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

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{{dc|dc=“T|he 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,{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=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.

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'' ({{date|1998}}), ''The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing'' ({{date|2003}}), ''Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings'' ({{date|2003}}), ''Why Are We at War?'' ({{date|2003}}), ''Norman Mailer’s Letters on ''An American Dream'', 1963—1969'' ({{date|2004}}), ''The Big Empty'' with John Buffalo Mailer ({{date|2006}}), ''The Castle in the Forest'' ({{date|2007}}), and ''On God: An Uncommon Conversation'' with J. Michael Lennon ({{date|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 {{date|1998}}—{{date|2008}} add—but it is ridiculously unfair to suggest that Mailer’s collections were lazy cut-and-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 {{date|2003-04-09|MDY}} the paper issued a correction:

{{quote|The Books of the Times review on {{date|January 22|MDY}}, 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.}}

''Norman Mailer’s Letters on ''An American Dream'', 1963—1969'' is a wonderful resource, detailing Mailer’s aesthetic considerations, his social world from the inside as most of us have never seen it before, and his responses to the weird reception much of his work has received as well. Mailer asks Diana Trilling to please invite Iris Murdoch to dinner as he has always wanted to meet her;{{sfn|Mailer|2004|p=71}} he tells several correspondents that he thinks the responses to ''Dream'' were not only schizophrenic but were symptomatic, also, of the nation’s own tectonic fault lines (apologizing to Aldridge for the overloaded metaphor as he uses it);{{sfn|Mailer|2004|p=74}} and we see Mailer writing long, friendly, detailed letters to fans such as Mrs. Virginia M. Mangram: “Between us, I’m just a little tickled with the book, because no matter its larger merits or lack of them, I worked the surface of this book harder than anything I’ve ever written and so feel at last there’s a certain craftsmanship to something I’ve done. To me it purrs a little now. It’s a bitch of a book, at least I think so. If you don’t like it, or are a good bit disappointed, my god, I’ll respect you for saying so after reading all these fine words about me by me.”{{sfn|Mailer|2004|p=63}} Evidence is accumulating to show that Mailer was actually one of the most gracious of the Truly Famous; in a few years or so, Lennon’s edited collection of Mailer letters will come out, and then the world will know.

Though Dearborn claims that the life and the work are equally important in Mailer’s case, her non-hagiographic view of the life is worth much more than her approach to the writing. ''The Armies of the Night'' ({{date|1968}}) is for Dearborn Mailer’s best work, and it is an unsurprising opinion. She declares ''Of a Fire on the Moon'' ({{date|1971}}) “one of the most disastrous projects of his writing life,” which is a strange assessment when one considers the thoughtful responses to that work in studies by Kernan, Landow, and Tabbi. Dearborn’s discussions of the work occasionally strike one as breezy, and they seem to rely a little too much on the scuttlebutt of reviewers. For example, she claims that ''Oswald’s Tale'' ({{date|1995}}) received almost uniformly bad reviews, but actually this book received positive reviews in a number of publications. More ambitious works such as ''Ancient Evenings'' ({{date|1983}}) receive a competent overview, but the study offers no real surprises. Each generation, at any rate, must write its own biography of a phenomenon such as Mailer, and Dearborn’s is the most complete portrait from this period, {{date|1998}}—{{date|2008}}. Since Robert Lucid’s death, J. Michael Lennon has taken over the job of writing an authorized biography.

“Boston State Hospital: The Summer of 1942” is an excerpt from Robert F. Lucid’s unfinished authorized biography of Mailer, and it is accompanied by an excerpt from Mailer’s ''play'' “The Naked and the Dead,” written in 1942 after Mailer’s experience as an employee in the of Boston State Hospital. J. Michael Lennon presents a selection of Mailer’s letters entitled {{" '}}A Series of Tragicomedies’: Mailer’s Letters on ''The Deer Park'', 1954—55,” which chronicle Mailer’s extraordinary effort to complete and publish his third novel. There is also Philip Bufithis’ reconnaissance, “''The Executioner’s Song'': a Life Beneath Our Conscience,” Jeffrey Severs’ interview with Mailer comrade-in-arms, entitled “The Untold Story Behind ''The Executioner’s Song'': A Conversation with Lawrence Schiller,” and Morris Dickstein’s typically clear and

