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Stormin' Norman: The writer as celebrity, and vice versa

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http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/s...20638.html

EXCERPT: Norman Mailer entered Harvard in the fall of 1939, just as World War II began. His famous novel about part of that war, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948, and at age 25, like Lord Byron, he awoke to find himself famous. Sixty years later, looking back on the book’s immense success—it topped the New York Times Book Review’s bestseller list for 11 consecutive weeks and remained on that list for 62 more—he commented on the experience of sudden fame: “I knew I’d be a celebrity when I came back to America [he and his wife were living in Paris] and I felt very funny towards it, totally unprepared. .  .  . I’ve always seen myself as an observer. And now I knew, realized, that I was going to be an actor on the American stage, so to speak.”

From that time until his death in 2007, Mailer’s career both as observer and actor—manifested in the 40 or so books he would write—gave us, in the words of Warner Berthoff, “a uniquely substantial record of what it had meant to be alive” in that long era.

Although Mailer has been capably biographed before and was the subject of a large oral history by Peter Manso, J. Michael Lennon’s 960-page account of him won’t be improved upon. Not satisfied with producing this herculean biography, Lennon has followed it with a comparably thick selection of Mailer’s letters. Lennon knew Mailer for decades, talked extensively with him, and recorded what he heard. Unlike many biographers, Lennon feels the need to say something in judgment, however brief, of every one of Mailer’s books. To do this, while keeping the “life” narrative moving along, is a feat he performs with care and without pomposity.

Lennon is especially attentive to Mailer’s undergraduate life, where he compiled a lopsided academic record, with a major in engineering sciences and six courses in creative writing. [...] Some of Lennon’s most fascinating pages are about Mailer’s service as an infantryman in the war and, after the war’s end, as a cook in Japan.

[...] As the positive force of Mailer’s journalism added up, with reports on everything from prizefights to Marilyn Monroe, one began to think of him less as a novelist who wrote books with a beginning, middle, and end than as a performer, with himself invariably at the center of things, entertaining ideas to see how long they interested him and his readers.

[...] Looking back over the decades since Mailer announced he would settle for nothing less than making a revolution “in the consciousness of our time,” we might ask just what “our time” was and when it ended. Ben Jonson famously wrote about Shakespeare, “He was not for an age but for all time.” How much of what we most admire in Mailer’s writing was “for an age,” that age being the 1960s and ’70s? Considering his contemporary novelists—Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth—my judgment is that certain of their works will last for a long time, if not for all time. I would be uncertain about claiming any novel of Mailer’s to fit that category, although I would claim it for Armies of the Night (1968).

What Mailer did that his contemporaries did not do was meet head-on every sort of public, social, and political phenomenon in order to “war” on them. To an extent, he shares this combative posture with Gore Vidal, another writer who will live less as a novelist than as an all-purpose gadfly. It was Vidal who told us on television that he would never turn down the opportunity to have sex or to appear on television. Mailer might have said the same thing; perhaps he did.

[...] Mailer wrote some 45,000 letters, and this selection amounts to less than 2 percent of the whole. [...] At times I wondered just how many letters one might care to read from Mailer to Lillian Hellman and Diana Trilling about their celebrated (and rather boring) feud. Lennon’s account in the biography serves perfectly well to fill us in on the spat, and on Mailer’s awkward attempts to be a pal to both women. The volume also seems heavy, perhaps too heavy, on letters to Mailer’s chums such as Mickey Knox and Buzz Farbar, and to his longtime intellectual friend Jean Malaquis. And there are too many letters to the convict-murderer Jack Abbott, in whom Mailer invested a great deal of energy and time, to no good end.

Since it’s doubtful that many readers will sit down and read through all the correspondence, they can pick and choose a bit. Not to be missed, however, are the wonderful letters he wrote to his parents and to his first wife, Beatrice Silverman, about his wartime experience in the Philippines. There is a freshness and human sympathy in these letters that he couldn’t recapture as he went on to do battle with life after the Army. There is also a subtle, indeed poetic, account of other novelists. To Diana Trilling, recipient of many of his best letters, he insists that writers become great because of, not despite, their infirmities: “Faulkner’s long breath, Hemingway’s command of the short sentence, Proust’s cocoon.” He explains:

"Faulkner writes his long sentences because he never really touches what he is about to say, and so keeps chasing it; Hemingway writes short because he strangles in a dependent clause; Proust spins his wrappings because a fag gets slapped if he says what he thinks."

But he assures her that he is not becoming the Westbrook Pegler of world letters. Except for John Updike, there was no better novelist-critic of his predecessors and contemporaries in the fiction game than Norman Mailer.

He once confided to a correspondent, “You know, I never had a monstrous ego.” If we’re tempted to respond “Really?” then the variety of other lives with whom he engages in these letters—William F. Buckley and Monica Lewinsky, Clint Eastwood and Jacqueline Kennedy—suggests that he became a major writer by putting his infirmities on display, irrepressibly so...


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