Paul Krassner: Remembering Norman Mailer: here.
When Norman Mailer wrote his first novel, *The Naked and the Dead,* he used a euphemism–”fug”–for fuck. The first time I encountered Mailer, I asked him if it was true that when he met actress Tallulah Bankhead, she said, “So you’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck.” With a twinkle in his eye, Mailer told me that he replied, “Yes, and you’re the young woman who doesn’t know how to.”
Remembering Norman Mailer through his books
This entry from “The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors” takes us on a tour of his best, his worst and his bravest: here.
“Advertisements for Myself” begins with a short list of its author’s favorite pieces, “for those who care to skim nothing but the cream of each author, and so miss the pleasure of liking him at his worst.” The critical consensus is that the cream of Mailer’s vast and various oeuvre consists, in chronological order, of “Advertisements for Myself,” “The Armies of the Night” and “The Executioner’s Song.” None of these books is, strictly speaking, a work of fiction: “Advertisements” intersperses stories, magazine articles and fragments of abandoned novels with extended passages of self-justification; “The Armies of the Night” narrates Mailer’s participation in an antiwar demonstration at the Pentagon in October, 1967; “The Executioner’s Song” relates, in Balzacian detail, the story of Gary Gilmore, a habitual criminal executed in Utah in 1977. If we define the novel as a hybrid, intermediate form, bounded on one side by journalism and on the other by speculative philosophy, then these books — with their mixture of stubborn empiricism and vertiginous abstraction, their density of detail and complexity of theme — are among the most original and radical novels ever written.
But if we define the novel as a fictional form we encounter a paradox. Mailer is a brilliant journalist and a dogged, if mostly self-taught, philosopher. He is, however, a consistently bad novelist. This is not to say that he hasn’t produced some good fiction: None of his novels is without pockets of terrific writing, vivid characterization, and narrative dexterity. But Mailer’s most successfully executed novels — “The Naked and the Dead,” “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” “Harlot’s Ghost” — are curiously unsatisfying. In each, his wilder impulses are checked by the constraints of his chosen genre: the war story, the policier and the spy novel, respectively. Each one fails to deliver the clean narrative punch these genres demand, and you realize that when he doesn’t risk making a fool of himself, Mailer can be something of a bore. And so a second paradox follows from the first: the worse Mailer’s novels are, the more pleasure they afford.
By all means, then, skim the cream, but to appreciate Mailer fully you must risk liking him at his worst. His second and third novels, “The Deer Park” and “Barbary Shore,” were widely, and somewhat unfairly, reviled when they first appeared. Neither “The Deer Park’s” attempt to reveal the spiritual corruption of Hollywood nor “Barbary Shore’s” evocation of the political paranoia of the McCarthy era is particularly convincing, but both books have a crude and vivid power that many more polished performances lack. The novel, for Mailer, is less a literary form than an existential gambit, and this is why he is most interesting in triumph or in disaster, and most tired (and tiresome) when playing it safe. So “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” for all its fine evocations of Provincetown and its engaging whodunit structure, is less memorable and less authentic a reflection of Mailer’s gifts than the five hundred pages of Pharaonic sodomy that constitute “Ancient Evenings.”
But Mailer’s worst novel — the novel whose place in his canon is absolutely central — is “An American Dream.” All of his characteristic preoccupations — Manichean theology, political power, nostalgie de la boue, anal sex and the subterranean connections between them — are on display, knit together in a plot that veers from the incredible to the incomprehensible. Yet the book’s chaos seems now to be a vivid and indelible reflection of the disorder of its time and place. It is a work of sublime bravery.
The drunk and the dead
So old man Mailer died this weekend at 84. He had a good long life.
I met him once, when I was working at Rolling Stone. RS head honcho Jann Wenner had rented out a swank Midtown Manhattan restaurant in honor of the ‘enfant terrible’ of American letters. The very upscale event was attended by Rolling Stone editors, staffers and advertisers, who milled around holding glasses of Chardonay, awaiting the great man’s arrival. He was late, and we on the business side of things were concerned that our advertiser attendees might have to get back to their media buying and planning before our star had shown. But eventually the doors swung wide, and as a buzz went up around the room, a short, pudgy, white-haired Norman Mailer came stumbling in — all ego and alcohol, a crowd of syncophants fawning around him.
Jann embraced him, smiled for our in-house photographer, and led him into the reception. Jann adored Mailer, I think, because of his noteriety as a hard-drinking, fast-living, ruff-and-tumble personality, and because he held the title as ‘the father of new journalism,’ whatever the fug that means.
During lunch, Norman waddled up to the podium, and delivered a fairly incoherent self-referential talk, praising Rolling Stone and plugging his latest work, excerpts of which were appearing in the pages of the magazine.
The event was a lot like his career. A lot of hooplah and anticipation, followed by a meager output that left one with a lingering aftertaste of longing for something more.
Mailer typified those writers who are more remarkable for their celebrity than their oeuvre. Best known for his first book, “The Naked and the Dead,” a rambling account of World War II that was loosely based on his own experience in the South Pacific. The “Naked and the Dead” was deemed to be “the best novel yet about World War II,” according to Time Magazine. For my money, I prefer Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughter House Five” or even Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22″ — both more readable and humorous and insightful than “NATD,” which like most of Mailer’s succeeding work would have benefited from more aggressive editing.
Despite his failure to live up to his early hype, Mailer did shake up the literary establishment. And for that, along with his liberal sensibilites, I salute him.