In April 2008, Harvard University purchased seven boxes of letters, books and papers from Mailer’s mistress of nine years, actress Carole Mallory. The material includes photos, interview transcripts and notes from the writing lessons he gave her. What researchers would most likely be interested in, and what Leslie Morris, Harvard’s curator of modern books and manuscripts, regards as “important” are Mailer’s hand-written edits and notes on several of Mallory’s manuscripts.{{efn|An example of a Mailer edit involved changing the phrase “stick that up your English tushy” to “stick that up your Hungarian bottom.” There was also a recommendation that Mallory delete a reference to “nibbling his bullets.”}}  

Mailer and Coover, for example, help us see homophobia as a function of cold war hegemony in “Crises of Masculinity: Homosexual Desire and Homosexual Panic in the Critical ColdWar Narratives of Mailer and Coover” by Michael Snyder. For Snyder, Mailer’s ''An American Dream'' and ''Why are We in Vietnam?'', like Coover’s ''The Public Burning'', “critique the way homosexuality functions to consolidate patriarchal power,”{{sfn|Snyder|2007|p=250}} but Mailer is a little more of the bad cop to Robert Coover’s good cop, since Mailer’s homophobia is compared to Coover’s “use of subversive Bakhtinian carnival laughter,” which “presents a more devastating, comprehensive critique of cold war rhetoric” than do texts by Mailer.{{sfn|Snyder|2007|p=250}}

Whether or not “Vidal vs. Mailer” was in any sense the fight of the century, a good literary feud can have a salutary effect on literary history. The Maxine Hong Kingston vs. Frank Chin fight, for example, has helped Asian-American writers and scholars make communally recognized literary constellations out of what would otherwise be random points of light, and we may ask, along these lines: What has the Gore/Norman fight ''produced''? Reviewing the matter from various angles, including for example Fred Kaplan’s ''Gore Vidal: a Biography'' and Dick Cavett’s recollections of the televised parts of the feud just after Mailer’s death, one does not come away thinking that great battles have been won either by the Devil or the Lord.{{efn|Dick Cavett’s recollections are a great pleasure to read, as dozens of readers noted on his ''New York Times'' blog page. Miraculously, he frames the matter in such a way as to indicate how the weirdness of a given time touches the participants in estranging ways that are funny, awful, and invigorating: “It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer’s life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at ''Time'' magazine.”}} Fred Kaplan’s ''Gore Vidal: a Biography'' gives the chemical formulas for the various high-intensity exchanges between the two; Kaplan’s account gives much more than recycled spleen. There are also detailed portraits of intermediaries such as the influential editor Jason Epstein, contrasting responses to various phases of the relationship between Mailer and Vidal, and a tactful rendition of the highly cautious manner in which the two aging writers sidled up to one another in order to end the feud.{{efn|Published in the same year as Gore Vidal, Norman Podhoretz’ ''Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer'' is a picture of rancor for its own sake.}} The story of Mailer as a ''friend'' rather than as an ineluctable adversary emerges in Rachel Cohen’s ''A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854—1967''. This book is in some ways quite Mailerian, folding in the radical intuitionism of Mailer’s speculative biography ''Marilyn'' into the subjective force of ''The Armies of the Night'', in which the centering self stands up to history. The book braids together the pacts and patterns of hundreds of biographical books and articles, and if it is a little too general at times, it always proceeds form a genuine appreciation of the affiliations that explain the intensity of all literary quests. Mailer figures quite strongly in the last third of the book, with chapters on Mailer with Baldwin, with Marianne Moore, and with Robert Lowell.

