HOME / fighting words: A wartime lexicon.

Norman MailerRemembering the pint-size Jewish fireplug.

By Christopher HitchensPosted Sunday, Nov. 11, 2007, at 12:52 PM ET

Norman Mailer"Culture," said Norman Mailer, pugnaciously, in 1981, "is worth a little risk." Admittedly, he was uttering these words at a rather chaotic press conference, just after a tripwire-dangerous convict for whose release he had so ardently campaigned had stabbed a harmless waiter to death. But I remember admiring Mailer's audacity even as I slightly whistled at his promiscuity, and I suppose that no appreciation of the man is really possible without taking a comparative survey of both those capacities. I find I have to add that it's quite surprisingly difficult to picture the cultural scene without him.

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"Have you read The Naked And The Dead?" wrote George Orwell to David Astor in 1949, a few months before his death. "It's awfully good, the best war book of the last war yet." For those of us who have to accept, bored as we must be with the idea, membership in the postwar "boomer" generation, it is impressive to reflect on quite how many subsequent milestones bore a Mailer imprint. The Kennedy years (with a detour for Marilyn Monroe and a long excursus for the assassination), the Cuban revolution, the agony of Vietnam, the Apollo mission, and the dark shadow of Richard Nixon: All of these were chronicled or encapsulated by Mailer episodes from The Deer Park, The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of a Fire on the Moon, and many fine but lesser texts written either for glossy magazines or for the "alternative" papers (Dissent, the Village Voice) that he helped to found and energize.

Yes, he did value risk-taking and not just for the rest of society (which was what was faintly "off" about his recommendation of murderer Jack Henry Abbott, and about some of the exorbitant things that he wrote in "The White Negro") but also and proudly for himself. Flung in the back of a paddy wagon with Noam Chomsky and an American Nazi for company: mixing it up down in the Congo waiting for the Ali-Foreman brawl; running for mayor of New York with Jimmy Breslin as a campaign manager; duking it out with the Stalinist fellow-travelers in the company of his old friend Jean Malaquais, individualist Trotskyist, as intellectual mentor; getting the point of Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song, and appreciating that a stone-cold killer who really wanted to die was the negation of bleeding-heart liberalism and an intuitive curtain-raiser for the Reagan years.

Pint-size Jewish fireplug that he was, Mailer also continually ran a great risk that very few are willing to run. I mean the danger of simply seeming ridiculous. He once nearly lost an eye in a bar fight, because he thought someone had implied that there was something homosexual, not about him, but about his dog! ("Nobody calls my dog a faggot.") He got whimpering drunk and made a complete idiot of himself on The Dick Cavett Show with Gore Vidal and Janet Flanner, and then reprinted the whole transcripted humiliation as part of an article. On that occasion, and on many, many others, beginning with An American Dream, he manifested an obsession with sodomy that was something a bit more (and perhaps even a bit less) than macho. I once made the mistake of asking him about this on a television show with Germaine Greer: Why was he so fixated on penetratio per anum and its occasions, male-on-male as well as male-on-female? Seizing my copy of his terrible novel Tough Guys Don't Dance, he scrawled an inscription that vowed revenge, and later gave an interview in which he said that the book had been ill-received in London because of a coterie of queer reviewers organized by me, Martin Amis, and Ian Hamilton. (Amis and I contemplated writing a hurt response, saying that this was very unfair to Hamilton.) But all this bravado and bullshit and delinquency, including the near-fatal stabbing of one of his wives, only seemed to increase the number of people—including the stabbed wife herself—who found fresh ways of forgiving him. Even Vidal, not a professional forgiver, was once gruffly affectionate about him in my hearing. A slightly schmaltzy way of phrasing this would be to say that Norman Mailer was always somehow life-affirming, and that his justly famous cocky grin was something that even his enemies had to envy.

The life-affirming may be true even of his most embarrassing work. In "The Time of Her Time," which appeared in Advertisements for Myself in 1959, he exhausted upward of a dozen pages in a description of a heroic struggle to bring a stubborn woman to orgasm. (The method that his character finally employs is so underhanded that I shall not quote it, thus forcing you to look it up.) Quite unabashed years later, he reprinted the whole folly and claimed that its original publication had nerved a hesitant editor to publish Lolita, of which novel he straight-facedly claimed that "The Time of Her Time" was "the godfather." Chutzpah could do no more. But without chutzpah, we would have had no Norman Mailer to appreciate in the first place. He would try everything at least once, from acting to directing to boxing to (worst of all, in my experience) cooking, and if it didn't work out, hey, it had been worth taking the chance.

He used to tell me with perfect gravity that politically he was "a left conservative," and this quixotic description has a patina of truth to it. Probably more than anything, Mailer was a libertarian and a foe of any system or mind-set that involved the censorious (feminism) or the overweening and the grandiose (imperialism/communism). His masterpiece, at least in my opinion, is Harlot's Ghost (1991), a historic fictionalizing of the national-security state that came very near to realizing the Balzacian ambition that he had conceived for it. What a shame that it was so dismally received by the critics and that he never delivered the second volume of it that he had promised. Instead, he frittered away a good part of the last two decades in half-baked essays and fictions on liberation theology—of all sorry things—and callow stuff on George Bush as the macho man gone wrong. Where the hell, I always wanted to ask Mailer, was the cultural risk in that?

