newcritics

Wolcott is right. He was something like a planet, massive, unavoidable, wandering all over the sky, sometimes more visible than at others, but always exerting his own gravitational field, drawing lesser objects into his orbit, whether they wanted to be there or not, warping the independent orbits of others.

So you’d think I’d have as much to say about Norman Mailer’s winking out as I did about the death of Kurt Vonnegut.

But Mailer’s writing never captured my imagination the way Vonnegut’s had. That’s not a literary criticism, just a statement of autobiographical fact. Because I was a kid with no intellectual defenses or prejudices, Slaughterhouse Five and Player Piano and Cat’s Cradle went straight into my head and my heart. I wasn’t much more sophisticated by the time I was ready to read and appreciate Mailer’s writing, but I couldn’t do either without Mailer himself getting in the way.

I read Vonnegut’s books because I found them on a bookshelf one day. Mailer himself dragged me to his books.

He was a celebrity of longstanding by the time I heard of him, and I only heard of him because he was a celebrity, and not a particularly likable or admirable one. And he was everywhere, an angry face, half-grinning, half-scowling from all the TV screens, the newspapers, the magazines. There was no getting around him to his books. You went into them on his terms, carried along kicking and screaming by him and his argument with the world. You couldn’t take his writing to heart without taking him to heart, and who would want such a bastard inside you like that?

Fug that.

It was a long time—not until grad school—before I figured out that the constant intrusion of his ego and his personal angers in his books weren’t his mistake, they were his point.

My first memory of Mailer is of him on the Dick Cavett Show. I remember how he grew furious with Cavett over something, I could hardly make sense of what, and he began angrily tapping his finger on the yellow legal pad Cavett had balanced on his knee where I guess Cavett had written out possible questions and topics he wanted Mailer to tackle. “Is that on your list?” Mailer wanted to know. “Stick to your list!” he bellowed, or something like that.

Cavett told him he could take the list, fold it five ways, and put it where the moon don’t shine.

So my first encounter with Mailer was watching him contribute to the making of Dick Cavett as one of my first intellectual heroes.

I suspect that for a lot of young would-be writers and intellectuals who came of age during the (vain)glory days of Mailer’s celebrity—which dated from the late 50s on into the early 80’s; it’s amazing how long he lasted, how he kept the spotlight on him all those years—Mailer made his first appearance on their mental stages as the adversary of their first heroes and heroines, if not as an out and out villain.

He ‘d become more famous for the fights he started than for the novels he’d been writing, which were, with the exception of the very first one, mostly drivel and madness. Basically, he was a famous jerk who wrote bad books….until you read the journalism.

Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago were what clued me in.

It’s not true that his only great subject was himself, although he was clearly his own hero. His subject was the whole of America in the time in which he happened to live there. He believed, though, that his personal experience was truly representative. He was the American Everyman. He also believed, at least he acted and wrote as if he believed it, that the only way he could get at the truth at the center of a story was to throw himself into it and fight with it, as if America was an ocean and he was a literary Jacques Costeau, with this difference:

Cousteau focused on what there was to be seen down below and reported on it in calm objectivity. Mailer told us about the dive and about the effects of the dive on the diver and he treated the ocean as an adversary that meant to drown him before he swam deep enough to discover its secrets.

And he often threw himself into stories just for the pleasure of describing the waves he stirred up. So much so that it’s easy to suspect that he stabbed his wife just to be able to write about it.

The result is the most egocentric American writing since Walt Whitman’s.

Of course Mailer had none of Whitman’s sympathy, none of Whitman’s humility, none of Walt’s willingness to see himself as part of the crowd. Mailer elbowed the crowd aside and boasted that he was there to stand in for it.

Whitman contained multitudes and among them he contained the feminine and softer and even weaker and more erring spirits of America. Mailer was glad to represent sinners and criminals, but only the most macho kinds of each.

The question with newly dead writers is always will they be read as much as they are read about? Mailer’s reputation will survive because of his historical importance. No one will be able to write about the literary and cultural landscapes of the 50s, 60s, and 70s without dealing with Mailer.

Mailer made himself so much a representative of his times—even if often all he was representative of was a writer named Norman Mailer who happened to be alive and famous during those times—that it might seem a good bet that when the time of his time has faded from the collective memory his writing will hardly make sense.

I won’t take the bet.

He was a great writer. He wasn’t a great novelist. But he wrote three books that will probably survive and be read. One is a novel, the second is a work of journalism, and the third is a book that is both.

The Naked and the Dead is one of the half dozen or so great novels of World War II. It’s not the best and the fact that it was the first doesn’t matter now nor will it to future generations of readers; what will matter is that after you read Catch 22 and The Thin Red Line and Slaughterhouse Five you have nowhere else you have to go except onto The Naked and the Dead.

Armies of the Night is one of the great models of personal journalism. If that’s the kind of writing you want to do, forget Thompson, read Mailer.

And The Executioner’s Song is Mailer’s Leaves of Grass, the book that contains Whitman’s multitudes. It is the book people mean without knowing it when they talk about the Great American Novel.

It is the great American novel. If only it were a novel.

Which it is.

Which it isn’t.

Those three books will lead young would-be writers and intellectuals to the rest of the journalism and the essays and Harlot’s Ghost and then—so it goes—to the bad novels, Barbary Shore and The Deer Park, and the crazy ones. They will keep his other work alive to be read the way Moby Dick keeps Pierre alive and read and The Scarlet Letter saves The Marble Faun.

That also means that some unwary young readers in the future will inevitably pick up Ancient Evenings.

Poor, sorry motherfuggers.

Originally posted at my place.

Note: My memory of the incident on the Cavett show turns out to have been pretty good. Over at my place, Ken Houghton dropped this link off in the comments to Cavett’s recounting of that night. It’s funny that I don’t remember Janet Flanner’s being onstage at all and can only dimly recall that Gore Vidal was there too. And I wish I’d remembered this exchange that followed Cavett’s telling Mailer where to put the list:

Mailer: Mr. Cavett, on your word of honor, did you just make that
up, or have you had it canned for years, and you were waiting for the
best moment to use it?

Cavett: I have to tell you a quote from Tolstoy?

Postscript: Well, I’ll be fugged. Of all the things I’ve read about Mailer this week, Eric Alterman’s description of the guy is the one that floored me:

He was also a real old-fashioned gentleman…

Who’d a-thunk it?

Fits, though, with this anecdote Bill Altreuter left in the comment thread at my place. Seems Bill invited Mailer to his wedding.

Bill has a couple of good posts about Mailer up at his place. This one on just appreciating Mailer’s work, and this one on Mailer’s run for mayor of New York City, which includes guest appearances by William F. Buckley and Jimmy Breslin.

This did not surprise me: Death just makes Terry Teachout grumpy.