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

Written by
Deborah Martinson

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Abstract: An examination of the four major biographies that have been written about Norman Mailer. The scholarship within the books is invaluable and all four of these books—complete with errors, distortions, and idiosyncrasies—nevertheless give this reader, and thousands of other readers, Norman Mailer, a trace of the man.

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URL: https://prmlr.us/mr03mar

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 (1995) 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 (1985), Hilary Mills (1982), Carl Rollyson (1991) and Mary Dearborn (1999) 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.

Mailer’s first biographer, Hillary Mills, is a thorough and seemingly objective writer, serving up “just the facts—substantiated, attributed, credited, quoted, dated, sorted and indexed.” Additionally, she weaves many narratives to depict each aspect of Mailer’s life, ultimately creating a fully detailed—if not always complex portrait. Yet something prurient lurks in the presentation of the material. Her narrative power does justice only to Mailer the Celebrity—Capital C celebrity. She never misses: Mailer “the provocative figure,” Mailer the “Ego,” Mailer “The Celebrity Writer.” The biography makes enthralling reading—a comprehensively researched National Inquirer. Some might argue that Mailer created a public persona that took over the literary power in the eyes of the world. Mills’ Mailer may just be the result—with no one more at fault than Mailer himself. What gets lost in Mills’ Mailer is the writer.

Mills revels in bad-boy Mailer. The book begins with an introduction entitled “The Paradox of Norman Mailer.” She jumps into 1981, with the fifty-eight-year-old Mailer’s nearly violent press conference at the trial of Jack Henry Abbott, the convict-writer who Mailer lobbied the criminal justice system to release. When prison authorities granted Abbott parole, arguably without Mailer’s influence mattering, Mailer tried to ease Abbot back into New York society; he offered him hospitality in New York and Provincetown, and sought housing and employment for him. But Abbott went his own felonious way almost immediately, killing a hapless waiter within months of his release. Mills explains in detail Mailer’s testimony during Abbott’s trial, but her emphasis is on the post-trial press conference where the press went for blood, accusing Mailer of “lionizing violence.” Mills uses the Abbott case as one of the extravagant motifs which hold the book together—to hype Mailer the violent, whose life reads “like a bad novel.”

After Mills’ opening segment, which introduces Mailer’s violence and ambivalence towards women, Mills returns to chronology, moving to Mailer as Harvard-man. Only then does she regress into his childhood to explain the man he was fast becoming. In this segment of the biography, Mills writes less salaciously and more analytically about the young Mailer, struggling to find his identity as a writer at Harvard. She interviews, for example, George Goethals who noted: “The bow-tied, velvet-slippered, three piece-suit types that made up the Advocate found Norman hard to take.” Importantly, Mills gets much insight on the young Mailer through an interview with Mailer’s first wife, Bea Silverman whose blazing intelligence shines real light on the young Mailer—man and writer. The only biographer to interview Bea, Mills makes much of Bea’s candor: “I think he just liked me because I went to bed with him . . . [i]n those days it was very hard to find someone to do that.” Mills reflects that Bea and Mailer’s public, loudly proclaimed affair before their marriage was “the beginning of a personal myth of sexuality which he has been willing to encourage ever since.” This section on Mailer’s life at Harvard and his experience in the Army, leading to The Naked and the Dead, is the most solid, insightful part of the biography. Subsequent chapters on the “failure” of Barbary Shore and The Deer Park seem summative and murky. Once Mailer begins to “create a public persona so vivid and outrageous, so seething with frustration at what he viewed as establishment repression,” then Mills is once again on shakier ground, more attracted to “The Incredible Hulk of American letters than to Mailer the author.”

Mills predicates her sense of the anti-hero Mailer on what she calls “The Stabbing.” She first introduces this motif in the chapter on Abbott, noting that “Mailer’s own violent past, specifically his stabbing of Adele in 1960, was implicit in the uproar.” Mills uses the 1960 stabbing of Adele as central to her conception of Mailer the man. Placed in the center of the book, the chapter fully exploiting “The Stabbing” follows “The Messiah and the New Journalist,” recording Mailer’s late 1950s rise to fame in his publishing of The White Negro and Advertisements for Myself. Mailer as messiah plays to the greatness of his escalating legacy, and sets him up to fall tragically. Readying himself for a 1960 run for Mayor of New York, a remarkable act of well-intentioned hubris, Mailer’s drinking, drugs, and fragile psychological state lead to his stabbing his second wife Adele at the end of a debacle of a party meant to gather support for his up-coming campaign. Mailer belligerent, the party “rough,” by 4:30 a.m. few remained to see Mailer take a two-and-a-half-inch-long penknife and go at Adele. Mills seems oddly sympathetic to Mailer, but nevertheless records in excruciating detail the horror of the wounds and the now-classic battered wife syndrome as Adele defends Mailer, telling doctors she fell on glass. The subsequent tale of Mailer’s stint in Bellevue and his recovery from his own collapse focuses more on Mailer’s cover-up and his legal machinations than on Mailer’s psyche.

