The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Courtly Mailer: The Legacy Derby
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| « | The Mailer Review • Volume 3 Number 1 • 2009 • Beyond Fiction | » |
Donald L. Kaufmann
Abstract: Norman Mailer’s status as a writer should be determined by the canon of his work and not by his biography. Any consideration of Mailer’s legacy must take into account the conspicuous Mailer canon: two Pulitzer Prizes and other major awards (except for the Nobel). There are over forty books, several truly weighty novels, stories and poems, and much nonfiction, including essays, articles, literary criticism, stage and screenplays, TV and film ventures (actor, director, critic), and much of ephemera. There is also, perhaps, this age’s most voluminous letter writing, many of which are astonishingly creative and revealing.
URL: https://prmlr.us/mr03kau
SOME PRELIMINARY SPECULATION ON NORMAN MAILER'S LEGACY reminds me of a media-fixed auto derby that has already predetermined a Mailer finish as a questionable non-winner at the starting-gate.
Such derby flux began with the news of Mailer’s recent demise and became fast-tracked into obvious truth that Mailer’s Legacy Quotient (LQ) is unique in that his “character” supersedes and eclipses his canon of work A writer’s behavior, in short, is all that matters to some critics. The LQ axiom, in Mailer’s case, remains commonplace: character overshadows canon.
Imagine such absurdity, historically speaking. To hell with The Ring,Wagner was such a rotter. And up the LQ of Will Shakespeare with his blank bio, but down the LQ of the thuggish Ben Jonson. And give a zero read to Ezra Pound, that Fascist. And don’t forget that old goat, Theodore Dreiser, and his whorehouse antics. And, yes, Papa Hemingway, that macho bundle of character flaws. Heraclitus said that “Character is Destiny.” Enter Norman Mailer, a literary bundle of flux, perhaps destined to have his ego read more than his books. Also enter the ubiquitous media that increasingly preside over a nation of gawkers rather than readers.
In 1948, a curtain rose and out trots an unknown with a big war book, an overnight best seller and a corresponding big-eyed media. What a readymade twosome, Mailer and the media, mutual enablers, and Norman Mailer becomes America’s leading literary celebrity. Unlike his two nearest competitors, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, Mailer was typecast as ruffian extraordinaire—a 24/7 bully-brawler in salons and saloons, the epitome of egghead violence. Overnight, Mailer became the undisputed bad boy of American letters, so said the drooling, yet chiding media.