godfrey Smith of this newspaper worked as personal assistant to Lord Kemsley, its proprietor, in the early 1950s. Smith once remembered how Kemsley suffered an “embarrassing skirmish with our quietly shifting sexual mores” because of Mailer.
“Though firmly advised not to do anything so manifestly daft, he instructed our elderly editor, W W Hadley, to write for our front page a denunciation of Mailer’s war novel The Naked and the Dead.
“Hadley did so and slipped it in after the protesters had departed for the weekend. It claimed that the book was too obscene to review, and contained one particularly unfortunate phrase, seized on by The Spectator, about not leaving the book around for fear that womenfolk should read it. André Deutsch, Mailer’s publisher, could hardly get into his office the next week for the piles of orders. Even more chastening were the 300 letters we received from protesting readers.”
He'a lionized because he's been part of the American landscape with brute force -- his first novel got him in and he refuesed to leave. I believe The Deer Park is one of the best, along with Robert Stone's book, on Hollywood. He's huge because he's imporant to the baby boomers. For them, he's always been on the landscape -- above them -- the father, the wild, incorrible father but protective in an odd way. Of course, despite his sordid imperfections, he will be missed.
He wanted to achi eve greatness through the novel -- no one admitted that aloud -- and that he didn't amakes him normal, accessible. And it appears that he tried to be a decent father --his morals on that account make him more acceptable tjhan he might be perceived without them. He is a Warhol in some respects: he understood celebrity and America. His art is on par with Warhol's -- but Mailer by al these accounts was a much more human person.
Sadie, Boston, USA
My day was made one day while visiting Provincetown.
I rang Norman's doorbell and his wife answered the door. She called him, "Honey, there's someone here who would like your autograph."
He invited me in. He was seated in the dining room facing the Atlantic Ocean, and asked my name. He gave me his autograph and was very warm and hospitable.
Yes, that made my vacation in P'town well worth it!
Carol Rae Bradford, Orange, MA
G.U. The fight was written about Ali and Foreman......
Keith Pirelli, Rio De Janeiro,
Now he is dead and probably naked, if not buried in the Jewish tradition. He kept trying. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would have approved. Hemingway gave up and blew his brains out. I like Norman's exit stategy. Strive!
Richard, davie, florida
Although Mailer's prose was accessible, it lacked identity - a palpable sense of Mailerness - something that was tangible in the prose of his contemporaries like Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson. His 1977 novel 'The Fight' chronicling the 'Rumble in the Jungle' between Ali and Frazier is the closest he came to furthering the brash, brutal style of macho journalism...He will be missed - but not in the canon of American literature - too many of his contemporaries have died and been (rightly) immortalised recently. He wasn't an innovator but he was a talented writer. McG
G, U, UK
The world has lost a literary giant who in every aspect was larger than life. Norman Mailer's life will surely evolve into something Gatsbyesque in stature, as truth will meld with fiction. His persona will forever be perceived in the literary world as that of a wild and crazy American genius.
elliot eisen, toronto, canada