The time of his time has come to an end

Updated below Saturday morning.

Wolcott is right.  He was something like a planet, massive, unavoidable, wandering all over the sky, sometimes more visible than at others, but always exerting his own gravitational field, drawing lesser objects into his orbit, whether they wanted to be there or not, warping the independent orbits of others.

So you'd think I'd have as much to say about Norman Mailer's winking out as I did about the death of Kurt Vonnegut.

But Mailer's writing never captured my imagination the way Vonnegut's had.  That's not a literary criticism, just a statement of autobiographical fact.  Because I was a kid with no intellectual defenses or prejudices, Slaughterhouse Five and  Player Piano and Cat's Cradle went straight into my head and my heart.  I wasn't much more sophisticated by the time I was ready to read and appreciate Mailer's writing, but I couldn't do either without Mailer himself getting in the way.

I read Vonnegut's books because I found them on a bookshelf one day.  Mailer himself dragged me to his books.

He was a celebrity of longstanding by the time I heard of him, and I only heard of him because he was a celebrity, and not a particularly likable or admirable one. And he was everywhere, an angry face, half-grinning, half-scowling from all the TV screens, the newspapers, the magazines.  There was no getting around him to his books.  You went into them on his terms, carried along kicking and screaming by him and his argument with the world.  You couldn't take his writing to heart without taking him to heart, and who would want such a bastard inside you like that?

Fug that.

It was a long time---not until grad school---before I figured out that the constant intrusions of his ego and his personal angers in his books weren't his mistake, they were his point.

My first memory of Mailer is of him on the Dick Cavett Show.  I remember how he grew furious with Cavett over something, I could hardly make sense of what, and he began angrily tapping his finger on the yellow legal pad Cavett had balanced on his knee where I guess Cavett had written out possible questions and topics he wanted Mailer to tackle.  "Is that on your list?" Mailer wanted to know.  "Stick to your list!" he bellowed, or something like that.

Cavett told him he could take the list, fold it five ways, and put it where the moon don't shine.

So my first encounter with Mailer was watching him contribute to the making of Dick Cavett as one of my first intellectual heroes.

(My memory of this show turns out to have been pretty good.  Ken Houghton dropped this link off in the comments to Cavett's recounting of that night.  It's funny that I don't remember Janet Flanner's being onstage at all and can only dimly recall that Gore Vidal was there too.  And I wish I'd remembered this exchange that followed Cavett's telling Mailer where to put the list:

Mailer: Mr. Cavett, on your word of honor, did you just make that up, or have you had it canned for years, and you were waiting for the best moment to use it?

Cavett:  I have to tell you a quote from Tolstoy?)

I suspect that for a lot of young would-be writers and intellectuals who came of age during the (vain)glory days of Mailer's celebrity---which dated from the late 50s on into the early 80's; it's amazing how long he lasted, how he kept the spotlight on him all those years---Mailer made his first appearance on their mental stages as the adversary of their first heroes and heroines, if not as an out and out villain.

He 'd become more famous for the fights he started than for the novels he'd been writing, which were, with the exception of the very first one, mostly drivel and madness.  Basically, he was a famous jerk who wrote bad books....until you read the journalism.

Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago were what clued me in.

It's not true that his only great subject was himself, although he was clearly his own hero.  His subject was the whole of America in the time in which he happened to live there.  He believed, though, that his personal experience was truly representative.  He was the American Everyman.  He also believed, at least he acted and wrote as if he believed it, that the only way he could get at the truth at the center of a story was to throw himself into it and fight with it, as if America was an ocean and he was a literary Jacques Costeau, with this difference:

Cousteau focused on what there was to be seen down below and reported on it in calm objectivity.  Mailer told us about the dive and about the effects of the dive on the diver and he treated the ocean as an adversary that meant to drown him before he swam deep enough to discover its secrets.

And he often threw himself into stories just for the pleasure of describing the waves he stirred up.  So much so that it's easy to suspect that he stabbed his wife just to be able to write about it.

