He Also Did A Little Writing
When Norman Mailer passed away last weekend, it made sense that the ensuing conversation would be about almost everything but his writing. An editorial published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday – however complimentary – praised Mailer for not only owning his masculinity, but for constantly wearing it in the form of a very public persona. Meanwhile, a day earlier, The Guardian took the author to task for exactly these same reasons.
In between such markers rests a host of similar examinations that remember Mailer more for how he behaved at cocktail-parties than for his professional record.
Because this wasn’t simply an author after all…this was the guy who once smashed Gore Vidal in the head with a tumbler and head-butted Truman Capote in the face, the misogynist who married six times and famously stabbed his second wife in the neck with a penknife at a party – the rude bastard who co-founded the Village Voice, ran for mayor of the largest city in the nation and vouched for a convicted murderer (who killed again within weeks of his parole). The list in this regard is exhausting, and one gets a hangover merely reading about Mailer’s public exploits. He was Johnny Depp before celebrity misbehavior was fashionable, the literary icon who left a trail of tears in his wake only to further occupy our time by loudly wondering why anyone bothered to care. As the last of the larger-than-life post-war authors, such behavior was destined to be his legacy.
But it’s also worth remembering that he was frequently a damn fine political writer, one who advanced the notion of the “non-fiction novel” to truly great heights. Anyone interested in unpacking the spirit of the current anti-war movement would be well served by Mailer’s 1968 “Armies of the Night,” while many of his other works – particularly the political ones – have stood the test of ideological time equally well, most famously “The Naked and the Dead,” but also the lesser-known “Harlot’s Ghost” and “The Presidential Papers.”
In recent years, Mailer’s attention turned increasingly back towards politics, spurred in large part by the behavior of America’s current administration (and exhibited specifically during the run up to conflict in Iraq). This upset more than a few within the literary illuminati, but after taking the time to go back over a few of his best modern tirades, I am struck not only by the inexhaustible force of his creative outlook, but also by how recent history has largely supported Mailer’s idiosyncratic analysis and forecasting.
Which, at the very least, makes him the old man who got it right the last time around – the weathered author whose spectacular predictions the Bush administration has spent the last seven-years tirelessly proving correct. While there is undoubtedly a discussion to be had about the life of Norman Mailer, about how the man who described himself as a “Left-Conservative” fits philosophically within the paradigm of our modern partisan landscape, we might best start such reflections by simply reading (or, dare I say, re-reading) some of what he left behind for us to find in the first place.
Iraq, George Bush, thom file, Norman Mailer, Mailer
