By Hillel Italie
NEW YORK, Nov 10 AP - His friends all tell similar stories.
Norman Mailer at a dinner party, awards ceremony or afternoon gathering, hobbling on canes up or down a few steps, short of breath, as if getting from one place to another was a harder than finding the right word to finish a paragraph.
Then, he would be seated, and was himself again.
We would talk about everything,'' novelist William Kennedy said of Mailer, who died today at the age of 84 after spending more than two months in and out of hospitals. He knew he wasn’t going to live very much longer, but he would still talk of taking on the greatest subjects. He always was working on something.’’
He was absolutely dauntless,'' said Jason Epstein, who edited several of Mailer's books at Random House. He was quite weak in the end, but he still planned to write a seven-volume novel about Hitler.’’
The Pulitzer-Prize winning Mailer, the eminent literary journalist, drama king and gentleman, eternal striver for the Great American Novel, seemed to embody in recent years not just one writer, but a generation for whom the printed word was a noble and endangered way of life.
More than such peers as Gore Vidal, William Styron or Kurt Vonnegut, Mailer was the writer as Writer, not a career to be printed on a business card, but a calling, an identity, with all the follies and privileges to which a man alert to his own gifts felt entitled.
He wrote letters to the president, sounded off on talk shows, likened himself to Picasso, placed himself on a plateau'' with Jacqueline Kennedy. Some part of me knew that I had more emotion than most,’’ Mailer, who married six times and stabbed one of his wives, once wrote. He cautioned himself not to exhaust the emotions of others''. He was interesting, because he was interested,’’ said Vidal, a longtime friend and occasional rival. He had a radical imagination, a way of approaching subjects that was never boring.'' He was by nature bound to a style of excess,’’ said EL Doctorow, who worked with Mailer in the 1960s as an editor at the Dial Press. There were times when you would be fed up with him, but if you could conceive of American culture of the past 50 years without Norman Mailer, you would find it a lot drearier.'' Lightning struck early for Mailer, and he struck back. In his 20s, he was the prodigy behind The Naked and the Dead, the World War II novel that made him instantly, and prematurely famous. He came back in his 30s as the master self-advertiser, the anointer of John F Kennedy as Superman’’ at the supermarket. In his 40s, he was the fighting narrator-participant in The Armies of the Night; in his 50s, the cool chronicler of killer Gary Gilmore.
His hero was the authentic, autonomous man - the boxer, or graffiti artist, or maestro of jazz, or the Norman Mailer'' who starred in The Armies of the Night and other works of journalism. The bureaucratic mind was his enemy, from the military leaders of The Naked and the Dead to the box-like skyscrapers that appalled him when looking out from his Brooklyn town house, to the processed presidency of Richard Nixon. Nixon’s crime is his inability to rise above the admiration for the corporation,’’ Mailer wrote in 1974, commenting on the Oval Office tapes that would help drive Nixon from office.
``Throughout the transcripts, he is acting like the good, tough, even-minded, cool-tempered, and tastefully foul-mouth president of a huge corporation - an automobile man, let us say, who has just discovered that his good assistants have somehow, God knows how, allowed more than a trace of tin to get into the molybdenum.’’
It was easy to make fun of Mailer, with his chesty and sometimes foolish pronouncements, his nerve as a man in his 80s to write a 450-page novel about the childhood of Hitler, as told by an underling of Satan, with a bibliography citing Milton, Tolstoy and Freud.
But mocking Mailer was really just a way of putting down ourselves. Mailer’s greatest risk was to presume that writing - and writers - mattered. To argue with him was good sport. To dismiss him was to dismiss literature itself.
Though he believed in reincarnation, we should not count on such luck again. He was a man who saw the world whole and still forgave it.
We have only started to miss him.
INTERESTING PERSONAL HISTORY OF MAILER. WELL WORTH THE READ.
By Richard Pyle
NEW YORK, Nov 10 AP - Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country’s literary conscience and provocateur with such books as The Naked and the Dead'' and The Executioner’s Song’’, died today aged 84, his literary executor said.
Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J Michael Lennon, who is also the author’s biographer.
From his classic debut novel The Naked and the Dead,'' set in the South Pacific in World War II, to such masterworks of literary journalism as The Armies of the Night’’, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for his insight, passion and originality.
Some of his works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old enfant terrible''. Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, streetwise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party. He had nine children, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New York, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA (Young Women's Hebrew Association, a Jewish community centre) for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women's liberation. But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, in the end it is the writing that will count’’.
