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Perhaps not, but the writer found an authority of visual presentment in the artist’s work that gave a new imperative to his own culture-readings. Although he may not at that time have produced any extensive biographic study of Picasso, his writing of those years undoubtedly begins to express a very similar response to reality.In his essay “Eros and Idiom”(1975), George Steiner cites the work of Mailer, along with that of William Burroughs and Jean Genet, as expressions of “the political character of the age”. Such writers “have said that the bestialities recounted in their work mirror the crisis of inhumanity through which we appear to be living since 1914. A literature which failed to reflect modern barbarism, the widespread return of torture in political life, the programmatic degradation of the human person in concentration camps and colonial wars, would be a lie”. Steiner is right, and in the broken limbs and fractured forms of Guernica and Picasso’s autopsical portraits Mailer found more than a glimpse of that dark vision, paintings imbued with what he described as “a sense of their authority and our horror”. His writing would soon begin to build upon a similar idiom. If he saw in Picasso’s art a determination to “tear apart the world of appearances and leave us with a secret fear that the soul behind the face of each person we meet is more hideous than any tale told by his features”, then in “The Metaphysics of the Belly” he would also testify that “the modern condition may be psychically so bleak [...] that studies of loneliness, silence, corruption, scatology, abortion, monstrosity, decadence, orgy and death can give life, can give a sentiment of beauty”. In the honesty of Picasso’s explorations into the “fair and dark psyche” of humanity — such as appeared in “the great dichotomy” of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon — Mailer could still find a statement of hope and possibility.

Yet if the biographer, like the critic, must maintain the capacity to be both within and without his subject, then Mailer’s role as Picasso’s biographer was at that time seriously compromised. By his own admission he was “not ready to write about Picasso”. Instead, in those years Picasso became the eminence gris in Mailer’s own creative life. But this admission leads us to a crucial consideration: must it be that such readiness to write about an artist as complex and powerful as Picasso is dependent upon the biographer feeling himself to be free from active influence by his subject? If so,does this only apply to biographers who are themselves practicing artists? It is a moot point as to whether Mailer was ever able to achieve that balance between the within and the without, and in any case it may be that writing a life-study ought to be a life-changing experience, involving risk to oneself and one’s beliefs.While we do not find anything like the cool objectivity of a Penrose or a Richardson in the life of Picasso that Mailer did eventually produce, as is sometimes the case with the work of artists who write biographies or appreciations of other artists (Randall Jarrell’s wondrous appreciation of Whitman in his Poetry and the Age would be a case in point), there are gratifications of a different order, such as a double helping of genius. In his relationship with the lives of Marilyn Monroe and Pablo Picasso, Mailer gives us an example of what he has sometimes referred to as “an imaginary memoir”. Readers of those memoirs will either find them legitimate, and will accept, even relish the prospect of encountering not just the memoir, but also the vitality of interaction between Mailer’s imagination and his subject, or on grounds of illegitimacy they will refuse him admission into the academy of biographers.

2.“But why not assume Marilyn Monroe opens up the entire problem of biography?”.

If in 1962–1963 his first pass at biography writing was deferred, a decade later in Marilyn: A Biography, Mailer returned to complete the touchdown with sovereign ease. The reasons have to do both with the subject as well as his revision of conventional biographic form. Looking back we can now see that Mailer was never more fully centered in the flux and force of American energy than he was by that time, never more completely the voice of its subterranean reaches. In those years of creative flood he was producing what many now regard as his most memorable works,a record of extraordinary absorption in and interpretation of America’s cultural revolution. As Hilary Mills states in her biography of Mailer,“the cumulative effect of his life and writing career had brought him to the height of his fame”, endowing him with celebrity and notoriety. Assessing Marilyn for the New York Times Book Review, Pauline Kael recognized that its author had inherited Hemingway’s title as America’s “official literary celebrity”. In that celebrity sense he had become as close as he ever would to the condition of his new biographical subject and knew he was fastening onto a figure not only iconic and tragic, but also one who was capable of defining a larger arc of American sensibility. Her death was, he felt sure, a symbol of a more national dying fall. Could it be, as he so much wished, that “she knew better than anyone that she was the last of the myths to thrive in the long evening of the American dream?”.

Mailer’s biography launches itself with a brilliant span of Marilyns, a spray of colors and forms, “a child-girl, yet an actress to loose a riot by dropping her glove at a premiere ... a lover of life and a cowardly hyena of death who drenched herself in chemical stupors ... she was certainly more and less than the silver witch of us all”. While this expresses the complexity of his subject, it also serves to prepare us for Mailer’s engagement with what he takes to be the generic problem that confronts all biographers. In concluding the first section of the first chapter,“A Novel Biography,” he must have seized upon Virginia Woolf’s words with some pleasure: “A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves,whereas a person may well have as many as one thousand”. His next question suggests, however, that the reach of his inquiry will be even larger, and if it fails it will not be because of a reductively factual approach: “But why not assume Marilyn Monroe opens the entire problem of biography? The question is whether a person can be comprehended by the facts of the life, and this does not even begin to take into account that abominable magnetism of facts. They always attract polar facts”.

