Norman Mailer

Hearing of the death of Norman Mailer at age 84 on November 10th, it occurred to me that I knew him more as a public figure than I did as a writer. I have read only two of his books: Tough Guys Don't Dance, a mystery thriller he wrote in six months when he needed some cash, and Armies of the Night, his award-winning book about the anti-war movement, specifically the march on the Pentagon in October, 1967.

That leaves a lot for me to catch up with. Reading the obituaries and tributes it would seem that the obvious choices would be The Naked and the Dead, his debut novel of World War II which made him an instant literary star, and The Executioner's Song, his Pulitzer-Prize winning true-crime novel about Gary Gilmore, which many cited as his masterpiece. Mailer was also a proficient writer of non-fiction and essays, and some of the other titles that interest me are Advertisements for Myself, which includes his famous essay "The White Negro" about hipsterism, and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, about the presidential conventions of 1968.

Despite Mailers' gifts as a writer he will always be best remembered for his antics: stabbing one of his wives, running a quixotic campaign for mayor New York City, championing a writer who was an ex-con who ended up murdering someone. Only a few months ago a clip surfaced on YouTube of Mailer getting into a fistfight with actor Rip Torn while Mailer was shooting a movie in the sixties.

And then there were his public appearances. There were two I thought of immediately upon hearing the news of his death. One was an appearance on the Dick Cavett Show, where he appeared to be drunk and sparred with fellow guests Gore Vidal and Janet Flanner. Cavett got into it with him and Mailer snidely made reference to Cavett's sheet of paper with questions on it. Cavett suggested he take the paper and "fold it four ways and stick it where the moon don't shine." Not only was it great television, but it makes me nostalgic for a time when people like Vidal and Mailer were guests on a network television show. The other is Mailer's participation in a panel discussion on feminism that occurred about 1970. The results were turned into a film called Town Bloody Hall, and I caught in on PBS many years ago. It's an absolute hoot, with Mailer trying to maintain some kind of macho swagger (he goes off on a rant about how the word "cunt" is appropriate) and debates with feminist firebrands like Germaine Greer.

But of course Mailer was a great writer. I found my old yellowed copy of The Armies of the Night and re-read it. Mailer divides the book into two parts. The first is The History as Novel, and he writes of himself in the third person, detailing three days surrounding the march on the Pentagon and his subsequent arrest. He rubs shoulders with men such as poet Robert Lowell, critic Dwight MacDonald and musician and mischief-maker Tuli Kupferberg. While he is writing in the third person, he doesn't spare his warts, and seems perfectly aware of his giant ego. And the man is such a brilliant stylist. Consider this passage, where he talks about obscenity:

"The common discovery of America was probably that Americans were the first people on earth to live for their humor; nothing was so important to Americans as humor. In Brooklyn, he had taken this for granted, at Harvard he had thought it was a by-product of being at Harvard, but in the Army he discovered that humor was probably in the veins and the roots of the local history of every state and county in America--the truth of the way it really felt over the years passed on a river of obscenity from small-town storyteller to storyteller there down below the bankers and the books and the educators and the legislators--so Mailer never felt more like an American than when he was naturally obscene--all the gifts of the American language came out in the happy play of obscenity upon concept, which enabled one to go back to concept again. What was magnificent about the word shit is that in enabled you to use the word noble: a skinny Southern cracker with a beatific smile on his face saying in the dawn in a Filipino rice paddy, "Man, I just managed to take a noble shit." Yeah, that was Mailer's America."

The second part of the book is The Novel as History, and Mailer removes himself from the proceedings and details just how the march was organized and what happened to others than himself. This reads a bit like a term paper, albeit a very good one, and kind of allows the fun of the first part of the book to deflate. Hopefully anyone who hopes to stop the war in Iraq will read it, though, as the gang that Mailer was running with did manage to eventually stop a war. Maybe these methods should be used again.