returns to WWII via two 1948 novels to correct our misimpression that the “good war” was always good: “At best, what we now call the ‘Good War’ is a well-maintained fiction, a constellation of images, narratives, memories, and sound bites invoked to lend authority to everything from the War on Drugs to the current American-lead occupation of Iraq.”{{sfn|Kinder|2005|p=187}} In this article, not only does Mailer become friends with another writer, he also gets to be the political good guy. Gary Rosenshield aligns Mailer with three other writers in his article “Crime and Redemption, Russian and American style: Dostoevsky, Buckley, Mailer, Styron and Their Wards.” Many people have commented critically on Mailer’s involvement in the Abbot case, noting his valorization in contemporary American society, “his romanticization of the criminal, and his faith in the redemptive power of literary talent.”{{sfn|Rosenshield|1998|p=684}} The main virtue of Rosenshield’s essay is that he does not look at the activity of a single writer in isolation, instead choosing to compare Mailer, Styron and Dostoevsky to show the complex interrelations between judgment, risk and seduction in all of these cases. Rosenshield does what a scholar should do—he connects the impulsive judgments that energize daily journalism to the deeper responsibilities of historical memory. How does Mailer come off

The best academic articles have tended to discuss Mailer as a repository of our psycho-social rebellion. Several of these articles have been collected in a clutch of articles on Norman Mailer in the ''Journal of Modern Literature''. James {{harvtxt|Ryan|2006}}, Ashton {{harvtxt|Howley|2006}} and Scott {{harvtxt|Duguid|2006}} each discuss Mailer as a figure of resistance with some ambivalence: Mailer is at once the resister-in-chief who was celebrated as “General Marijuana,” but, increasingly in the last several decades, Mailer has been seen as a symptom of what is wrong with the left rather than medicine for the ailment. In {{" '}}Insatiable as Good Old America’: ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' and Popular Criminality,” Ryan argues for the achievement of Mailer’s often disparaged novel ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', which Ryan considers neglected by the critics because of its formulaic adhesion to the genre of crime fiction and also because, by Mailer’s own admission, it was written hastily because he needed money. Ryan shows how the populist form of the novel is well suited to its themes and allows Mailer a fresh angle on a favored theme, obscenity. The novel allows for fully fleshed treatment of American self-understanding circa 1980 in which vulgarity and obscenity (especially pornography) had become common cultural currency. Ryan points out that the repetitive structure of this populist form resonates with the structure of pornography, which in turn resonates with the American “diet of reality.”{{sfn|Ryan|2006|p=21}} With the explosion of “reality culture” that has taken over contemporary popular media, Ryan’s analysis shows Mailer’s attention to America’s crude hunger for illusory “realities” to have been quite prescient.

In another excellent article, T. H. {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2006}} works similar ground when he hypothesizes in “Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer” that Norman Mailer (alongside Lionel Trilling and Leslie Fiedler) contributed to the demoralization of liberalism just before and after WWII through inadvertent critiques of liberalism from ''within'' its confines. Mailer began to portray ''forms of totalitarianism'' within liberalism itself after ''The Naked and the Dead'', effectively attacking liberalism from both the Left (in his paranoiac mode) and the rightist legacy of the counter Enlightenment tradition (that includes de Maistre, Lawrence, and Heidegger). By going beyond Trilling and Fiedler’s portrayals of liberals as political dupes, Mailer was ultimately prescient in his portrayal of liberals as weak and compromising, since he anticipated the 1960s adoption of this same notion. “Never let the troops become demoralized.” Adamowski writes near the conclusion of his article: “They might desert to the other side.”{{sfn|Adamowski|2006|p=891}} Closing with the triumph of Neo-Conservativism, the suggestion is, somewhat, that Mailer is to blame. Alan Petigny’s counterstatement “Norman Mailer, ‘The White Negro,’ and New Conceptions of the Self in Postwar America” from the inaugural issue of ''The Mailer Review'' in an interesting rejoinder to the idea that Mailer ''et alia'' brought down the house of liberalism, as Petigny argues that Mailer and Company misconstrued the Eisenhower decade: “In ‘The White Negro,’ Mailer seemed to regard white middle-class America as uptight and sexually repressed. While partially correct, Mailer failed to see what the majority of Americans at the time, and till this day, fail to see: a great and broad liberalization that was unfolding almost unnoticed during the fifties.”{{sfn|Petigny|2007|p=186}} Petigny closes with an interesting paradox: “Norman Mailer’s hand-wringing about the lack of individuality in American Society was not a substantiation of his claims but of the reverse,” since the resonance of “The White Negro” was in fact “Evidence of an ascendant spirit during the postwar era—one which was more secular, more expressive, and—in the aggregate—less conformist than anything that had come before.”{{sfn|Petigny|2007|p=192}} So three full cheers for literary liberalism.

