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The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/From Monroe to Picasso: Norman Mailer and the Life-Study: Difference between revisions
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====2. “But why not assume Marilyn Monroe opens up the entire problem of biography?”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}}==== | ====2. “But why not assume Marilyn Monroe opens up the entire problem of biography?”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}}==== | ||
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 | 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,”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=411}} 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.”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=411}} 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?”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=16}} | ||
fame,”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=411}} 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.”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=411}} 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?”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=16}} | |||
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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=16-17}} 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=18}} 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=18}} | 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=16-17}} 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=18}} 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=18}} | ||
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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}} 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}} 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?”){{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}} 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=18}} 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}} 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=20}} | 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}} 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}} 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?”){{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}} 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=18}} 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}} 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=20}} | ||
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,{{efn| Mailer’s belief in reincarnation is reiterated in his recent book ''[[Why Are We at War?]]''{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=21}}}} insisting that “we must question the fundamental notion of modern psychiatry—that we have but one life and one death.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=22}} 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”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=23}} 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=23}} | 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,{{efn| Mailer’s belief in reincarnation is reiterated in his recent book ''[[Why Are We at War?]]''{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=21}}}} insisting that “we must question the fundamental notion of modern psychiatry—that we have but one life and one death.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=22}} 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”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=23}} 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=23}} | ||