The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/It Takes a Thief to Know a Thief: Biographies of Norman Mailer

Written by
Deborah Martinson

Biography, as a genre, has been called gossip, cannibalism, history, blood sport, a voyeur’s dream. When I proposed to review the four central biographies of Norman Mailer to date, I got this response: “Well, it takes a thief.” I am that thief, a biographer who slides in, snatches every bit of fact, innuendo, and proof. Biographers voraciously read the subjects’ letters, calendars, journals, marginalia, books and articles, spending hours in dark archives, riffling through pages and pages, seeking treasure. She also talks to any who will talk to her, adjusting claims, negotiating hundreds of voices claiming the truth. And then, of course, a biographer thinks and dreams, inhabiting that biographical subject’s spirit in order to write. But biographer as thief? I like to think a good biographer is a soul-catcher, moving to a person after death, inhabiting his mind, entering his body, becoming a “keeper of the breath.” Thus, the biographer brings a subject to life on pages of their own so readers can better know the subject, and in doing so, can better know themselves. This soul-catcher does not work to empty a life of meaning, as Janet Malcolm contends, or to “burgle” a life for personal gain— but to assist readers in understanding the humanity, the talents, the devastating fears and failure—and as important—the worth of the life lived. The thrill for a biographer is finding and knowing the human at the center of the writing: his secrets, his passions, and his interests. In writing biography, she brings to life someone who perhaps has more life, more intensity, than the writer or the readers of biography.

Norman Kingsley Mailer certainly warrants biographical attention. Fiery intelligence blazed in his blue eyes, and the American public watched as his slight frame became thick and muscular; only in recent years did his canes foreshadow a frailty strong enough to bring death. The full force of his mind shows in the numbers of over forty books, including eleven novels. Before he died on November 10, 2007, he had written myriad essays, nonfiction narratives, miscellanies, hundreds of articles and interviews, and thousands of letters. The Norman Mailer Collection at the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities is the largest there of any single author. Mailer is compared either lovingly or with hostility to Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; clearly Mailer reigns as one of the foremost writers of the twentieth century. His years of writing, experimenting, philosophizing, brawling, interviewing, and womanizing in both private and public arenas fascinate. He certainly hasn’t escaped biographers’ attention. Four thick, fact laden and rumor intensive biographies have explored the man and the myth of Mailer. He warranted America’s attention and he got it. Through biography a man or woman lives, bestowing greatness or acclaim or ignominy on the biographical subject. In Norman Mailer’s case, biography does all of these and more.

Biographers have differing motivations for building a life in biographical text: market considerations; respect for a person’s work; the chance to live in the reflected glory of the biographical subject, to interview the famous, to gathering some of the acclaim. Respect for Mailer’s writing certainly drove Mailer scholar Robert Lucid’s attempt to write the “authorized” biography of Mailer, but Lucid’s illness and life circumstance stopped his work and he did not get beyond Mailer at twenty-eight. I do not know what drove Peter Manso, Hilary Mills, Carl Rollyson and Mary Dearborn to spend years researching and finally writing thick biographies of Norman Mailer. I hope that each biographer tried to penetrate the mystery of Mailer—a man so open, so verbal, so ready to engage the public. But that hope diminishes in light of the biographies themselves. Mailer said biographers “present me as if I have no inner life” and thus far, he was right (Lennon*). This isn’t to say that the four published biographies do not bring something of value to Mailer scholarship. Each does.

In taking on the reading of four biographies of Norman Mailer, I expected to read as a professional biographer, looking for comparative data, accuracy, the biographer’s sense of the man. What happened was more startling, indeed. I read them as a reader: in airports, on airplanes, during jury duty, in my office, in dentists’ waiting rooms, on sandy beaches, by bedside lamp. And I changed my reader-character as each book seemed to dictate. Each biography moved from Mailer as child to student to acclaimed writer to public celebrity. I followed the biographers’ rhythms, presentations, innuendos—awaiting Mailer’s resurrection into a life I recognized as whole and human. I learned a great deal about Norman Mailer, and much, too, about the effect of the biographer’s shaping of material to form the man.

