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Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Is Dead
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Norman Mailer in Los Angeles in February. More Photos >
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By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: November 11, 2007
Norman Mailer, the combative, controversial and often outspoken novelist who
loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his
generation, died early yesterday in Manhattan. He was 84.
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An Appraisal: A Novelist’s Nonfiction Captured the American Spirit (November
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A Body of Work Spanning 59 Years (November 11, 2007)
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Times Topics: Norman Mailer
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Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Norman Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, his
literary executor said. Above, Mr. Mailer at his home in Provincetown,
Mass., in January. More Photos »
The cause was acute renal failure, his family said.
Mr. Mailer burst on the scene in 1948 with “The Naked and the Dead,†a
partly autobiographical novel about World War II, and for six decades he was
rarely far from center stage. He published more than 30 books, including
novels, biographies and works of nonfiction, and twice won the Pulitzer
Prize: for “The Armies of the Night†(1968), which also won the National
Book Award, and “The Executioner’s Song†(1979).
He also wrote, directed and acted in several low-budget movies, helped found
The Village Voice and for many years was a regular guest on television talk
shows, where he could reliably be counted on to make oracular pronouncements
and deliver provocative opinions, sometimes coherently and sometimes not.
Mr. Mailer belonged to the old literary school that regarded novel writing
as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic characters with egos to match.
He was the most transparently ambitious writer of his era, seeing himself in
competition not just with his contemporaries but with the likes of Tolstoy
and Dostoyevsky.
He was also the least shy and risk-averse of writers. He eagerly sought
public attention, and publicity inevitably followed him on the few occasions
when he tried to avoid it. His big ears, barrel chest, striking blue eyes
and helmet of seemingly electrified hair  jet black at first and ultimately
snow white  made him instantly recognizable, a celebrity long before most
authors were lured out into the limelight.
At different points in his life Mr. Mailer was a prodigious drinker and drug
taker, a womanizer, a devoted family man, a would-be politician who ran for
mayor of New York, a hipster existentialist, an antiwar protester, an
opponent of women’s liberation and an all-purpose feuder and short-fused
brawler, who with the slightest provocation would happily engage in
head-butting, arm-wrestling and random punch-throwing. Boxing obsessed him
and inspired some of his best writing. Any time he met a critic or a
reviewer, even a friendly one, he would put up his fists and drop into a
crouch.
Gore Vidal, with whom he frequently wrangled, once wrote: “Mailer is forever
shouting at us that he is about to tell us something we must know or has
just told us something revelatory and we failed to hear him or that he will,
God grant his poor abused brain and body just one more chance, get through
to us so that we will know. Each time he speaks he must become more bold,
more loud, put on brighter motley and shake more foolish bells. Yet of all
my contemporaries I retain the greatest affection for Norman as a force and
as an artist. He is a man whose faults, though many, add to rather than
subtract from the sum of his natural achievements.â€Â
Mr. Mailer was a tireless worker who at his death was writing a sequel to
his 2007 novel, “The Castle in the Forest.†If some of his books, written
quickly and under financial pressure, were not as good as he had hoped, none
of them were forgettable or without his distinctive stamp. And if he never
quite succeeded in bringing off what he called “the big one† the Great
American Novel  it was not for want of trying.
Along the way, he transformed American journalism by introducing to
nonfiction writing some of the techniques of the novelist and by placing at
the center of his reporting a brilliant, flawed and larger-than-life
character who was none other than Norman Mailer himself.
A Pampered Son
Norman Kingsley  or, in Hebrew, Nachem Malek  Mailer was born in Long
Branch, N.J., on Jan. 31, 1923. His father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, known as
Barney, was a South African émigré, a snappy dresser  he sometimes wore
spats and carried a walking stick  and a largely ineffectual businessman.
The dominant figure in the family was Mr. Mailer’s mother, the former Fanny
Schneider, who came from a vibrant clan in Long Branch, where her father ran
a grocery and was the town’s unofficial rabbi. Though another child,
Barbara, was born in 1927, Norman remained his mother’s favorite.
When Norman was 9, the family moved to Crown Heights, in Brooklyn. Pampered
and doted on, he excelled at both Public School 161 and Boys High School,
from which he graduated in 1939.
That fall he enrolled as a 16-year-old freshman at Harvard, where he showed
up wearing a newly purchased outfit of gold-brown jacket, green-and-blue
striped pants and white saddle shoes. Classmates remembered him as brash and
jug-eared and full of big talk about his sexual experience. (In fact he had
had very little, a lack he quickly set about rectifying.)
