Pulitzer winner Norman Mailer dead at 84

while i dislike mailer on a personal level, i do think he had a formidable
style of writing. executioner’s song is beautifully written, which in some
ways is a shame because the subject of the book, gary gilmore, is scum.

WIFE-OBUCKHEAD

In an earlier post you said that the Right is not as mean spirited as the Left. And that is true in general. When most people die it is in poor taste to speak ill of the dead, especially the recently departed. However, Mailer had a huge influence on our culture and none of it was good.

Roger Kimball has written a fierce obituary in which he calls Mailer unintentionally funny. I have tried reading some of his books, and have to agree with this commenter:

This is an absolutely dead-on, ruthlessly truthful assessment of Mailer and his literary accomplishments, if any.Have never been able to finish a single one of his books, though I have tried mightily, especially as a young man, feeling then that I needed to know his work. Later, Mr. Mailer wrote a piece for a magazine where I worked as an editor, for which he was paid $50,000 (a shocking amount, then and now). The literary lion had trouble delivering and had to be given a conference room at the magazine (Esquire) and an "assistant" to help him meet his deadline. The piece was a routine interview. The final result was such a horrific mish-mash that, once again, I couldn't finish it without much determined skimming. All in all, he seemed to have no special talent for either long-form works or routine culture pieces. So what was his talent anyway? Self-promotion, I guess.

Mailer had a huge influence on our culture and none of it was good. . . . a fierce obituary in which he calls Mailer unintentionally funny.

Kimball’s article is very good. Thank you for providing the link.

I don't know whether you noticed or not, but Kimball uses either "existential" or "existentialism" nineteen times to describe either Mailer or Mailer's work. He does not account for the source of Mailer's existentialism. I won't, either. But, I'll be interested in reading . . . from a library copy of some past biography . . . what happened to Mailer between his discharge from the army and his return from France.

Here's an unkind comment from one of Kimball's readers:

Face it, Boomers. Unlike Hemingway, or a real novelist, Mailer only looms large because the Boomers thought his "rebellion" was cool (i.e. Althouse). No one, not even the Boomers actually READ his stuff, and no one will now. He'll be forgotten in another generation, after the Boomers follow him to the dirt. -- David.

David, of course, is an idiot. Most Boomers were in their infancy or waiting to be born when Mailer became famous and celebrated. "The Greatest Generation" gave him his kickstart. By the time Boomers reached high school, about a dozen years later or so, Mailer was well entrenched in his ways and it was still "The Greatest Generation" which mostly kept Mailer's coffee cup filled with whatever he preferred to drink from it.

Aboard a troop ship carrying him to the Korean War, a WWII artilleryman passed the time reading Mailer's book. The book had been recommended to him by army buddies from the 148th Artillery Battalion which had, for a time, been attached to Mailer's unit, the 112th Cavalry Regimental Combat Team. The reader recognized incidents Mailer wrote about. They happened, mostly. And, he knew how Mailer came to know about them. As recently as yesterday, the artilleryman had nothing bad to say about Mailer or "that book."

David, of course, is also right. I, for example, have read only one of his novels, the first, bits of two others, and a few shorter things in a collected work. I've never been much of a fan. I'm fairly confident that most Americans over the last sixty years have read even less and have cared less. Mailer's influence, if there was any real influence, was minimal.

Kimball, of course, is not an idiot. How could he be? He uses words like "hagiographical" and "polyphiloprogenitive."

These two sentences from the second paragraph are wonderful. They put a fence around Mailer's life, according to Kimball, and point back to the question which really interests me.

Mailer epitomized a certain species of macho, adolescent radicalism that helped to inure the wider public to displays of violence, anti-American tirades, and sexual braggadocio. It didn’t start out that way.

Kimball attributes it all, via a Norman Podhoretz quote, to being a nice Jewish boy who never really wanted to be nice. Fame and wealth broke his chains and set him free to play out his adolescent fancies. That might be true. It might also be a cheap and easy gloss. Seems like World War II doesn't deserve comment, except he was there. Kimball gives no value at all to the time Mailer spent in France after the war. He does not even mention it.

The few comments that I've heard or read from artillerymen and cavalrymen who served with Mailer describe him as "reclusive." He would come into their tents, listen quietly, barely make his presence known, and then quietly leave. A little while later they'd hear him typing. Only after "that book" was published did they know what he was typing. (You may remember from recent obits that Mailer is reputed to have had a technological phobia. He wrote everything in an unintelligible scrawl. During the war he used that typewriter to write letters home which included the notes for "that book.")