Mailer, he wrote, possessed a superb natural style that does not crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and characters with real bloodstreams and nervous systems, a great openness and eagerness for experience, a sense of urgency about the need to test thought and character in the crucible of a difficult era''. Author Joan Didion, tearful and struggling for words after learning of Mailer's death, said: Obviously, he was a great American voice.’’
Norman Mailer was born January 31, 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey. His father, Isaac, a South African-born accountant, and mother, Fanny, who ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, soon moved to Brooklyn - later described by Mailer as the most secure Jewish environment in America''. [b]Mailer completed public schools, earned an engineering science degree in 1943 from Harvard[/b], where he decided to become a writer, and was soon drafted into the army. Sent to the Philippines as an infantryman, he saw enough of army life and combat to provide a basis for his first book The Naked and the Dead’’, published in 1948 while he was a post-graduate student in Paris on the GI Bill, a government program which paid for college tuition for returning veterans.
The book - noteworthy for Mailer’s invention of the word fug'' as a substitute for the then-unacceptable four-letter original - was a best-seller, and Mailer returned home to find himself anointed the new Hemingway, Dos Passos and Melville. [b]Buoyed by instant literary celebrity, Mailer embraced the early 1950s counterculture - defining hip’’ in his essay The White Negro'', allying himself with Beat Generation gurus Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and writing social and political commentary for the leftist Village Voice, which he helped found.[/b] He also churned out two more novels, Barbary Shore’’ (1951) and Deer Park'' (1955), neither embraced kindly by readers or critics. [b]Mailer turned reporter to cover the 1960 Democratic Party convention for Esquire and later claimed, with typical hubris, that his piece Superman Comes to the Supermarket’’ had made the difference in John F Kennedy’s razor-thin margin of victory over Republican Richard M Nixon. [/b]While Life magazine called his next book, An American Dream'' (1965), the big comeback of Norman Mailer’’, the author-journalist was chronicling major events of the day: an anti-war march on Washington, the 1968 political conventions, the Muhammad Ali-Floyd Patterson fight, an Apollo moon shot.
His 1968 account of the peace march on the Pentagon, The Armies of the Night'', won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was described as the only person over 40 trusted by the flower generation. [/b]Covering the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago for Harper's magazine, Mailer was torn between keeping to a tight deadline or joining the anti-war protests that led to a violent police crackdown. I was in a moral quandary. I didn’t know if I was being scared or being professional,’’ he later testified in the trial of the so-called Chicago Seven.
In 1999, ``The Armies of the Night’’ was listed at No 19 on a New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.
Mailer’s personal life was as turbulent as the times. In 1960, at a party at his Brooklyn Heights home, Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a knife. She declined to press charges, and it was not until 1997 that she revealed, in her own book, how close she had come to dying.
In 1969, Mailer ran for mayor on a left conservative'' platform. He said New York City should become the 51st state, and urged a referendum for black ghetto dwellers’’ on whether they should set up their own government.
Mailer had numerous minor run-ins with the law, usually for being drunk or disorderly, but was also jailed briefly during the Pentagon protests.
While directing the film Maidstone'' in 1968, the self-described old club fighter’’ punched actor Lane Smith, breaking his jaw, and bit actor Rip Torn’s ear in another scuffle.
Years later, he championed the work of a convict-writer named Jack Abbott - and was subjected to ridicule and criticism when Abbott, released to a halfway house, promptly stabbed a man to death.
Mailer had views on almost everything.
The 1970s: ``The decade in which image became pre-eminent because nothing deeper was going on.’’
Poetry: A natural activity ... a poem comes to one'', whereas prose required making an appointment with one’s mind to write a few thousand words’’.
Journalism: Irresponsible. ``You can’t be too certain about what happened.’’
Technology: Insidious, debilitating and depressing'', and nobody in politics had an answer to its impact on our spiritual well-being’’.
He had such a compendious vision of what it meant to be alive. He had serious opinions on everything there was to have an opinion on, and everything he had was so original,'' said friend William Kennedy, author of Ironweed’’.
Mailer’s suspicion of technology was so deep that while most writers used typewriters or computers, he wrote with a pen, about 1,500 words a day, in what Newsweek’s Sokolov called ``an illegible and curving hand’’.
When a stranger asked him on a Brooklyn street if he wrote on a computer, he replied, No, I never learned that'', then added, in a mischevious aside, but my girl does’’.
