Norman Mailer died this morning of kidney failure at the age of 84, and there is no doubt that the world is sadder place with his passing. Mailer came from a time when writers and novelists bellowed from the rooftops and demanded to be taken seriously, when they lived large, messy lives and wrote larger, sometimes messier, novels. Mailer never quite reached the heights he believed himself capable of, but it was not for lack of trying. He was brilliant and angry, both in his fiction and his journalism, and believed he was the literary heir to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Joyce. That he fell well short seems to matter little. In one of Mailer's many obituaries published this morning, A.O. Scott may have summed him up perfectly.
"But if it is easy to ridicule Mailer," Scott wrote, "for failing to realize such an extravagant ambition, it is nonetheless possible to admire him for having had the guts to conceive it and the temerity to confess it. If no other postwar American writer has produced as dazzling and spectacular a series of failures as Normal Mailer, it is because none has dared so much."
These days, our literary controversies consist of silly spats between Oprah and Johnathan Franzen or J.K. Rowling's after-the-fact, oh-by-the-way declaration that Dumbledore rode his broom sidesaddle for a reason. But Mailer probably scoffed at such nonsense. This was, after all, a man who once bit off a piece of actor Rip Torn's ear when Torn came after Mailer and split his head open with a hammer. (Mailer was directing a movie; Torn was the lead actor). This was a man who stabbed his wife (the second of six) with a penknife in a drunken disagreement at a party. He feuded with Bellow, Buckley, Vidal, Capote, Miller, Styron and any other literary giant who crossed his path, and people were riveted. He was arrogant enough to run for mayor of New York city (with columnist Jimmy Breslin as his running mate). In Mailer's time, writers were not only celebrities, but agents, at least in their own minds, of social change.
As flawed as he was as a novelist, he was nearly the equal of Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese as a journalist. His dispatch for Esquire from the 1960 Democratic National Convention, titled "Superman Comes To the Supermarket" remains one of the most angry, honest and eloquent screeds ever published about politics and the changing landscape of American culture. It is, without question, one of the defining pieces of literary journalism in the 20th century. His paragraph describing the hollow, empty, yet addictive city of Los Angeles (below) may never be topped.
"But if it is easy to ridicule Mailer," Scott wrote, "for failing to realize such an extravagant ambition, it is nonetheless possible to admire him for having had the guts to conceive it and the temerity to confess it. If no other postwar American writer has produced as dazzling and spectacular a series of failures as Normal Mailer, it is because none has dared so much."
These days, our literary controversies consist of silly spats between Oprah and Johnathan Franzen or J.K. Rowling's after-the-fact, oh-by-the-way declaration that Dumbledore rode his broom sidesaddle for a reason. But Mailer probably scoffed at such nonsense. This was, after all, a man who once bit off a piece of actor Rip Torn's ear when Torn came after Mailer and split his head open with a hammer. (Mailer was directing a movie; Torn was the lead actor). This was a man who stabbed his wife (the second of six) with a penknife in a drunken disagreement at a party. He feuded with Bellow, Buckley, Vidal, Capote, Miller, Styron and any other literary giant who crossed his path, and people were riveted. He was arrogant enough to run for mayor of New York city (with columnist Jimmy Breslin as his running mate). In Mailer's time, writers were not only celebrities, but agents, at least in their own minds, of social change.
As flawed as he was as a novelist, he was nearly the equal of Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese as a journalist. His dispatch for Esquire from the 1960 Democratic National Convention, titled "Superman Comes To the Supermarket" remains one of the most angry, honest and eloquent screeds ever published about politics and the changing landscape of American culture. It is, without question, one of the defining pieces of literary journalism in the 20th century. His paragraph describing the hollow, empty, yet addictive city of Los Angeles (below) may never be topped.
"It is not that Los Angeles is altogether hideous, it is even by degrees pleasant, but for an Easterner there is never any salt in the wind; it is like Mexican cooking without chile, or Chinese egg rolls missing their mustard; as one travels through the endless repetitions of that city which is the capital of suburbia with its milky pinks, its washed-out oranges, its tainted lime-yellows of pastel on one pretty little architectural monstrosity after another, the colors not intense enough, the styles never pure, and never sufficiently impure to collide on the eye, one conceives the people who live here—they have come out to express themselves, Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded; no passions will calcify here for years in the gloom to be revealed a decade later as the tessellations of hard and fertile work, no, it is all open, promiscuous, borrowed, half bought, a city without iron, eschewing wood, a kingdom of stucco, the playground for mass men—one has the feeling it was built by television sets giving orders to men.
And in this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles, Los Angeles is a city to drive in, the boulevards are wide, the traffic is nervous and fast, the radio stations play bouncing, blooping, rippling tunes, one digs the pop in a pop tune, no one of character would make love by it but the sound is good for swinging a car, electronic guitars and Hawaiian harps."
And in this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles, Los Angeles is a city to drive in, the boulevards are wide, the traffic is nervous and fast, the radio stations play bouncing, blooping, rippling tunes, one digs the pop in a pop tune, no one of character would make love by it but the sound is good for swinging a car, electronic guitars and Hawaiian harps."
Mailer, a literary pugilist to the end, wasn't the greatest writer who ever lived. He wasn't even close. But he was an absolute original.
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