Bruce
Bawer is the author of While Europe Slept, Surrender,
and The Victims' Revolution. His novel The Alhambra
was published in 2017. His new book, The
Victim's Revolution, is now available in paperback.
Ten
minutes after downloading Richard Bradford’s Tough
Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer, I was wondering what
the hell I’d been thinking. No, that’s not it.
I did know what I’d been thinking: It had been a long
time since I read Mailer, or read about him, let alone wrote
about him, and I figured that perhaps I should take a look
at this new biography — whose author, a British professor
(not to be confused with the late American novelist of the
same name), has previously written lives of Kingsley Amis,
Philip Larkin, Alan Sillitoe, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway,
and Patricia Highsmith — and use it as an opportunity
to revisit Mailer’s life and work and see if I had any
fresh thoughts about the son of a b***h.
But
10 minutes was enough to turn me off. Did I really want to
renew my acquaintance with this privileged, pampered mama’s
boy from tony Long Branch, New Jersey, who, even as a kid
— and, later, as an undergraduate at Harvard —
posed as a tough-talking, deprived proletarian goon from the
most uncivilized part of Brooklyn? Then again, as I read Bradford’s
book, I realized there was a lot I’d forgotten that
was worth being reminded of. Starting early on, for example,
I’d forgotten that after the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire
in Boston in which 492 people perished, Mailer, then 19, spent
“several hours” examining the burned corpses that
had been laid out so that they could be identified by their
loved ones. Good God, what to make of that?
Two
years later, after marrying his first wife, Bea — a
pianist, communist, and nymphomaniac — Mailer went off
to serve as a GI in the Pacific theater, which he looked forward
to not because he was particularly interested in fighting
for his country but mainly because wanted to make his name
by writing the great American war novel. Indeed, The Naked
and the Dead (1948) did make him famous — even
though, for this reader, the words never rose off the page
— and enabled him to assume a position, which he’d
retain for the rest of his life, at the very heart of the
New York literary world. Mailer — who at the time was
a fan of Stalin and of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party
(a Kremlin front) and unwilling to listen to any sense on
the subject of communism — soon replaced Bea with a
new spouse, Adele, who resembled her predecessor in at least
one respect: In Mailer’s journals, notes Bradford, she
comes off by turns as a “sex maniac, decadent aficionado
of pure filth and a woman who seems to take pleasure in being
raped.” Despite being a mama’s boy, then, he was
never interested in wedding a girl just like the girl who
married dear old dad.
Raked
over the coals for his short, surprisingly unimpressive second
and third novels, Barbary Shore (1951) and The
Deer Park (1955), Mailer, eager to establish himself
as a beatnik hero, helped found — and became a regular
contributor of slapdash, infantile columns to — the
new weekly Village Voice. No longer big on communism,
he was now busy formulating his own philosophy, which idolized
meaningless displays of brutal force. In one column, he distinguished
“squares” (bad) from “hipsters” (good):
“To a Square, a rapist is a rapist…. But a hipster
knows that the act of rape is a part of life too, and that
even in the most brutal and unforgivable rape, there is artistry
or the lack of it.” “The Hip and the Square”
was one of many writings, in a variety of genres, that made
up Mailer’s 1959 grab-bag Advertisements for Myself,
a book that helped shift his image from that of a no-longer-promising
serious novelist to that of an iconoclastic social and cultural
commentator. Another highlight of Advertisements was the essay
“The White Negro,” which, as Bradford puts it,
treated “the African-American male as an animalistic
sub-species of humanity”; in one notorious passage,
he imagined two black teens murdering a shopkeeper and asserted
that such a crime would qualify them as rookie “hipsters.”
Even Beat writer Jack Kerouac, himself no intellectual heavyweight,
thought that Mailer’s views on being “hip”
were idiotic. Many members of the Gotham literati agreed,
but they still loved attending Mailer’s parties and
inviting him to theirs. Yes, he had an unpleasant tendency
to start fistfights, but his buffoonery kept him in the headlines
and made Manhattan’s more staid authors feel, by sheer
virtue of contact with him, hip.
Then,
at one of those very parties, as if to act out his theories
about hipsterdom, Mailer stabbed his wife. Twice. She almost
died. It happened during the first of his two ridiculous runs
for mayor of New York. He showed no guilt, got off almost
scot-free, and actually thought he could continue with his
mayoral campaign as if nothing had happened. Soon he was on
to wife number three, Jeanne, who was also notable for her
“debauchery” (Bradford’s words). His fourth,
Beverly, came along shortly after, as did his terrible little
fourth novel, An American Dream (1965), whose protagonist
doesn’t just stab his wife but kills her. The plot’s
similarity to Mailer’s own recent act of near uxoricide
helped sales. But it was garbage, as was his slight fifth
novel, Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). By contrast,
The Armies of the Night (1968), his account of an
antiwar protest in which he took part, was a straightforward,
well-observed narrative that received glowing reviews, won
the Pulitzer and National Book Award, and is now considered
a blue-chip example of the then-new New Journalism, which,
unlike traditional journalism, eschewed objectivity. Yes,
it was, and still is, an immensely absorbing read —
but how much of the praise had to do with its literary merit
and how much with its PC politics?