Whether or not we believe in an afterlife, we enjoy imagining our way into and around such beliefs, and several articles show how Mailer’s fictive constructions guide us through the land of the dead. In “Books of the Dead: Postmortem Politics in Novels by Mailer, Burroughs, Acker, and Pynchon,” Kathryn Hume highlights Mailer’s usage of “ancient ritual instructions”{{sfn|Hume|2000|p=417}} in his novel ''Ancient Evenings'', emphasizing especially his investment in ancient Egyptian myths in relation to the postmodern, mainly secular world of the late twentieth century. She defends Mailer against accusations of obscenity by demonstrating that Mailer’s graphic representations of sexual and even excremental activities metaphorical celebrate forms of resistance that are at once spiritual and political. Against dehumanizing forces of modern life such as totalitarian ideology and unquestioned materialism, Hume argues, Mailer redeploys the imagery and ideas found in ''The Egyptian Book of the Dead'' in the service of liberation. This article could be said to read Mailer in a magical/utopian way, proceeding as ''Ancient Evenings'' does from underworld to reincarnation, whereas Hume’s book length study, ''American Dream'', ''American Nightmare: Fiction since 1960'', presents us with Mailer’s more dystopian underworld vision. In novels like ''An American Dream'' and ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'', Mailer fleshes out the “American Nightmare” by ironically distorting the heroic structure of descent and return;{{sfn|Hume|2000|p=285}} by problematizing notions of success, morality, and freedom{{sfn|Hume|2000|p=275}} and by portraying the running themes of lost innocence, of the dissolution of love in contemporary society, and of families with no future where children are not an expression of hope. These novels, Hume finds, generally project a demonic vision of America that undermines its rosier self-concepts.

The secular and the sacred, the political and the innermost personal, constitute one another, and this mutuality comes through powerfully and strangely in the epigraph from Kafka that Morris Dickstein chose for his {{date|1999 study}}, ''Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945—1970'': “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony.”{{sfn|Dickstein|2002|p=i}} This quotation takes us in two directions. Our need for order is such that the most blasphemous actions imaginable, should they continue regularly, are retrofitted in the imagination such that they become religion itself, part of the ritual they had previously upset. But then we think about established religious forms and wonder: when was this priest a leopard? By “leopards” Dickstein means outsiders; a Jew or a homosexual or an ethnic minority was a leopard but is now a priest. Mailer was a leopard but is now a priest. In his opening autobiographical prelude, Dickstein describes the shift in his reading from sacred to secular-sacred: “As I grew disenchanted with the religious texts I had grown up on, secular literature became a kind of scripture for me, a continuous commentary on living in the world” (x). Writers like Bellow, Mailer, Vidal, Roth, Updike, O’Connor, Ellison, Nabokov and others were “like Kafka’s ravenous leopards, invading and disrupting the sheltered precincts of our literary culture.”{{sfn|Dickstein|2002|p=x}} The old-time religion to which these writers remained true was always Modernism: “Bellow, O’Connor, Ellison, Malamud, Cheever, Updike, Baldwin, Mailer, and Roth were faithful to their aesthetic conscience, to the gospel according to James and Joyce, Kafka and Proust, even when the results showed up in their own faults of craft or character. They remained loyal to the novel even as its boundaries blurred and its hold on readers diminished.”{{sfn|Dickstein|2002|p=20}} Mailer is more than prominent in Dickstein’s pantheon; though Dickstein does not say that any one of these writers was first among equals, Mailer’s name is indexed over 120 times—more than any other writer.

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=2004 |title=Norman Mailer’s Letters on ''An American Dream'', 1963—1969 |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url= |location=Shavertown, PA |publisher=Sligo Press |ref=harv }}