Mr. Mailer intended to major in aeronautical engineering, but by the time he
was a sophomore, he had fallen in love with literature. He spent the summer
reading and rereading James T. Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan,†John Steinbeck’s
“Grapes of Wrath†and John Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.,†and he began, or so he
claimed, to set himself a daily quota of 3,000 words of his own, on the
theory that this was the way to get bad writing out of his system. By 1941
he was sufficiently purged to win the Story magazine prize for best short
story written by an undergraduate.
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Norman Mailer
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An Appraisal: A Novelist’s Nonfiction Captured the American Spirit (November
11, 2007)
A Body of Work Spanning 59 Years (November 11, 2007)
A Sampler From Mailer (November 11, 2007)
Times Topics: Norman Mailer
Mr. Mailer graduated from Harvard in 1943, determined on a literary career.
He started on a thousand-page novel about a mental hospital (never
published) while waiting to be drafted. He was called up by the Army in the
spring of 1944, after marrying Bea Silverman in January, and was sent to the
Philippines.
Mr. Mailer saw little combat in the war and finished his military career as
a cook in occupied Japan. But his wartime experience, and in particular a
single patrol he made on the island of Leyte, became the raw material for
“The Naked and the Dead,†the book that put him on the map.
Mr. Mailer wrote the novel, which is about a 13-man platoon fighting the
Japanese on a Pacific atoll, in 15 months or so, and when it was published
it was almost universally praised  the last time this would happen to him.
Some critics ranked it among the best war novels ever written.
“The Naked and the Dead†sold 200,000 copies in just three months  a huge
number in those days  and remains Mr. Mailer’s greatest literary and
commercial success, even though it is in part an apprentice work, owing a
large and transparent debt to Dos Passos, Tolstoy and Farrell.
Mr. Mailer later said of it: “Part of me thought it was possibly the
greatest book written since ‘War and Peace.’ On the other hand I also
thought, ‘I don’t know anything about writing. I’m virtually an impostor.’ â€Â
‘Daring the Unknown’
His second book, “Barbary Shore†(1951), a political novel about, among
other things, the struggle between capitalism and socialism, earned what Mr.
Mailer called “possibly the worst reviews of any serious novel in recent
years.†A third, “The Deer Park†(1955), in part a fictionalized account of
Elia Kazan’s troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee, fared
only a little better, and for the rest of the decade he wrote no fiction at
all.
For much of the ’50s he drifted, frequently drunk or stoned or both, and
affected odd accents: British, Irish, gangster, Texan. In 1955, together
with two friends, Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher, he founded The Village
Voice, and while writing a column for that paper he began to evolve what
became his trademark style  bold, poetic, metaphysical, even shamanistic at
times  and his personal philosophy of hipsterism.
It was a homespun, Greenwich Village version of existentialism, which argued
that the truly with-it, blacks and jazz musicians especially, led more
authentic lives and enjoyed better orgasms.
The most famous, or infamous, version of this philosophy was Mr. Mailer’s
controversial 1957 essay “The White Negro,†which seemed to endorse violence
as an existential act and declared the murder of a white candy-store owner
by two 18-year-old blacks an example of “daring the unknown.â€Â
In November 1960, Mr. Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a
penknife, seriously wounding her. It happened at the end of an all-night
party announcing Mr. Mailer’s intention to run in the 1961 mayoral campaign,
and he, like many of his guests, had been drinking heavily. Mr. Mailer was
arrested, but his wife declined to press charges, and he was eventually
released after being sent to Bellevue Hospital for observation. The marriage
broke up two years later.
All told, Mr. Mailer was married six times, counting a quickie with Carol
Stevens, whom he wed and divorced within a couple of days in 1980 to grant
legitimacy to their daughter, Maggie. His other wives, in addition to Ms.
Silverman and Ms. Morales, were Lady Jeanne Campbell, granddaughter of Lord
Beaverbrook; Beverly Rentz Bentley; and Norris Church, with whom he was
living at his death. Lady Jeanne died in June.
In the 1970s Mr. Mailer entered into a long feud with feminists and
proponents of women’s liberation, and in a famous 1971 debate with Germaine
Greer at Town Hall in Manhattan he declared himself an “enemy of birth
control.â€Â
He meant it. By his various wives, Mr. Mailer had eight children, all of
whom survive him: Susan, by Ms. Silverman; Danielle and Elizabeth Anne, by
Ms. Morales; Kate, by Lady Jeanne; Michael Burks and Stephen McLeod, by Ms.
Bentley; Maggie Alexandra, by Ms. Stevens; and John Buffalo, by Ms. Church.
Also surviving are an adopted son, Matthew, by an earlier marriage of Ms.
Church’s, and 10 grandchildren.
For all his hipsterism, Mr. Mailer was an old-fashioned, attentive father.