Not that Mills forgets the paradoxical nature of Mailer with which she begins, setting up juxtapositions of behavior to highlight his chameleon-like quality. Mills seems awed by it—as well she might. She mentions, for example, in the chapter on The Armies of the Night: “By moving from the drunken, obscene-talking revolutionary provocateur of Thursday night to the man of action stepping boldly across the police line on Saturday to the humble lover of Christ on Sunday, Mailer had managed to encompass the spectrum of American sensibility within himself.” She skips a thoughtful analysis of how Mailer can do all this, and why. She merely calls Mailer, “the most expansive, sensitive—and egotistical—of American writers” giving the reader the public Mailer with the barest of insight. Returning to her themes of violence and aggression that tie her Mailer biography together, she tells the reader about the “rage in Mailer,” saying the “slumbering ‘Beast’” was awakening. It is as if she fears our avidity for scandal might be waning. Oddly absent in Mills’ narrative is reflection on Mailer’s character, the why of his actions. Given to summaries to catch the reader up, Mills in every section, without analysis, replays Mailer as part of Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast, finding an intrinsic part of Mailer more Beast than writer. Mills tells the Mailer story in extravagant detail, with wonderful interviews, lively anecdotes. But it is not enough.

Given the keen precision with which she regales the reader with Mailer the violent, she observes the sexual actions of Mailer with an almost ladylike aloofness. Mailer’s sexual prowess is always in evidence throughout the book, but Mills does not seem intent on remarking on every single woman Mailer was said to have bedded. Rather, Mills takes on Mailer’s “personal myth of sexuality” as another aspect of his own mythmaking. Mailer’s wives and lovers become fascinating interviewees that permit readers to see his chaotic and expensive domestic life, his subordination of women, his serial womanizing. Curiously, Mills lays the failure of each relationship on the competitiveness of the women and the outrageousness of Mailer, not on the complex sexual dynamic of a man and a woman—or in Mailer’s case, man and his women, plural. In her reporter’s style, she relates the public nature of each relationship: “Beverly had her first affair that summer, and on Labor Day Mailer suggested she travel for a while to think things out.” Mills reports, rather than develops a theory of Mailer’s desire—what he really wanted, how it worked in his life and his literature. Unsurprisingly, Mills’ Norris Church is a curiously flat portrayal. Mills seems to have bought into the young, model, trophy-wife theory of Church without looking carefully at her character and her role in Mailer’s life. “The competitiveness of Mailer’s previous wives seemed absent in Norris,” the woman Jose Torres says is “‘a nice lady’ and the best of his women.” While true, the centered, beautiful, sensible wife with a strong sense of herself is nowhere in the book. Of course Mills wrote in the couple’s early days; she couldn’t have known that Norris and Norman would live together for thirty-three years, ending only with Mailer’s death. By the time Norris came on the scene, Mailer’s financial difficulties of five ex-wives subsumed sexual interest—at least for Mills—who depicts in great detail the debts, alimonies, divorce court proceedings, IRS negotiations. Mills’ emphasis on Mailer’s raucous public life makes reading her biography both fascinating and disappointing.

Mills’ solipsistic take on Mailer may be a response to a publisher prodding to deliver a warts-and-all biography calling into question Mailer the writer in favor of Mailer the self-promoter. The publishing game in much intricacy is played out on Mills’ pages, and her information and insight about publishing is one of the most interesting aspects of the book, another light-motif as it were. She begins with the struggle for control of the style and tone at the Harvard Advocate, and works this tension throughout the book as Mailer negotiated with publishers about his projects, their motivations. Publishers ardently worked to get Mailer on board, relished his potential and his professionalism, but not always his time-line or his finished product. In trying to publish The Deer Park, for example, Mailer met much resistance over the lascivious content. Mills details the fascinating intricacies: Alfred A. Knopf ’s initial rejection, Mailer’s efforts to get Blanche Knopf to reverse the decision, editors Phil Vaudrin and Harold Straus agreeing to publish, only to be stopped by lawyers. As Ted Amussen of Rinehart reflected: “‘It was a time when publishers just wouldn’t consider that kind of book. It was another world,’” Mills, married to Robert Loomis, William Styron’s editor at Random House, knew this world of publishing from the inside. This makes for great literary gossip and intrigue, heightening the drama of this important part of Mailer’s life. But knowing the publishing game as well as she did, she knew what sells. Mills depicts Mailer the obsessive: fighting, boxing, women, politics, drinking, drugs, writing, spiritual inventions and wacky medical explorations. When she finally gets to the “Celebrity Writer” in her next to the last chapter she puts heavy emphasis on the “Celebrity.”