Increasingly
in need of cash to bankroll his expensive lifestyle, support
his many children, and pay alimony to an ever-burgeoning number
of spouses, Mailer spent much of his middle age banging out
volumes of lousy-to-middling non-fiction that were nominally
about the 1968 political conventions (Miami and the Siege
of Chicago, 1968), the Apollo 11 mission (Of a Fire
on the Moon, 1971), feminism (The Prisoner of Sex,
1971), Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn, 1973), the glories
of vandalism (The Faith of Graffiti, 1974), and a
boxing match between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman (The
Fight, 1975). I say “nominally” because whatever
the purported subjects, the books were always, in very large
part, about Mailer himself. After all these hack jobs came
a curious project. Mailer’s longtime rival Truman Capote
had spent years researching his magnificent true-crime work,
In Cold Blood, for which he’d received plaudits
of a kind Mailer had never attained; so when a mountain of
material about the murderer Gary Gilmore was dumped in Mailer’s
lap, he avidly, and without doing a lick of research of his
own, transformed it into The Executioner’s Song
(1979), which won him a second Pulitzer, in no small part
because the literary elites who cheered it shared his view
of Gilmore as, in Bradford’s words, an “existential
anti-hero.”
In
1980, Mailer divorced Beverly, underwent a two-day marriage
to his fifth wife, Carol, in order to make their child legitimate,
and wed his sixth wife, Norris. A year later came a scandal
to rival his stabbing of Adele. It was while 
working
on his Gilmore book that Mailer began an intense correspondence
with another convicted killer, Jack Henry Abbott. Mailer not
only helped Abbott find a publisher for his memoir, In the
Belly of the Beast, but also helped secure his release
from prison, even though a prison official who knew him a
lot better than did Mailer considered him a dangerous psychotic;
in 1981, two weeks after Belly came out, Abbott killed Richard
Adan, a 22-year-old waiter in an East Village restaurant,
for no reason whatsoever. As in the wake of his wife-stabbing,
Mailer was unrepentant, saying that he was “willing
to gamble with certain elements of society to save this man’s
talent.” As it happens, Adan, too, had been an artist
— an actor, dancer, and about-to-be-produced playwright;
but for Mailer, writes Bradford, Adan “was just a waiter,”
and therefore as worthless as the imaginary store owner in
“The White Negro.” I would add this: Surely part
of the reason why Mailer valued Adan less than he did Abbott
was that Adan appears to have been a gentle soul, unlike Abbott,
who embodied precisely the kind of irrational rage that Mailer
identified with real manliness, creative genius, greatness
of spirit, and (of course) hipsterhood.
Mailer
devoted the third act of his life largely to the production
of fictions, a couple of them massive, in which he tackled
subjects about which he knew next to nothing. About Ancient
Evenings (1982), a giant doorstop set in pharaonic Egypt,
Bradford comments that some parts “are almost hilariously
terrible…. It is astonishing that anyone found it publishable.”
After the pedestrian crime novel Tough Guys Don’t
Dance (1984) came the 1300-page Harlot’s Ghost
(1991), which covers the entire history of the CIA by recounting
the career of a fictional spy, and Mailer alter ego, named
Harry Hubbard. “Mailer,” I wrote in my review
for the New Criterion, “has never been known
as an exquisite stylist; if the writing here is especially
slovenly and redundant, however, one has the impression that
it is because he has been more than usually fixated on filling
pages.” I further described Mailer as “shoveling
in research,” noting that the novel even included “excerpts
from 1963 New Republic articles about Kennedy and
Castro.”
I’d
actually forgotten about Mailer’s short Portrait
of Picasso as a Young Man, which, completed in 1992,
shortly after the publication of the first volume of John
Richardson’s magisterial life of Picasso, was, quite
sensibly, rejected by Jason Epstein, his editor at Random
House, because it would look so pathetic by comparison; it
wasn’t brought out (by another publisher) until 1995.
The same year saw the publication of Oswald’s Tale
(1995), about Lee Harvey Oswald, and two years later came
The Gospel According to the Son, the premise of which
was that Mailer was retelling the Gospels from Christ’s
perspective. But Gospel clung so closely to Mark, Matthew,
Luke, and John that the exercise seemed pointless except as
a way to make a quick buck off a provocative title. “Mailer’s
attempts to provide glimpses of the interior Jesus are feeble,”
I wrote in my notice for the Hudson Review, adding
that he seemed “to have no notion at all of what it
might mean to have a spiritual life.” After the embarrassment
of this biblical ripoff, Mailer actually dared to write a
companion book in the form of a theological treatise, On
God (2007). And as if all this incompetent overreaching
weren’t enough, Mailer’s last novel, The Castle
in the Forest (2007), was about the young Hitler. In
all these cases — Oswald, Jesus, God, Hitler —
more serious writers would have steeped themselves in scholarship
before daring to set down a word. Not Mailer. Few novelists
who have addressed Nazism, writes Bradford apropos of Castle,
“can match Mailer in allowing invention and the imagination
to intrude upon undisputed truths.”
