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I once heard the Canadian writer Morley Callaghan describe Norman Mailer as a "showboat" more than a writer. For Mailer is part of a post-World War II generation of U.S. writers — along with Gore Vidal, Truman Capote and others — who became known as widely for their media appearances as for their literary works. But Mailer has also produced a very large body of work. Will some of it stand the test of time as well as have the works of the famous American expatriate writers from Callaghan's time earlier in the century? Mailer himself once measured himself against Hemingway although his style is quite different. Normal Mailer was born in New Jersey and studied at Harvard. He was drafted in 1944 and served in the Pacific during the war. He used his battle experience to create his first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) which became a bestseller, making him one of the first big-name American writers to emerge from the war. However, he suffered an extended sophomore jinx with his second and third novels Barbary Shore (1951) and Deer Park (1955), which were received poorly. Mailer started mixing journalism and auto-biographical musings with his fictional output, most notably in The White Negro (1957) and Advertisements for Myself (1959), the latter collection attracting attention as presaging the new personal journalism of the following decade. During this period he was also involved in political journalism, co-founding New York's Village Voice alternative newspaper in 1955 and editing Dissent magazine from 1952 to 1963. In the early 1960s
he undertook to produce a novel for monthly instalments in a magazine.
He began with his narrator describing a double-date with future U.S.
president Jack Kennedy in 1946 and by the end of Many of his works in the turbulent sixties dealt with his involvement in the anti-war protest movement. Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) is actually a stream-of-consciousness novel about a Texas youth nicknamed D.J. on a hunting expedition and does not mention the infamous war until the memorable last two lines: "This is D.J., Disk Jockey to America turning off. Vietnam, hot dam." The Armies of the Night (1968) reported somewhat more directly on a massive anti-war demonstration in Washington, during which Mailer was arrested. It's a subjective, often hilarious, often insightful and always self-absorbed account of those times. His follow-up, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1969), dealt similarly with protests outside the Democratic and Republican conventions. Mailer's next foray into the New Journalism was Of a Fire on the Moon (1970), a psychological account of the first human lunar landing. He was developing a rapid-fire style of colliding insights and hyperbole in his "non-fiction novels" of this period:
He produced no fewer than ten more works in the 1970s, among which Marilyn about screen siren Marilyn Monroe and The Executioner's Song about death-row convict Gary Gilmore were his best received. The latter is considered a masterpiece by some and won Mailer's second Pulitzer Prize, the first having been for The Armies of the Night. As his prolific output continued into the next decade Mailer kept talking about a big work of fiction he was working on. Ancient Evenings finally appeared in 1983, a massive, messy, stream-of-consciousness novel taking place in ancient Egypt. It elicited both wild applause and disappointment. His less ambitious Tough Guys Don't Dance from the next year, though, is a terrific novel of sex, drugs and murder. Mailer says he wrote it in sixty days and the plot is "silly". Hmm, is there a lesson in this? His less carefully thought-out novels sometimes have more life to them than his "great works". In the 1990s his most notable works may be Harlot's Ghost (1991)—a long, often engaging novel of life in the CIA from the mid-1950s to the assassination of John F. Kennedy—and Oswald's Tale (1996) about Kennedy's alleged assassin. Into his eighties and up to the very end his output was prodigious. In the last two years of his life, he published three more books, including The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America (2006), based on conversations with his 27-year-old son (he was obviously prodigious in more ways than one); On God: An Uncommon Conversation (2007), with dialogues on his concept of an artistic god; and his last and acclaimed novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007). It often seems that, contrary to his early literary idol, Mailer would never use a single word where 16 would do. And he himself often seemed to be the real subject of anything he wrote, whether in the first or third person. But when his swirling, erratic ideas came together, he could give gritty life to almost any subject matter. This showboat put on a good show. — Eric |
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© Copyright 2002–2008 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.
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MAILER,
Norman