Not a picture of a macho, adolescent radical bent on corrupting the world around him, I think. From the same sparse sources I've read or heard, I think he was intimidated by and fascinated by the men who surrounded him at war. From a summary of an interview conducted by Glen Johnston (Univeristy North Texas - copied from 112th Cav list email):

[Mailer:] "The journey was uneventful, but it was the first time we had come
face to face with the Texans, who were the core of the unit. They
were tough men...We would watch as they would sit on the deck of the
ship honing their bayonets or knives. They would sit on the deck
honing their bayonets for hour after hour with a dull glaze over their
eyes. They were cold, hard men...A lot of them were sick--the Texans
who remained. Most all of them had jungle rot of one sort or another.
They spent hours painting sores with methiolate and things like that,
particularly on the boat. I remember that. Everybody had digestive
troubles and bowel troubles. Diarrhea was just prevalent. None of us
were that strong; we weren't in great shape. The Atabrine was taking
a lot out of us."

He went on to say that his time with the 112th was a humbling
experience because he truly wanted to be a good soldier.
"Unfortunately," he admitted, "almost everyone in my squad could do
things so much better than I could."

In the end, he seemed genuinely proud of his time with the 112th and
wanted me to pass on his best wishes to the Regiment at the next
reunion. I did so.

Sounds a lot like hero worship to me. I think Mailer wanted to be one of those tough, cold, hard Texans, and he knew he wasn't. Maybe that had a lot to do with Mailer's decision to place his life's work at the University of Texas at Austin. Maybe. Maybe at least in this way, he had finally become one of them.

"I understand one element of celebrity, which is the unreality of it," he said later. "At the age of 25 I went from being the kid next door ... to being called a major American writer -- that's a role you just don't fit at 25. ... I used to feel I was secretary to someone named Norman Mailer, (and) to meet him you had to meet me first." ( CNN.com )

So, what did Mailer do immediately after the war? He went to France on the G.I. Bill to study at the Sorbonne and he wrote "that book." Is this when Mailer came up nose-to-nose against the face of effete French existentialism and liked it so much he took it home with him? At the Sorbonne, was Mailer that macho, adolescent radical which Kimball mocks and Mailer's fellow vets seemingly would not have recognized? Or, did all that come with the fame that the book brought?

That's what I might want to learn from a biographer.

I'm reminded of a pair of fictional Texans created by another Texan, Larry McMurty, one of whom fits the imagined character of Mailer: Hud Bannion. (You may remember the movie, Hud. )

Homer to Hud: You don't care about people Hud. You don't give a damn about 'em. Oh, you got all that charm goin' for ya. And it makes the youngsters want to be like ya. That's the shame of it because you don't value anything. You don't respect nothing. You keep no check on your appetites at all. You live just for yourself. And that makes you not fit to live with.

You'll remember from above David's pronouncement that "He'll be forgotten in another generation, after the Boomers follow him to the dirt."

Not likely. All he needed was one lasting book and it was probably the first one he wrote.

A little while ago a Guardian literary supplement published a Joel Rickett column in which he listed books that defined the decades. For the 40s, he chose these four:

1984, George Orwell
The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
The Outsider, Albert Camus

Whether or not Mailer survives to become a classic author will have nothing to do with Boomers or even The Greatest Generation that gave him his start. Maybe it will have something to do with whether or not the future sees Mailer and his work as funny or even comical. Maybe some future advanced creative writing instructor at some Ivy League school will keep him alive by holding seminars in his name. I surely don't know. Except for what I've listed, I didn't read him when he was alive and a lot of not reading him was for reasons Kimball gave in his article.

But, I've got to give Mailer his due. He was on a quest to and failed to write "The Great American Novel." He wasn't afraid to be laughed at and probably expected it and didn't care. He kept trying. Kept punching.

I think that's admirable. Very Texan. Reminds me of Texas Ranger Captain W.J. McDonald's famous creed, "No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that's in the right and keeps on a-comin."

Was Mailer's life in the right? What do you think he'd say? :-)

An interesting life. Everything becomes equal when we die.

RIP.

Was Mailer's life in the right? What do you think he'd say? :-)

I actually remember him talking about this on The Dick Cavett Show, I think. He said you could never really know.

OK, where to start.
If I can summarize your comment it goes something like this: Mailer was a tough guy wanna be who used other people’s experiences to write a war novel.

That’s pretty much what Kimball said.

As to whether he’ll be remembered, I’ll leave that to future generations, but I can’t finish his books and I read almost constantly.

Was Mailers’ life in the right? It seems to me that a man who is
>Inordinately obsessed with sex,
>Female domination,
>Who stabs one of his many wives, nearly killing her
>Who manages to get a killer sprung who then kills again, and thinks it’s worth the cost (after all, Mailer wasn’t killed).
>And is totally in tune with the Liberal zeitgeist of anti-Americanism and participated in demonstrations that ended in our abandoning our Vietnamese allies which led to genocide in that part of the world...

No, that was not a life lived in the right.