I approached each biography as if I did not know Mailer—and after the first two books I knew him very well indeed—at least the external Mailer, the shell. In the first of the published biographies, Hilary Mills’ Mailer: a Biography (1982), Mailer came to life suddenly as scandalous celebrity. Mills reaches out to the National Enquirer reader who tut-tuts her way through the slime-sheet to feel the rush of a misspent life not her own. Mills let a public avid for scandals sway her as she wrote this workmanlike biography. Next came Peter Manso’s Mailer: His Life and Times, the 1985 version and a 2008 edition. The two editions are virtually the same, except for the sixty-page screaming screed of biographer’s remorse attached to the latest edition. As I read Manso’s oral biography, I transformed into a member of a wake or funeral, sitting at attention as everyone told stories and remembered anecdotes. When Mailer occasionally spoke, I felt the astonishment of someone who sees a ghostly presence by the funeral home drapes and hears the spectral voice amending the record. When Manso first published the book, Mailer was very much alive, adding to the irony of the book comprised of over two hundred remembrances. Still, it both fascinates and confuses. Moving to Carl Rollyson’s 1991 The Lives of Norman Mailer, I approached warily. Rollyson and I both wrote biographies of Lillian Hellman, and we disagreed about Hellman. A lot. I was suspicious of him, expecting failed insight, but I was wrong. Although derivative and a bit mechanical, his Mailer biography is clear, detailed and insightful about Mailer’s writing and the man himself. Mary Dearborn’s 1995 Mailer amped up my interest, turning my reader persona into a Mailer wife or mistress, following the sleek, sexual Mailer in parties, seductions, threesomes and multiple marriages. Dearborn led me to engage in Mailer's life and work in vicarious excitement. Dearborn's literary sense made for smart reading, but she relied too much on Mailer's ex-wives for much of her material, and it shows. As reader, scholar, and voyeur, I found at each biography’s center, the wild, multiplicitous, complex Mailer. What I and other readers miss is Norman Mailer himself—his generating spark, his soul so essential to his conception of living and dying.

Works Cited

• Bikerts, Sven (1999). "'Mailer's Head.' Rev. of Mailer: A Biography by Mary Dearborn". Esquire. 80 (1).
• Blades, John (6 Mar 1983). "'Norman Mailer Buried in Deluge of Literary Biographies' Rev. of Mailer: A Biography by Hilary Mills". Chicago Tribune. sec.7 (2).
• Burgess, Anthony (1985). "'The Prisoner of Fame' Rev. of Mailer: His Life and Times by Peter Manso". The Atlantic 255. 100 (04).
• Carson, Tom (Feb 1983). "'The Time of his Prime Time: Mailer's Greatest Hits.' Rev. of Mailer: A Biography, by Hilary Mills". Village Voice Literary Supplement. 10.
• Crain, Caleb (19 December 1999). "'Stormin' Norman' Rev. of Mailer: A Biography by Mary V. Dearborn". New York Times Review of Books. 7.
• Dearborn, Mary (1999). Mailer: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Goldsmith, Barbara (19 May 1985). "'Lion in a Kaleidoscope' Rev. of Mailer: His Life and Times by Peter Manso". New York Times. sec. 7 (9).
• Hardwick, Elizabeth (30 May 1985). "'The Teller and the Tape' Rev. of Mailer: His Life and Times, by Peter Manso". The New York Review of Books. 3.
• Johnson, Diane (June 1985). "'A Moveable Roast' Rev. of Mailer: His Life and Times, by Peter Manso". Vogue. 147 (8).
• Kendall, Elaine (28 Nov 1982). "Rev. of Mailer: A Biography by Hilary Mills". Los Angeles Times. 1.
• Lauerman, Connie (20 Dec 1982). "'Norman Mailer: 'A Life that Reads Like a Bad Novel' Rev. of Mailer: A Biography, by Hilary Mills". Chicago Tribune. sec. 5 (1).
• Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (13 May 1985). "'Books of the Times' Rev. of Mailer: His Life and Times, by Peter Manso". New York Times. sec. C (20).
• Malcolm, Janet (1995). The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. New York: Vintage.
• Mailer, Norman (9 Jan 2000). "'Just the Factoids' Letter". New York Times Book Review. 4.
• Manso, Peter (1985). Mailer: His Life and Times. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Mills, Hilary (1982). Mailer: A Biography. New York: Empire Books.
• Rollyson, Carl (1991). The Lives of Norman Mailer. New York: Paragon House.