In a 1971 magazine piece about the new women’s liberation movement, Mailer equated the dehumanising effect of technology with what he said was feminists’ need to abolish the mystery, romance and ``blind, goat-kicking lust’’ from sex.
Time magazine said the broadside should earn him a permanent niche in their pantheon of male chauvinist pigs''. Mailer later told an interviewer that his being called sexist was the greatest injustice in American life’’.
Two years later he wrote Marilyn'' and was accused of plagiarism by other Marilyn Monroe biographers. One, Maurice Zolotow, called it one of the literary heists of the century’’. Mailer shot back: ``Nobody calls me a plagiarist and gets away with it,’’ adding that if he was going to steal, it would be from Shakespeare or Melville.
``He could do anything he wanted to do - the movie business, writing, theatre, politics,’’ author Gay Talese said today.
``He never thought the boundaries were restricted. He’d go anywhere and try anything. He was a courageous person, a great person, fully confident, with a great sense of optimism.’’
In ``Advertisements for Myself’’ (1959), Mailer promised to write the greatest novel yet, but later conceded he had not.
Among other notable works: Cannibals and Christians'' (1966); Why Are We in Vietnam?’’ (1967); and ``Miami and the Siege of Chicago’’ (1968), an account of the two political conventions that year.
``The Executioner’s Song’’ (1979), an epic account of the life and execution of petty criminal Gary Gilmore, whom Mailer never met, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
``Ancient Evenings’’ (1983), a novel of ancient Egypt that took 11 years to complete, was critically panned.
Tough Guys Don't Dance'' (1984) became a 1987 film. Some critics found Harlot’s Ghost’’ (1991), a novel about the CIA, surprisingly sympathetic to the cold warriors, considering Mailer’s left-leaning past.
In 1997, he came out with ``The Gospel According to the Son’’, a novel told from Jesus Christ’s point of view.
The following year, he marked his 75th birthday with the epic-length anthology ``The Time of Our Time’’.
Mailer’s wives, besides Morales, were Beatrice Silverman; Lady Jeanne Campbell; Beverly Bentley; actress Carol Stevens and painter Norris Church. He had five daughters, three sons and a stepson.
Mailer lived for decades in a Brooklyn Heights townhouse with a view of New York harbour and lower Manhattan from the rooftop ``crow’s nest’’, and kept a beachside home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he spent increasing time in his later years.
Despite heart surgery, hearing loss and arthritic knees that forced him to walk with canes, Mailer retained his enthusiasm for writing and in early 2007 released ``The Castle in the Forest’’, a novel about Hitler’s early years, narrated by an underling of Satan.
A book of conversations about the cosmos, ``On God: An Uncommon Conversation’’, came out in the (northern) autumn.
In 2005, Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards, where he deplored what he called the withering'' of general interest in the serious novel’’.
Authors like himself, he said more than once, had become anachronisms as people focused on television and young writers aspired to screenwriting or journalism.
When he was young, Mailer said, ``fiction was everything. The novel, the big novel, the driving force. We all wanted to be Hemingway … I don’t think the same thing can be said anymore. I don’t think my work has inspired any writer, not the way Hemingway inspired me.’’
Lennon said arrangements for a private service and burial for family members and close friends would be announced next week, and a memorial service would be held in New York in the coming months.
Amazing to think how young he was when Naked and the Dead was written.
I wonder how the family of the man that Jack Abbott stabbed feels. I bet they wished Mailer had died in the 60’s.
If he had they may have not had their son ripped away from them.
I’m sure the last 25 or so years have been nothing but hell on earth for themall due to Mailers arrogance.
Maybe someone should try and remember them. But then of course they were not great writers like dear old Norman.
Richard Adan was a Cuban-American waiter. He became Jack Abbotts murder victim.
Mailer testified in Abbotts defense at the murder trial.
After the trial at a press conferance Mailer stated " I’m willing to gamble a portion of society in order to save this mans talent"
A NY Post reporter then asked mailer which part of society Mailer was willing to sacrifice Waiters or Cubans.
For once Mailer had no response.
Great question and no surprise Mailer had no response- as he’d left his letter opener at home!
anyone ever told you that you’ve got a wicked sense of humour:D - one that Mailer would no doubt have appreciated:)
I first came across him in the epic ‘When we were Kings’ - probably the only exposure most under the age of 40 have too.
Only if he could catch me!
Most of Mailers violent behaviour was directed towards women. I think Charlie would be safe.