FEATURES
The Pugilist at Rest: Norman Mailer (1923-2007)
/ Andrew Lewis Conn
11.13.07
Then Norman Mailer. Overwhelming. I’d never seen Norman Mailer off the screen before. Guy’s eighty now, both knees shot, walks with two canes, can’t take a stride of more than six inches alone, but he refuses help going up to the pulpit, won’t even use one of the canes. Climbs this tall pulpit all by himself. Everybody pulling for him step by step. The conquistador is here and the high drama begins. The Twilight of the Gods. He surveys the assemblage. Looks down the length of the nave and out to Amsterdam Avenue and across the U.S. to the Pacific. Reminds me of Father Maple in Moby-Dick. I expected him to begin “Shipmates!” and preach upon the lesson Jonah teaches.
—From Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth
How lucky to have had Norman Mailer as our big writer—our genius and our jester—for this American half-century or more! Let us sing of the man’s ambition: that wild, prodigious, uneven, infuriating, embarrassing, brave and blustery and bruising arc, the longest, greatest song of himself in American letters.
Norman Kingsley Mailer: perhaps the highest praise one can lavish upon him is that it is inconceivable that another like him could rise from our midst. If he (or she!) did, there’d be no one at the literary banquet to greet him. What would today’s media know what to do with Mailer? A writer with the audacity to suggest he could change the course of public thought, that he could infuse some marrow into the country’s creaky bones, that a man of letters could exist at the cyclonic center of the American carnival? Not in the world of pixels and blips and small personalities Mailer lived long enough to see.
Nearly fifty years ago, in Advertisements For Myself (1959)—arguably the keel, the polestar of the bibliography, the volume in which the author created the persona that would sustain him over the next half century—Mailer laid out the career-long project for himself:
I find arrogance in much of my mood. It cannot be helped. The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with the perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time. I could be wrong, and if I am, then I’m the fool who will pay the bill, but I think we can all agree it would cheat this collection of its true intent to present myself as more modest than I am.
For many a young writer, the liberating effect of sentences like those cannot be overstated. The notion that one could take on not just the republic of letters, but the Republic writ large, that the entire American crazy quilt could be one’s canvas, was heady, intoxicating stuff. Equally thrilling, the notion that writing wasn’t (only) an effete, sedentary endeavor, but back work—rough-and-tumble turbulent, physical, dangerous—the psychic equivalent of a boxing match, all of this, wrapped in the physical package of a wiry-haired pit bull of a Harvard-educated Brooklyn Jew; is it any wonder that, for many of us, Mailer was our Joe DiMaggio?
Mailer was synonymous with ambition. Here was a writer whose scope stretched as long as the horizon, a capacious self-creation that wanted to take it all on: World War II and McCarthyism, Kennedy, Castro, Oswald, and Nixon, Vietnam and Hollywood, Picasso and the Pharaohs, the moon shot and the "Rumble in the Jungle," Gary Gilmore and Marilyn Monroe, Jesus and Yahweh.
Toward the end of Advertisements For Myself, Mailer famously promises to deliver the big book, the white whale, the great bitch: “The book will be fired to the fuse by the rumor that once I pointed to the farthest fence and said that within ten years I would try to hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane of our American letters. For if I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx, Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even moldering Hemingway might come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way.”
Did he succeed? In the final estimation, does the achievement absolve the misbehavior, do the books stack up to the claims Norman Mailer made for himself over fifty years of American public life?
—From Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth
How lucky to have had Norman Mailer as our big writer—our genius and our jester—for this American half-century or more! Let us sing of the man’s ambition: that wild, prodigious, uneven, infuriating, embarrassing, brave and blustery and bruising arc, the longest, greatest song of himself in American letters.
Norman Kingsley Mailer: perhaps the highest praise one can lavish upon him is that it is inconceivable that another like him could rise from our midst. If he (or she!) did, there’d be no one at the literary banquet to greet him. What would today’s media know what to do with Mailer? A writer with the audacity to suggest he could change the course of public thought, that he could infuse some marrow into the country’s creaky bones, that a man of letters could exist at the cyclonic center of the American carnival? Not in the world of pixels and blips and small personalities Mailer lived long enough to see.
Nearly fifty years ago, in Advertisements For Myself (1959)—arguably the keel, the polestar of the bibliography, the volume in which the author created the persona that would sustain him over the next half century—Mailer laid out the career-long project for himself:
I find arrogance in much of my mood. It cannot be helped. The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with the perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time. I could be wrong, and if I am, then I’m the fool who will pay the bill, but I think we can all agree it would cheat this collection of its true intent to present myself as more modest than I am.
For many a young writer, the liberating effect of sentences like those cannot be overstated. The notion that one could take on not just the republic of letters, but the Republic writ large, that the entire American crazy quilt could be one’s canvas, was heady, intoxicating stuff. Equally thrilling, the notion that writing wasn’t (only) an effete, sedentary endeavor, but back work—rough-and-tumble turbulent, physical, dangerous—the psychic equivalent of a boxing match, all of this, wrapped in the physical package of a wiry-haired pit bull of a Harvard-educated Brooklyn Jew; is it any wonder that, for many of us, Mailer was our Joe DiMaggio?
Mailer was synonymous with ambition. Here was a writer whose scope stretched as long as the horizon, a capacious self-creation that wanted to take it all on: World War II and McCarthyism, Kennedy, Castro, Oswald, and Nixon, Vietnam and Hollywood, Picasso and the Pharaohs, the moon shot and the "Rumble in the Jungle," Gary Gilmore and Marilyn Monroe, Jesus and Yahweh.
Toward the end of Advertisements For Myself, Mailer famously promises to deliver the big book, the white whale, the great bitch: “The book will be fired to the fuse by the rumor that once I pointed to the farthest fence and said that within ten years I would try to hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane of our American letters. For if I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx, Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even moldering Hemingway might come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way.”
Did he succeed? In the final estimation, does the achievement absolve the misbehavior, do the books stack up to the claims Norman Mailer made for himself over fifty years of American public life?