Norman Mailer and the Cutting Edge of Style

Still being edited as of December 21, 2018

Cover art from McConnell's Four Postwar Novelists.

“ To be, like Norman, a New York Jewish boy from Harvard who had written a war novel, I cannot imagine any situation better for the beginning of a career. ” — The speaker is Norman Mailer's contemporary, fellow novelist, and frequent television talk show antagonist, Gore Vidal, interviewed in Newsweek (November 18, 1974).

Vidal's characteristically malicious amiability carries more than a seed of truth, and much more than a seed of the essential problem — that of being Norman Mailer. To many readers, indeed, and to many people who may not have read a novel in years, the problem — or the profession — of being Norman Mailer might well appear to be the central drama of American literature since World War II. Other writers, novelists, poets, and journalists may content them­selves with the comfortably traditional eminence of an academic career, with the more complex and demanding satisfaction of a private existence with writing their sole activity, or with an intricate, almost monkish quest for anonymity. But Norman Mailer, alone among the significant writers of his generation (or now, his genera­tions), has made himself at home within the full panoply of publicity media and personality mongering which is the climate of America in the television era. He has been a frequent, outrageous, comic-meta­physical guest on innumerable talk shows. He has produced, di­rected, and starred in his own movies. He has run for mayor of New York City. He has, as I write, received a much-publicized million­ dollar contract from his publishers for his next (not yet completed) novel. Vidal’s venom is understandable; indeed, coming as it does from a fellow laborer in the often barren vineyards of fiction, inevitable. For “a New York Jewish boy from Harvard who had written a war novel,” Mailer has come as close as one can imagine coming (closer, perhaps) to being one of the Beautiful People of his age, to winning and holding the kind of fame and fascination the Ameri­can public normally reserves for politicians, film stars, and crimi­nals.

He has not (what writer has?) been well served by his most avid supporters. The Mailer style, the Mailer panache, is a deliberately constructed and maintained role — and one which offers, perhaps, too many easy consolations to the critic not prepared himself to undergo the arduous and risky task of being Norman Mailer. He has been celebrated, by such dissimilar cheerleaders as Jimmy Bres­lin and Richard Poirier, as the prophet of a new sexual vitality, a profound and original philosophical thinker, a liberator of the clois­tered and inhibited American imagination. He is, I suggest, none of these things and o en the reverse of some of them. But so over­ blown has become the celebration (or the damnation) of Mailer that such a paring of the image is bound to seem like an attack (or a defense) of the writer and the man. Mailer has, with signal efficiency, made his personality and his a inseparable; but he has paid the price of this unification, and an important part of that price is the refusal of his fans (fans everywhere, whether of a rock singer, a movie star, or a novelist, are the same) to allow him to be anything less than everything. The man who wrote the daring and painfully personal Advertisements for Myself (1959) has had to live with the implications of that brilliant title, for in turning his a into an “advertisement,” a more-than-aesthetic act of existential salesmanship, he has been burdened - at least in his career as a novelist - precisely by the success of his ads, by the “Norman Mai­ler” who has become such a surefire seller and high-ratings per­sonality in contemporary American letters.

There is no doubt that Mailer has always thought of himself pri­marily as a novelist; and here, as often, he is more correct in his self-assessment than are his enthusiasts. And here, as often, his career displays a curious ambiguity, a deep-seated malaise underly­ing the proclamations of health, a dark flirtation with failure beneath the arrogantly flaunted triumphs. Of his twenty books, only five — six, stretching a point to include The Armies of the Night — are novels. Indeed, for a writer as prolific as Mailer, remarkably little of his published work is in the field, fiction, which is his announced, chosen, loved and hated vocation. It is, of course, an easy and cheap temptation to discover the saving, humanizing flaws of a splendid success, the hidden insecurities of a “star”; but if we consider Mai­ler's career as a novelist, it is difficult not to see such a set of con­tradictions. One remembers Vidal’s flippant dismissal of his first success: “who had written a war novel.” But what is implicit in that phrase is, surely, the most important event of Mailer’s life as a writer. The “war novel” is The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948, Mailer’s first novel and — much more than a “war novel” — one of the major achievements of American fiction in this century.

It was a cruel fate for a young novelist. We have already spoken, in the previous chapter, of the “one-book” nemesis of the American writer, the inability of so many major American talents to overcome the success and the burden of their earliest important achievements. And, as Mailer’s own first triumph in The Naked and the Dead is so much more surprising even than the promise of The Sun Also Rises or This Side of Paradise, so the difficulty of living up to that achievement appears to have been for him all the more painful. This is, oddly, a frequently ignored or glossed over, but central point about Mailer; for The Naked and the Dead is not simply a brilliant first book, it is the work of a master. Given the reach of that early (perhaps premature) mastery, the wonder is not that Mailer has since written so little fiction, comparatively, but rather that he has managed to complete so much. He has lived and worked, since he first appeared as a writer, as a first magnitude star whose talent and appeal are, if anything, too massive for any vehicle which we might imagine efficiently carrying them. No wonder, then, that one of his most embarrassingly revelatory nonfiction books is his recent biography of another definitive presence in search of an adequate incarnation, Marilyn Monroe.