During
this period, Mailer’s exertions were interrupted by
9/11. That attack inspired insipid little America-hating broadsides
by two of Mailer’s fellow New York Review of
Books contributors, Gore Vidal and Joan Didion, but until
reading Bradford’s book, I was unaware that Mailer,
too, had published his own polemical pamphlet on the topic.
In interviews, he’d already praised the hijackers for
toppling the “architectural monstrosity” that
was the World Trade Center; his philippic, Why Are We
at War?(2003), which I finally got ’round to the
other day, reads in part like tons of other left-wing trash
I remember perusing after 9/11: “Why are we so hated?”
But Mailer’s contribution to the debate is even uglier,
less reflective, and more glib and ragtag than most. He speaks
of “trying to understand terrorism” and says that
there’s “a tolerable level to terror.” He
defends Islam. He brings up Hiroshima. You don’t have
to have supported the long, pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
to be disgusted by the readiness with which Mailer jumped
onto the bandwagon of intellectuals who blamed the 9/11 jihad
on America.
Bradford’s
biography has been faulted for being too critical of Mailer
both as man and as writer. I would say rather that, unlike
previous biographers, he’s chosen not to whitewash or
to dodge certain dicey — but illuminating — actions
and writings by his subject but instead to address them head-on.
The plain fact is that — when you strip away the glowing
reviews written by his pals for the New York Times Book
Review and the cozy anecdotes that fill books like the
1985 oral biography Mailer: His Life and Times, compiled
by Mailer’s Provincetown housemate Peter Manso —
many of the facts of Mailer’s life suggest that he was,
quite simply, an out-and-out psychopath. In any event, his
was the weirdest of literary careers: a first book cynically
calculated to be crowned as the great novel of World War II;
several volumes of bombastic New Journalism designed to ensure
that his name would be associated with the era’s biggest
headline events; and, in later years, absurdly big novels
about absurdly big topics that were intended to (and did)
earn him absurdly big advances — even if the books themselves
were more or less preposterous, promoted breathlessly but
purchased by few, read all the way to the last page by even
fewer, and forgotten by pretty much everybody in record time.
There’s
one book I still haven’t mentioned yet. In 1998, on
the occasion of Mailer’s 75th birthday (he died in 2007
at age 84), Random House put out a 1,200-page anthology of
his “best” writings entitled The Time of Our
Time. My late friend Terry Teachout took the occasion
to ask, in National Review: “Why is Norman
Mailer still famous?.… I’ve never met anyone under
the age of forty who took him seriously.… Mailer has
been writing badly for so long that it is easy to forget that
a great many intelligent people once took him almost as seriously
as he took himself.” Reviewing the book in the Hudson,
I made the same point: “[D]o people really read him
anymore? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they
don’t.”
What
a cautionary tale the story of Norman Mailer’s life
is! From the beginning, he approached the business of professional
writing as if it were pugilism. He wanted to be seen as the
champ but wasn’t willing, metaphorically speaking, to
down those raw eggs, take those long early-morning runs, and
punch the hell out of sides of beef in a meat freezer. You
can’t be a great writer if getting the fame is more
important to you than doing the work. Serious writing requires
self-discipline, but few Americans of his time led a more
undisciplined life than he did: too many wives, too many mistresses,
too many parties, too many occasions on which he picked fights
with purported friends, throwing sucker punches and giving
head-butts. A worthwhile novelist, moreover, needs to be a
keen observer of his fellowman, standing, perhaps not always
but often enough, on the outside of events and watching the
human comedy proceed and, later, writing it all up in solitude
and silence; one extreme example of this kind of dedication
is Proust. But Mailer was the opposite, always feeling compelled
to put himself at the center of the action, always wanting
to get all the attention, and always being too fascinated
by himself to care very much about what made other people
tick. Hence most of his protagonists are, to a great extent,
versions of himself.
There’s
more. A great novelist needs to have a profoundly developed
moral sense (although one writer’s morality will not
necessarily line up exactly with another’s). Think of
Dostoevsky. Yes, Mailer was preoccupied with good and evil.
But he defined them in infantile, appalling ways. As a young
man, he loved Stalin. Later he admired Castro. He saw killers
as heroes. He identified manhood not with a sense of mature
responsibility and self-control but with arrogant self-assertion
and unnecessary acts of aggression. He unapologetically idolized
madness, mayhem, and murder. While he was alive, this childishness
won him attention and sold books. Now all that’s left
are the books, which nobody cares about.
If
Bradford’s biography is nonetheless a rewarding read,
it’s because it’s the first life of Mailer that
doesn’t treat him like a literary master — and
because, by attending to Mailer’s long-term treatment
as a master by the New York literary establishment, it sheds
light on the deeply questionable values of America’s
high-culture poobahs in the decades during which Fanny Mailer’s
overgrown brat so improbably flourished.
by
Bruce Bawer:
When
Race Trumps Merit
Affirmation
Generation
Amazon
Disappears Two Books on Islam
You
Before Me
Stop
Saying LGBT
Paul
Auster: Man in the Dark
Karl
Ove Knaaugaard's The Morning Star
Gender
Narcissism
History of World's Most Liberal City
Global Warning: An Unsettled Science