Starting in the 1960s, the financial burden of feeding and clothing his
offspring, as well as keeping up with his numerous alimony payments, caused
him to churn out a couple of novels, including “An American Dream†(1965),
for the sake of a quick payday and also to take on freelance magazine
assignments.
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Norman Mailer
Related
An Appraisal: A Novelist’s Nonfiction Captured the American Spirit (November
11, 2007)
A Body of Work Spanning 59 Years (November 11, 2007)
A Sampler From Mailer (November 11, 2007)
Times Topics: Norman Mailer
A series of articles for Esquire on the 1968 Republican and Democratic
conventions became the basis for his book “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,â€Â
and articles for Harper’s and Commentary about the 1967 antiwar march on the
Pentagon were the basis for the prizewinning book “The Armies of the Night:
History as a Novel, the Novel as History.â€Â
‘Servant to a Wild Man’
The beginning of “Armies†is both a good summary of Mr. Mailer’s life to
that point and an example of how he had begun to turn himself into a
character in which literary style and selfhood were virtually
indistinguishable:
“As Mailer had come to recognize over the years, the modest everyday fellow
of his daily round was servant to a wild man in himself: The gent did not
appear so very often, sometimes so rarely as once a month, sometimes not
even twice a year, and he sometimes came when Mailer was frightened and
furious at the fear, sometimes he came just to get a breath of fresh air. He
was indispensable, however, and Mailer was even fond of him, for the wild
man was witty in his own wild way and absolutely fearless. He would have
been admirable, except that he was an absolute egomaniac, a Beast  no
recognition existed of the existence of anything beyond the range of his
reach.â€Â
The critic Richard Gilman said of the book: “In ‘Armies of the Night,’ the
rough force of Mailer’s imagination, his brilliant wayward gifts of
observation, his ravishing if often calculated honesty and his chutzpah all
flourish on the steady ground of a newly coherent subject and theme.â€Â
Alfred Kazin praised the book for its “admirable sensibilities, candid
intelligence†and “most moving concern for America itself.â€Â
Somehow in this busy decade Mr. Mailer also managed to write “Of a Fire on
the Moon,†about the 1969 lunar landing, which began as a series for Life
magazine; to make his most famous movie, “Maidstone,†during the filming of
which he bit off part of an ear of the actor Rip Torn after Mr. Torn
attacked him with a hammer; and to run finally for mayor of New York, this
time as a secessionist candidate, campaigning to make New York City the 51st
state. He also proposed to ban private automobiles from the city.
The writer Jimmy Breslin, who was also on the ticket, thought the race was a
lark until, at a disastrous rally at the Village Gate nightclub, he
discovered that Mr. Mailer was serious. Mr. Breslin later recalled, “I found
out I was running with Ezra Pound.†(The Mailer team eventually lost in the
Democratic primary to Mario Procaccino, who was beaten in the election by
John V. Lindsay.)
In an interview in September 2006, Mr. Mailer said his favorite novel, if
not his best, was “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,†a mystery thriller he wrote,
under extreme financial pressure, in just two months in 1984. He was in tax
trouble, he explained, and needed to crank something out quickly. “I was
prepared to write a bad book if necessary,†he said, “but instead the style
came out, and that saved it for me.â€Â
His best book, he decided after thinking for a moment, was “Ancient
Evenings†(1983), a long novel about ancient Egypt that received what had
by then become familiar critical treatment: extravagantly praised in some
quarters, disdained in others. About the book that many critics consider his
masterpiece, “The Executioner’s Song,†he said he had mixed feelings because
it wasn’t entirely his project.
“The Executioner’s Song,†which is about Gary Gilmore, a convicted murderer
who, after a stay on death row, asked to be executed by the State of Utah in
1976, was the idea of Lawrence Schiller, a writer and filmmaker who did much
of the reporting for the book, taping Mr. Gilmore and his family.
But in “The Executioner’s Song,†Mr. Mailer recast this material in what was
for him a new impersonal voice that rendered the thoughts of his characters
in a style partly drawn from their own way of talking. He called it a
“true-life novel.â€Â
Joan Didion, reviewing the book for The New York Times Book Review, said:
“It is ambitious to the point of vertigo. It is a largely unremarked fact
about Mailer that he is a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the
shape of the sentence is the story. His sentences do not get long or short
by accident, or because he is in a hurry. I think no one but Mailer could
have dared this book. The authentic Western voice, the voice heard in ‘The
Executioner’s Song,’ is one heard often in life but only rarely in
literature.â€Â
Mr. Schiller also assisted Mr. Mailer with “Oswald’s Tale: An American
Mystery,†his 1995 book about Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy’s
assassin. In a review for The Sunday Times of London, Martin Amis called the
book a “remarkable feat of imaginative sympathy.†But Mr. Amis also noted
that it recalled Mr. Mailer’s championing of the convict Jack Henry Abbott,
which displayed, he said, the author’s “old weakness for any killer who has
puzzled his way through a few pages of Marx.â€Â
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Norman Mailer
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An Appraisal: A Novelist’s Nonfiction Captured the American Spirit (November
11, 2007)
A Body of Work Spanning 59 Years (November 11, 2007)
A Sampler From Mailer (November 11, 2007)
Times Topics: Norman Mailer
Mr. Abbott was serving a long sentence in a Utah prison for forgery and for
killing a fellow inmate when, in 1977, he began writing to Mr. Mailer. Mr.