From the start then, this book provides a determinedly innovative approach to its methods,and in so doing it shows Mailer overcoming much of the resistance he encountered at the time of the Picasso biography in 1962. The resistance is overcome by finding the common ground between biography and art and so developing a rationale for himself as an artist-biographer. The “entire problem of biography” is located in this province, and once he has moved life-study away from its dependence upon the factual record alone, he is free to occupy the ground of a psychohistory that leaves room for both romantic and magical explanations of human behavior. Liberated from procrustean strictures he is able to insist on the distinction between biography as a species of reportage and the higher ground of “great biography.” This superior form is capable of exploring the depths of personality which are essentially mysterious: “the facts live, but Marilyn does not”. The lives of exceptional people demand exceptional biographers to interpret them and, moreover, biographers who are not afraid to enter the realms of the irrational, since those same “exceptional people (often the most patriotic, artistic, heroic, or prodigious) had a way of living with opposites in themselves”. Facts can only get us so far. Great biography must be capable of transcending that record, since like the astronauts (“what had a movie star like Monroe in common with an astronaut?”), exceptional people were themselves capable of transcending dualisms, and of coexisting with opposites within themselves, such as, say, nobility and evil. Moreover the factual archive is especially limited in the case of an actor like Monroe,“for an actor lives with the lie as if it were truth”. Faced by these impediments the biographer may become a type of secret sharer with his subject, since “by the logic of transcendence, it was exactly in the secret scheme of things that a man should be able to write about a beautiful woman”. Finally, “there is no instrument more ready to capture the elusive quality of her nature than a novel. Set a thief to catch a thief, and put an artist on an artist”.

Here then is the ultimate rationale for Mailer’s life-studies. Biography in his hands has passed into the repertoire of grand imagining, becoming not so much one further window in the house of fiction as one further room; the question is whether the result can pass for anything other than the most liberal assimilation of biographic norms. In a period when most of the energies of prose fiction were being assimilated by documentary forms, Mailer invested the documentary form of biography with a new poetics capable of exploiting the classic divisions between narratives of fact and fiction. Part metaphysics, part memoir, part reverie, Marilyn gives us a life whose resonance deepens and multiplies as we read; it tries for an integrity of human response and remembrance, as do most considerable works of art. Biographers will commonly seek to explain a life by attending, for instance, to the childhood of their subject, and so too does Mailer, though along with other specific energies in the tragic drama. Modern biography has accepted the possibilities of post-Freudian psychology, but Marilyn goes further to incorporate metaphysical influences such as karma and reincarnation, insisting that “we must question the fundamental notion of modern psychiatry—that we have but one life and one death”. Conventional biography and perhaps the contemporary imagination might be skeptical of such notions, but in working the ground of the possible Mailer insists that “the reductive voice speaks with no more authority than the romantic” and his biography frequently asks readers for reorientations of rational consciousness. “There are a million dumb and dizzy broads with luck and none come near to Monroe, no. To explain her at all, let us hold to that karmic notion as one more idea to support in our mind”.

The above comment asks us to consider Monroe as the particular case that transcends the generic type, yet throughout this book Mailer very often uses the particular case to support the generic,allowing him to build towards what he calls “a working hypothesis” of American cultural dysfunction. So as Della Monroe Grainger—Monroe’s grandmother—turns to accelerating psychosis and attempts to murder the baby Marilyn (at least according to Marilyn herself), Mailer can intimate the presence of a larger malaise in the culture. Marilyn suggests that America, and particularly West Coast America, is but precariously situated in the land of sanity:

If a void in one’s sense of identity is equal to a mental swamp where insane growths begin, then America is an insane swamp more than other lands ... Los Angeles had to be the focus within such focus, the deepest swamp of the national swamp, the weed of weeds ... And there in Hawthorne in 1927, the weed Della Hogan Monroe Grainger, festering in the psychic swamp life of quiet Hawthorne, is believed to have crossed the street one afternoon, picked up the baby, taken her to her home, and there begun to suffocate her with a pillow.

In Mailer’s analysis, the dramatic plot of Monroe’s life becomes a lucid shorthand for American neurosis and breakdown. And if Della Grainger in her psychotic behavior “was as American as most”, so Ida and Wayne Bolender, who fostered Marilyn for the first seven years of her life, were not only “hymn and fundament, flesh and spine” of middle-America’s Silent Majority, but also exemplified its characteristic weakness, being “absolutely terrified of the lividity of the American air in the street outside.” This “Silent Majority [that] lives in dread of the danger which lies beneath appearances” may have a premonition of its own demise, its silence afluent outpouring of bad faith, of frontier dreams running toseed on suburban lawns.