The result is the most egocentric American writing since Walt Whitman's.

Of course Mailer had none of Whitman's sympathy, none of Whitman's humility, none of Walt's willingness to see himself as part of the crowd.  Mailer elbowed the crowd aside and boasted that he was there to stand in for it.

Whitman contained multitudes and among them he contained the feminine and softer and even weaker and more erring spirits of America.  Mailer was glad to represent sinners and criminals, but only the most macho kinds of each.

The question with newly dead writers is always will they be read as much as they are read about?  Mailer's reputation will survive because of his historical importance.  No one will be able to write about the literary and cultural landscapes of the 50s, 60s, and 70s without dealing with Mailer.

Mailer made himself so much a representative of his times---even if often all he was representative of was a writer named Norman Mailer who happened to be alive and famous during those times---that it might seem a good bet that when the time of his time has faded from the collective memory his writing will hardly make sense.

I won't take the bet.

He was a great writer.  He wasn't a great novelist.  But he wrote three books that will probably survive and be read.  One is a novel, the second is a work of journalism, and the third is a book that is both.

The Naked and the Dead is one of the half dozen or so great novels of World War II.  It's not the best and the fact that it was the first doesn't matter now nor will it to future generations of readers; what will matter is that after you read Catch 22 and The Thin Red Line and Slaughterhouse Five you have nowhere else you have to go except onto The Naked and the Dead.

Armies of the Night is one of the great models of personal journalism.  If that's the kind of writing you want to do, forget Thompson, read Mailer.

And The Executioner's Song is Mailer's Leaves of Grass, the book that contains Whitman's multitudes.  It is the book people mean without knowing it when they talk about the Great American Novel.

It is the great American novel.  If only it were a novel.

Which it is.

Which it isn't.

Those three books will lead young would-be writers and intellectuals to the rest of the journalism and the essays and Harlot's Ghost and then---so it goes---to the bad novels, Barbary Shore and The Deer Park, and the crazy ones.  They will keep his other work alive to be read the way Moby Dick keeps Pierre alive and read and The Scarlet Letter saves The Marble Faun.

That also means that some unwary young readers in the future will inevitably pick up Ancient Evenings.

Poor, sorry motherfuggers.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

Postscript: Well, I'll be fugged.  Of all the things I've read about Mailer this week, Eric Alterman's description of the guy is the one that floored me:

He was also a real old-fashioned gentleman...

Who'd a-thunk it?

Fits, though, with this anecdote Bill Altreuter left in the comment thread at my place.  Seems Bill invited Mailer to his wedding.

Bill has a couple of good posts about Mailer up at his place.  This one on just appreciating Mailer's work, and this one on Mailer's run for mayor of New York City, which includes guest appearances by William F. Buckley and Jimmy Breslin.

This did not surprise me:  Death just makes Terry Teachout grumpy.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

I was thinking last night that he was an archetype with a few others, and that many of them were New Yorkers. Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Andy Warhol...

Is there something in the water or air there?

[velvet goldmine]

The Executioner's Song was really important to me in high school, as was the whole idea of the nonfiction novel. I can't even really remember why, but I was completely wrapped up in it.

Then....this is really irrational, but the reason that I didn't go on to read more of Mailer is that one of his children did something unspeakable to a dear friend of mine. I know the sins of the kids shouldn't be visited upon the fathers, but you have to figure there was plenty of asshatery in the Mailer child rearin' method.

A couple of years ago Mailer and that spawn of his were on a TV show together, which I came across out of the blue, and I couldn't get over how enraged I was about it.

But I didn't stab anyone or anything.

[Dan Leo]

Lance, on your recommendation I'll have to put "Executioner's Song" on my reading list, but only after I finish Proust and that new translation of "War and Peace".

I actually always got a kick out of seeing Norman on TV, even though I wasn't crazy about even "Naked" and "Armies". He was just always trying so fucking hard, if you know what I mean. And it cracked me up that his book on writing ,"The Spooky Art", was filled out with a lot of not-so-good writing.