Mailer saw literary talent in Mr. Abbott’s letters and helped him publish
them in an acclaimed volume called “In the Belly of the Beast.†He also
lobbied to get Mr. Abbott paroled. A few weeks after being released, in June
1981, Mr. Abbott, now a darling in leftist literary circles, stabbed to
death a waiter in a Lower East Side restaurant, and his champion became a
target of national outrage.
Black-Tie Benefits
The episode was the last great controversy of Mr. Mailer’s career. Chastened
perhaps, and stabilized by his marriage to Ms. Church, a former model whom
he wed in November 1980, Mr. Mailer mellowed and even turned sedate. The
former hostess-baiter and scourge of parties became a regular guest at
black-tie benefits and dinners given by the likes of William S. Paley,
Gloria Vanderbilt and Oscar de la Renta. His editor, Jason Epstein, said of
this period, “There are two sides to Norman Mailer, and the good side has
won.â€Â
In 1984 Mr. Mailer was elected president of PEN American Center, the writers’
organization, and was the main force in bringing together writers from all
over the world for a much publicized literary conference called “The Writer’s
Imagination and the Imagination of the State.†For a change, Mr. Mailer even
found himself attacked from the left as many of the attendees protested
about his inviting George P. Shultz, then secretary of state, to address the
opening session. Mr. Mailer dismissed them as “puritanical leftists.â€Â
In the ’90s Mr. Mailer’s health began to fail. He had arthritis and angina
and was fitted with two hearing aids. But his productivity was undiminished,
especially after he embarked on what he called a “monastic regime†in 1995,
swearing off drinking when he was working.
“Bellow and myself and a couple of others were very much smaller than
Faulkner and Hemingway,†he conceded early in the decade, but he never
backed off from the claim that among his contemporaries he was the
heavyweight champion.
In 1991 he published “Harlot’s Ghost,†a 1,310-page novel about the Central
Intelligence Agency, in which he conceived of it as a kind of cold-war
church, the keeper of the nation’s secrets and the bearer of its values. A
poorly received biography of Picasso came out in 1995, followed in 1997 by
“The Gospel According to the Son,†a first-person novel about Jesus. It gave
some critics the opportunity they had been waiting for. Norman Mailer thinks
he’s God, they said.
Mr. Mailer’s next novel, “The Castle in the Forest,†was about Hitler, but
the narrator was a devil, a persona the author admitted he found
particularly congenial. “It’s as close as a writer gets to unrequited joy,â€Â
he said. “We are devils when all is said and done.â€Â
Interviewed at his house in Provincetown, Mass., shortly before that book’s
publication, Mr. Mailer, frail but cheerful, said he hoped his failing
eyesight would hold out long enough for him to complete a sequel. His knees
were shot, he added, holding up the two canes he walked with, and he had
begun doing daily crossword puzzles to refresh his word hoard.
On the other hand, he said, writing was now easier for him in at least one
respect.
“The waste is less,†he said. “The elements of mania and depression are
diminished. Writing is a serious and sober activity for me now compared to
when I was younger. The question of how good are you is one that really good
novelists obsess about more than poor ones. Good novelists are always
terribly affected by the fear that they’re not as good as they thought and
why are they doing it, what are they up to?
“It’s such an odd notion, particularly in this technological society, of
whether your life is justified by being a novelist,†he continued. “And the
nice thing about getting older is that I no longer worry about that. I’ve
come to the simple recognition that would have saved me much woe 30 or 40 or
50 years ago  that one’s eventual reputation has very little to do with one’s
talent. History determines it, not the order of your words.â€Â
Shaking his head, he added: “In two years I will have been a published
novelist for 60 years. That’s not true for very many of us.†And he recalled
something he had said at the National Book Award ceremony in 2005, when he
was given a lifetime achievement award: that he felt like an old coachmaker
who looks with horror at the turn of the 20th century, watching automobiles
roar by with their fumes.
“I think the novel is on the way out,†he said. “I also believe, because it’s
natural to take one’s own occupation more seriously than others, that the
world may be the less for that.â€Â