The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998–2008

"The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people,"

Mailer wrote just under half a century ago (Advertisements 384), but the majority of serious readers today would not pick up Mailer by that handle. Perhaps it is the business of Mailer scholarship, first and foremost, to ask whether we should. The inquiry would, at its fullest, have implications that extend far beyond Mailer scholarship, which is a way of saying that Mailer is not (or in a just world would not be) merely of interest to specialists.

Implication one: Art has a final purpose, so it is not a plaything, a distraction. To say that art has a final purpose is to say that all of it, all of life’s parts, actually matter. This fragment of a thought takes us to the Mailerian test– and he was an “essayist” who tested and tried out ideas even when writing gigantic novels–of a Manichean world view which, for Mailer at least, had the great utility of making life meaningful especially in the face of cultural forces that trivialize meaning-making activities.

Implication two: “Intensify” and “exacerbate” show Mailer to be a Modernist–one of a group of late Modernists, Morris Dickstein tells us in Leopards in the Temple, who kept a quasi-religious faith with the artistic standards and methods of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and company–but the words show Mailer more than anything else to be an artist who insists on risk. Mailer was one of the great leopards of postwar American writing. His writing was regularly shocking. He said many times that everyone should be able to see God in the midst of a sex act; perhaps sex was and is really a subset of “risk.” Masturbation would be a sin to our existential Manichean left-conservative theologian precisely because it wasn’t going to risk anything or change anything.

To intensify experience is something pretty much all artists do, but not all artists exacerbate the moral consciousness of the reader, and the role of gadfly is one Mailer took up with glee. Is the gadfly always in the moral right? That isn’t really a necessary condition at all, although one senses that Mailer very much wanted to be identified with the correct or best position, the one that ultimately allowed for the generation of the most meaningful life. This end of art could be blissful but it would also be painful. “No pain, no gain,” as the sneaker salesmen say.

Implication three: However much Mailer aligned himself with the holy outsider, he was concerned with the moral consciousness (and aesthetic pleasure, and civic morale) of “the people.” As Stephen Dedalus flies past all the various nets, bat-like himself, he dreams of forging the uncreated conscience of his race. We don’t do this anymore.¹ We disavow our identities, though we depend on them, such as when the passport becomes a shield. We enjoy all the various birthrights but pretend, in utterly dishonest and shortsighted ways, that we are not implicated in the best and the worst of this national identity. If you don’t believe it, sit through three papers at an American literature conference and you will learn that our job is to learn Right Shame and to pretend that we are “global.”² Mailer, at his most antinomian, was always utterly civic-minded.

The fourth and final implication is really a corollary or an extension: Mailer is an underrated author. One dutifully mentions Melville by way of comparison, noting that Moby-Dick was shelved under cetology at Yale a hundred years back. One wonders if Mailer’s strange embarrassing humor now is the analogue of Melville’s strange embarrassing humor then. (Think about the last time you actually taught Moby-Dick and had occasion to discuss the marriage of Ishmael and Quohog in the Spouter’s Inn.) What will happen to Mailer in his literary afterlife? Alice Walker resurrected Zora Neale Hurston’s literary reputation a mere fifteen years after her bodily death. In the meantime, one has the more modest task of asking: Who was Mailer in the last ten years of his life to his readers? History has to change for Mailer to become more readable and perhaps less shocking–if I’m right. So let us engage in the work of communal prophecy-via-criticism and call our shots, saying where we think the stronger readers are emerging and where the work might go next.

I. Mailer's Writing From 1998-2008

While the real focus of this article is the scholarly response to Mailer’s work, Mailer has out-written all of his critics put together, and so a sketch of that work will be necessary at the outset. These books are: The Time of Our Time (1998), The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing (2003), Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings (2003), Why Are We at War? (2003), Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969 (2004), The Big Empty with John Buffalo Mailer (2006), The Castle in the Forest (2007), and On God: An Uncommon Conversation with J. Michael Lennon (2007). Both The Time of Our Time and The Spooky Art present dangers of a sort of which younger Mailer readers need to be warned: Do not read through these books and think that you have before you the literary equivalent of an arctic ice core, something that provides a textual analogue to phenomenological history as measured by the author’s style.

Mailer has always rearranged his material in his retrospective collections, and the art of his collage technique has as much to do with spatial juxtaposition as it does with chronology. Mailer made this point about the “short hairs,” the poems that made Deaths for Ladies and Other Disasters and which have been rearranged and sometimes rewritten in Modest Gifts, a collection of doodles and doodle-poems. The scholar who wishes to discuss the evolutions of ideas and forms will have to work through the primary forms before deciding what the revisions of 1998–2008 add–but it is ridiculously unfair to suggest that Mailer’s collections were lazy cutand-paste efforts that belie a lack of historical sense. Michiko Kakutani, however, makes the charge that “The Spooky Art is a manufactured book, an old-fashioned cut-and-paste job.” Mailer wrote a strong letter to The Times objecting to Kakutani’s pattern of attacks but taking particular umbrage at Kakutani’s claim that “all too often dates for statement” in The Spooky Art “are not supplied.” On April 9, 2003 the paper issued a correction:

"The Books of the Times review on January 22, about The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing, a collection of works by Norman Mailer, referred erroneously to the absence of dates for some works republished and excerpted. While the dates were missing from the proof copy furnished to reviewers, the published book has thorough source notes at the back, compiled by the editor, J. Michael Lennon. A letter from Mr. Mailer dated March 24 pointed out the error"