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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, now out in paperback.

Photograph of Norman Mailer on Slate's home page and article page by Diane Bondareff/AP Photo.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

My father once told me, "A smart and interesting asshole is an asshole." This is largely how I feel about Norman Mailer.

Mailer won a Pulitzer against every rule of journalism -- brevity, clarity, objectivity played no role in the way Mailer wrote. He was capable of employing magical language, heroic bombast and utter bullshit to obscure the light of his accurate critics. If he was truly libertarian as Hitchens claims, he certainly didn't direct his concern for liberty to women, conservatives or a host of other people or ideologies that were anathema to him. There was scarcely a farce in the second half of the 20th century that could take place without the presence of this bombastic, malevolent troll.

I don't wish death upon any human, although it comes to all. I will say that Mailer wasn't fit to change the ribbon in Vonnegut's typewriter, and that Mailer would have been better served if he'd spent less time in the public eye, and more time at his own typewriter. En pace resquiat

--trapdoor

(To reply, click here.)

Norman Mailer has had a radical trajectory through the course of his career, and then, at age 75 with fifty years as a professional writer behind him, a summary collection is the fashion, and The Time of Our Time is the door stopper through which posterity should judge either his ascension or decline in our literary Olympus. It's amazing, actually, how Mailer has controlled the course of criticism of his work, as he did with Advertisements for Myself and later with the Prisoner of Sex, both books through which his aesthetics were linked with a peculiarly Maileresque cosmology. There is much to argue with in The Prisoner of Sex, and though I'm in sympathy with the aims of the women's movement, I cheer Mailer's defense of the artists' right to use their sexuality and sense of the sensual world as proper fodder for poetic expression.

What makes the book important is precisely the fact that Mailer felt there was a need for a man to stand up and have a word against and about the rising tide of Feminist theory; while many male writers were too confused, adrift in daydreams of irony or bottled up rage, and while the academy was surrendering its arms without a shot being fired, Mailer spoke up and wrote that there was a profound and important difference between the sexes, and that while social justice must and will prevail regarding the rights of women in the work place and overall social sphere, one cannot maintain, straight faced, that the only difference between the sexes has to do with genitalia.

There are times when Mailer- the- mystic clogs up an otherwise lacerating argument, where his romanticism veers dangerously towards a lunatic's hallucinations, but his defense of Miller, Lawrence and Genet against the clumsier moments of Millet's original critique in Sexual Politics is literary criticism at its most emphatic. The Prisoner of Sex is, I'm afraid, incoherent at times, but there are long passages of rich knock-out prose that demonstrate why Mailer is thought by many to be one of the premiere stylists of the times, and if nothing else, his lyrical defense of D.H.Lawrence is worth the purchase by itself. One might despise Mailer and his philosophy, but a critic was still trapped discussing the work through the author's obsessions. And that is the mark of brilliance, Mailer could get his readers to talk about things he wanted to speak to, because his language is strangely persuasive, at his high point, even as it addresses the dark and obscene corners of the imagination, and the baser instincts of American power.

The Time of Our Time again makes us consider his entire career through Mailer's filter, and understandably, it can be aggravating for someone expecting an easy path into the body of his work. But it gives us the rewards, with generous selections form his best work, The Naked and the Dead, Armies of the Night, Executioner's Song, An American Dream--and likewise long excerpts from slighter efforts, like The Gospel According to the Son and his recent Picasso biography. There is an impressive reach over the five decades that he's been in the public eye, an early brashness turning into a combative and provocative brilliance that at times trips over its own eloquence that later turned into thoughtful, epic scale storytelling through which the previous egocentric prose vanished behind the tragedy writ in the Gary Gilmore saga.

It's difficult not to be impressed with the range of Mailer's topics in fiction, journalism, and essays -- World War 2 in the Pacific, Moon Landings, Black power, Women's Rights, Hunting, Reichian sexuality, the failure of Marxism, The Kennedy Assassination, Ancient Egypt, masculinity and American Literature, the dread of Modern architecture, the real meaning of the right wing, Boxing--and while Mailer at times seems breathless and throat clearing in his writing, that he's spreading a style too thin to cover the feeling that he is, for the moment, bereft of anything interesting to say, you note the way he changes tact, changes styles, and ushers in another period of solid books that stand as his strongest. The Time of Our Time provides an overly long reflection of a career that has been victim of the author's proclaimed desire to be the champ of his generation, but it also gives us a chance to appreciate a brilliant talent that found expression in spite of Mailer's self-annihilating quirks. Controversial, problematic, self-absorbed, but quintessentially American, he remains one of the best witnesses we could have had for the second half of the century.

--Ted_Burke

(To reply, click here.)

(11/12)

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