The most important thing to remember about Norman Mailer is that he wasn’t very smart. When he hit the big time in 1948 with The Naked and the Dead, Mailer’s heart and soul was stuffed with big, fat American novels like An American Tragedy, USA, and Look Homeward, Angel. He arrived at the party to discover that everyone—everyone who counted—was talking about Freud and Marx (of course), not to mention Sartre, Picasso, Stravinsky, and abstract expressionism. Poor Norman couldn’t make head or tails of any of it.
Mailer couldn’t bear to be the tail of anyone’s kite, which he surely would be if he tried to out-Partisan Review the Partisan Review crowd, some of whom could actually read French. So he invented his own philosophy, the philosophy of “hip.” You can’t be wrong if you’re making it up yourself, can you?
Yes, it was only an act, but Norman needed one. The novels weren’t doing so well. The Barbary Shore, a clumsy parable about socialism, was an abject failure. The Deer Park was a lot better, an interesting failure, definitely, but a failure nonetheless. With Advertisements for Myself, a “get out of my book contract” book cobbled together to a large extent from pieces that Mailer had been unable to place—lousy poems, lousy sketches, lousy short stories, and chunks of unfinished novels—Mailer retreated to the unassailable fortress of his own ego. Here, at least, he was king, and always right.
To prove that his act wasn’t an act, Mailer was driven to advocating absurd, “shocking” positions and then refusing to back down from them. It was really ballsy to attack a woman with a knife, when you come to think about it, and a society needs great artists more than it needs to protect itself against murder. Anyway, a sense of danger is important to society, and you can’t have a sense of danger without an occasional murder or two.
Norman managed to keep his act interesting through the sixties. Armies of the Night, his famous book-length essay on the 1968 March on Washington, makes good reading for the first hundred pages. But by 1970 Mailer was in deep trouble. For whatever reason—too many divorces, too many books, too much booze, or simple old age—he fell into a serious decline from which he never emerged. Everything he wrote after Armies of the Night was nothing more than bad self-parody.
But it’s a mistake to be too hard on Norman. In 2003, he said something that a lot of people should have listened to: “Listen I am not interested if the majority of people in Iraq want a new government or not, what I am interested in is starting something that you can’t finish… I’m worried, that we are starting something that we can’t finish without changing the nature of American democracy by the time we are done.”
Norman Mailer. He wasn’t always wrong.
