Norman Mailer, pugilist of American letters, died on November 10th, aged 84
IT WAS on the Dick Cavett show in 1971 that Mailer (always “Mailer” in his writings; “Mister” was needless polish and priming), three-tumblers drunk, angry, little eyes blue as a touchpaper, was needled by Gore Vidal into saying this:
He had only half got going, but then the commercial came in. Much more could have been said. How Mailer had written what George Orwell called the best-ever book about the second world war, “The Naked and the Dead”. How he had won a Pulitzer for “The Armies of the Night”, the story of the 1968 anti-war march on the Pentagon, and every other book prize going except the Nobel. How, despite the critical bile spewed over much of his fiction, he still had germinating in him the Great American Novel that would out-Tolstoy Tolstoy and out-Dickens Dickens. How he had invented, with a nod to Truman Capote, the non-fiction novel and the novelised news report, through both of which strolled his best character, Mailer, with his crinkly electrified hair and his maudlin writer's hang-ups, continually “in an intimate dialogue, a veritable dialectic with the swoops, spooks, starts, the masks and snarls, the calm lucid abilities of sin...his tonic, his jailer, his horse, his sword”.
Mailer was brave. That was his virtue of virtues. In the 1950s he disdained “the stench of fear that has come out of every pore of American life...a collective failure of nerve”. He smelled fear in the dark, rotting jungle mud where he had fought as a soldier in the Philippines, in the blood, shit and slobber of the Chicago stockyards, but also at Washington parties, among his own stupid bouts of tongue-tiedness and circumlocution, as “the hard gemlike flame of bourbon” burned through him. At such points he would be rescued by the wild man Mailer, a creature “who would have been admirable, except that he was an absolute egomaniac, a Beast”.
Gristle and gravel
He talked and wrote of fighting more than he did it. Short and stocky, he was liable to be upended pretty fast. But he boxed a bit, and proudly jogged once with Muhammad Ali until his breath gave out. Instinctively, he put up his fists. In 1957, in an essay called “The White Negro”, he recommended that white Americans should live like inner-city blacks, hip and cool as cats on the edge of violence, rather than fall into the deadness of post-war conformity.
The shock tactics sometimes misfired badly. He stuck a kitchen knife (or a pair of scissors, or a “three-inch dirty penknife”) into the neck of his second wife, the second of six, all of whom loved and forgave him as long as their alimony was paid. He acted as literary sponsor to a talented murderer, Jack Abbott, who murdered again when Mailer had helped to get him out of jail. He revelled in gross, boastful or mechanical descriptions of sex (“a hard punishing session with pulley weights, stationary bicycle and ten breath-seared laps round the track”), not least because this outraged the women's libbers with whom, in the 1970s, he was permanently at war. Once Mailer, with a sparkle in his eye that was maybe aggression, maybe fun, acting his usual part of the hollering Jewish leprechaun, proclaimed that all women should be locked in cages.
On form (as in “Miami and the Siege of Chicago”, about the 1968 political conventions, or “Of a Fire on the Moon”, about the first moon landing) he was a gloriously evocative, generous, sprawling writer, worthy of the scale of his country and his subjects. But Mailer dismissed these books as journalism, that ceaseless scavenging for “tidbits, gristle, gravel, garbage cans, charlotte russe, old rubber tyres, T-bone steaks” that went to feed “that old American goat, our newspapers”. Despite his founder-role on the radical Village Voice, he took little pride in that craft. The Great Novel was his quest: a quest that became weirder and more abstruse over time, taking him to Pharaoic Egypt and the corridors of the CIA and inserting Mailer (sometimes the very Son of God, sometimes the Devil) into the made-up lives of Jesus and Hitler.
By general consent, though not by Mailer's, his best book was “The Executioner's Song” of 1979. It won him his second Pulitzer. In it he told the story of Gary Gilmore, the first man to be executed after the ending of the moratorium on the death penalty, in sentences as spare and unadorned as the Utah desert in which it was set. The style was almost reminiscent of his great hero, Hemingway. Those short, declarative sentences, he wrote once, had a suicide's dread in their silences: dread that “at any instant, by any failure in magic, by a mean defeat, or by a moment of cowardice, Hemingway could be thrust back again into the agonising demands of his courage.” Mailer's short sentences carried a more pugnacious message: he was the champ, and would be until someone braver and better knocked him off.