Amongst the horrors of Monroe’s childhood, Mailer counts the shooting of her pet dog as one of the most traumatic, a horror that blighted any notion of being at home in “the other world outside the Bolender house”:

In 1932, when Norma Jean was almost six, Tippy began to get out of the house on spring evenings and make his run in the dark. One night a blast rolled down the street, and the milkman found the dog’s body in the dawn ... a neighbor, sitting on his porch, had waited for Tippy with a shotgun. For three nights running Tippy had rolled in the neighbor’s garden. On the third night the neighbor shot him. We can sense that man. There is dog heat and dog body, dog funk leaving its odor on his new greens, rolling dog lusts on the garden crop. That’s one night for you, dog, he counts to himself; two nights for you, dog; on the third night—with what backed-up intensity of the frontier jammed at last into a suburban veranda we can only hear in the big blast—the dog is dead. The fears of the Bolenders have stood on real ground. And their timidity also stands revealed. For there is no record of confronting the neighbor and his shotgun.So to the child, a catastrophic view of history must have begun.

Throughout the biography Mailer gives priority to such decisive vignettes and cumulatively provides a devastating critique of a culture in collapse. For behind the white picket-fence and “at the end of every sweet and quiet passage of love, amputation or absurdity is waiting”. Again he shows here the influence of Picasso, master of semblances. In the brief essay “An Eye on Picasso,” published as early as 1959 in Advertisements for Myself, there is already recognition of the moral necessity of the painter’s combative assaults on the form and appearance of the conventional world:

For the last fifty years ... Picasso has used his brush like a sword.... Up and down the world of appearances he has marched, sacking and pillaging and tearing and slashing, a modern-day Cortez conquering an empire of appearances. It is possible that there has never been a painter who will leave the intimate objects of the world so altered by the swath of his work ... He is the first painter to bridge the animate and the inanimate.

The first painter perhaps, but soon followed by a writer, for certainly this is also Mailer’s bailiwick. We have only to think of “The White Negro” to realize his espousal of a similar approach. Of course that essay and a great deal of his thinking at that time is also rooted in an existential ethic of necessary confrontation with one’s own weakness, and with the individual’s challenge to the post war consensus in American culture. This had all but succeeded in placing its brand on a population who existed in a state of clammy cowardice and totalitarian control—“[a] stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve”.

Marilyn, in addition to being a great biography, is a seminal chapter in Mailer’s lifelong critique of American mores. It presents Monroe both as a victim of those values and as one who, in her courage and all but Faustian ambition, offered a challenge to them. For when “the luminous life of her face grew ten feet tall” on the movie screen, then to her audiences “Marilyn was deliverance”. Yet that image was also “the magnified mirror of ourselves, our exaggerated and now all but defeated generation”. As a girl she witnessed men like her “Uncle” Wayne Bolender, who did nothing to defend against the cruel abrasions of the world beyond domesticity; her life would often show the scars of exposure to those moments of catastrophe and cowardice: Whole washes of the apathy that would sit upon her in later years, that intolerable dull and dead round she passed through in the year after her marriage to Miller was over, “is probably sealed in the reflex of sorrowing for Tippy”. If “psychosis, like death, move[s] back into the past”, then this life-study provides us with a harvest of possibilities from which to choose. Little wonder that in his final paragraph as he writes “Goodbye Norma Jean,” Mailer above all wishes that her spirit finds its resting place and that it “be rather in one place and not scattered in pieces across the firmament; let us hope her mighty soul and the mouse of her little one are both recovering their proportions in some fair and gracious home.”

Works Cited

• Brassaï (2002). Conversations with Picasso. Translated by Todd, Jane Marie. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
• Bremner, Charles (17 May 2003). "French Saw Picasso as an Enemy of the State". The Times. p. 16.
• Flam, Jack (1986). Matisse: The Man and His Art 1869-1918. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
• Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam.
• — (1965). Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial.
• — (1973). Marilyn: A Biography. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.
• — (1980). Of Women and Their Elegance. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• — (1995). Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
• — (1963). The Presidential Papers. New York: Putnam.
• — (2003). Lennon, J. Michael, ed. The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing. New York: Random House.
• — (1959). "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster". Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam: 337–358.
• — (2003). Why Are We at War?. New York: Random House.
• Manso, Peter (1986). Mailer: His Life and Times. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.
• Mills, Hilary (1982). Mailer: A Biography. New York: Empire.
• Poirier, Richard (1972). Mailer. London: Fontana.
• Steiner, George (1980). On Difficulty and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford UP.