I went to a lecture he gave at Temple University well over thirty years ago, where he showed clips from his early movies "Maidstone" and "Beyond the Law", and conducted a lively Q&A with the audience. I thought he was very likeable. And I remember somebody asking him why he didn't make another movie, and he said he'd like to but he was tapped out, and had had to borrow money from his mom to finish his last movie.

It's hard to imagine Dave Eggers or Rick Moody or David Foster Wallace or Jonathan Safran Foer showing up drunk on TV shows, telling people to fuck off, getting arrested, punching guys, not being nice and careful all the fucking time...

Love him or hate him, as Marlene Dietrich said about Quinlan at the end of "A Touch of Evil":

"He was some kind of a man."

[burritoboy]

"will matter is that after you read Catch 22 and The Thin Red Line and Slaughterhouse Five you have nowhere else you have to go except onto The Naked and the Dead."

What about Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions?

"And I remember somebody asking him why he didn't make another movie, and he said he'd like to but he was tapped out, and had had to borrow money from his mom to finish his last movie."

Tough Guys Don't Dance is kind of interesting. Not great if you persist in believing it's a straight noir thriller while you're watching it, but if you admit it's.......something else (Mailer kept insisting it was a horror movie) ........ it's interesting.

[sfmike]

I love "The Deer Park" and find the journalism boring, which is probably just me being perverse. And did you really read "Ancient Evenings"? That stood out as one of the great, colossal duds from a mile away. I'm still mulling a possible reading of "Harlot's Ghost," just because the CIA is sorta important.

[Bill Altreuter]

I'm pretty sure nobody has ever finished "Ancient Evenings". I sure as hell didn't. "The Deer Park" is better than you give it credit for being, and "Advertisements for Myself" is a wonderful, genre defining thing, full of treats-- a sort of literary pinata-- which, come to think of it, is sort of what Mailer was too.

I invited him to my wedding. He didn't come, but sent along a note with his regrets. I didn't know him, of course-- I put him on the invitation list because I admired him, and because I wanted to upset my bride and her mother. Years later I met him at a book signing and told him the story. "Heh, heh, heh," he laughed in that distinctive rolling way, obviously amused by the story, "That's pretty good.What's your wife's name?" Then he wrote a dedication to her on the flyleaf of "Time of Our Time" (he called it "ToOts").

There is nobody left like him.

[Apostate]

Naked and the Dead was my first war novel (ahead even of Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front) at age 14. I remember being puzzled by the 'fugs' -- why? Why was he the only writer I had read who misspelled 'fuck'?

I also remember being shaken by the raw power of the novel. I've meant to re-read it, but I doubt I ever will. Nothing else he wrote had such an impact.

what will matter is that after you read Catch 22 and The Thin Red Line and Slaughterhouse Five you have nowhere else you have to go except onto The Naked and the Dead.

There is a relatively little-known novel called Birdy by William Wharton which is partly about the Second World War, and I still sometimes think of it as my coming of age book. It taught me the most I knew about sex for a very long time.

[WereBear]

I loved Birdy. It was deceptively simple.

I loved Mailer's first novel, and was disappointed by the rest. Loved Executioner's Song, so I kind of forgave him.

But the whole what's his face incident, the guy who wrote Belly of the Beast; that was sheer ego driven madness. It was hard to read him after that.

[Ken Houghton]

Cavett discusses Mailer on his show (and more) here.

[Avedon]

Yeah, Neil Gaiman also said he found Mailer a really nice guy. Who'da thunk it?

[jillbryant]

All I know about Mailer's writing was a piece he did on the Foreman/Ali fight. It was so good and made fighting sound so interesting, I decided to watch a fight after that. I don't remember what fight it was - one that people were getting excited about - pay per view - and, I think I watched three minutes worth and realize, unless I was seeing it through Mailer's eyes - it just looked like men trying to hit each other: no beauty, skill, art....