Mills’ lucid, nearly lurid narrative of Mailer’s life subordinates his own sense of himself as first and foremost a writer. He proved that over and over again in the breadth of his subject matter, and the consistent shifting crafting of his style and content. In Mills’ biography, the Mailer who takes a swing at McGeorge Bundy and head-butted and thumb wrestled all takers subsumes the man who published what some critics called the greatest war novel, The Naked and the Dead, at the age of twenty-five, helped found the Village Voice, took literary journalism to new heights, and won a Pulitzer apiece for The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song. To her credit, Mills gives the reader a great read of an utterly mesmerizing life, supplying “enough graph points of narrative to chart Mailer’s path whole.” Mailer, the whole man, remains absent. Absolutely different in form and tone than Mills, Peter Manso’s nearly contemporaneous biography Mailer: His Life and Times regrettably, also failed to locate a coherent sense of Mailer—the man and the writer.

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Works Cited

• Bikerts, Sven (November 1999). "Mailer's Head". Esquire. pp. 80–81. Rev. of Mailer: A Biography, by Mary Dearborn.
• Blades, John (March 6, 1983). "Norman Mailer Buried in Deluge of Literary Biographies". Chicago Tribune. sec. 7. p. 2. Rev. of Mailer: A Biography, by Hilary Mills.
• Burgess, Anthony (1985). "The Prisoner of Fame". The Atlantic. Vol. 255. pp. 100–104. Rev. of Mailer: His Life and Times, by Peter Manso.
• Busa, Christopher (October 17, 2008). "Personal Interview" (Interview).
• Carson, Tom (February 1983). "The Time of his Prime Time: Mailer's Greatest Hits". Village Voice Literary Supplement. p. 10. Rev. of Mailer: A Biography, by Hilary Mills.
• Crain, Caleb (December 19, 1999). "Stormin' Norman". New York Times Review of Books. p. 7. Rev. of Mailer: A Biography, by Mary Dearborn.
• Dearborn, Mary (1999). Mailer: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Goldsmith, Barbara (May 19, 1985). "Lion in a Kaleidoscope". New York Times. sec. 7. p. 9. Rev. of Mailer: His Life and Times, by Peter Manso.
• Hardwick, Elizabeth (May 30, 1985). "The Teller and the Tape". The New York Review of Books. Rev. of Mailer: His Life and Times, by Peter Manso.
• Johnson, Diane (June 1985). "A Moveable Roast". Vogue. pp. 147–148. Rev. of Mailer: His Life and Times, by Peter Manso.
• Kendall, Elaine (November 28, 1982). "Rev. of Mailer: A Biography by Hilary Mills". Los Angeles Times. p. 1.
• Lauerman, Connie (December 20, 1982). "Norman Mailer: A Life that Reads Like a Bad Novel". Chicago Tribune. sec. 5. pp. 1+. Rev. of Mailer: A Biography, by Hilary Mills.
• Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (May 13, 1985). "Books of the Times". New York Times. sec. C. p. 20. Rev. of Mailer: His Life and Times, by Peter Manso.
• Malcolm, Janet (1995). The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. New York: Vintage.
• Mailer, Norman (January 9, 2000). "Just the Factoids". New York Times Book Review. p. 4.
• — (June 13, 1985). "Personal Correspondence (PC)" (Letter). Letter to Bruce Dexter. Norman Mailer Archive.: Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
• — (May 13, 2002). "Letter to the Editor". Provincetown Banner (Letter). Letter to. Norman Mailer Archive.: Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
• — (March 31, 1982). "PC" (Letter). Letter to Hilary Mills. Norman Mailer Archive.: Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
• — (January 21, 1983). "PC" (Letter). Letter to Hilary Mills. Norman Mailer Archive.: Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
• — (January 17, 1983). "PC" (Letter). Letter to Jack Abbott. Norman Mailer Archive.: Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
• — (April 23, 1986). "PC" (Letter). Letter to Jean Malaquais. Norman Mailer Archive.: Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
• 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.