Mailer was a manic pursuer of fame and fortune with a take-it- or-leave-it persona. Much of his style wouldn't play well today
Random House recently announced an effort to try to revive interest in Norman Mailer, not long ago America's most famous writer.
Likewise Mailer's own family, together with various former associates, have been trying to pump up his royalties and reputation with an annual Norman Mailer Prize gala – the next scheduled in a few weeks. It's a limp chicken affair, often rewarding writers that Mailer, neither generous nor of a mentoring temperament, would probably have disdained.
You might think that the Brooklynization of upper-middle-brow culture would have made a special place for Mailer, that most Brooklyn-based author (his apartment in Brooklyn Heights, decorated like a ship with a view over the East River and Lower Manhattan, has been the subject of lots of squabbling since his death). But Mailer, who died in 2007, even more than his yet-remembered generational mates – Bellow, Updike, Roth – seems like a figure from a bygone era.
Certainly Mailer has always had passionate detractors along with dedicated loyalists. Most of his novels warrant an asterisk – bad, yes, but there's the backstory of the battles he was fighting at the time. And his public persona was strictly take it or leave it – lots of drunken speeches, head-butting, and ill-advised television appearances. Ultimately, to his own protests, his reputation rested on the journalism he produced largely to pay the bills of a novelist's life (and those of his nine children and six wives).
But now there's hardly anybody who cares enough to take sides against him. As for his loyalists, most have demographically aged out of contemporary culture – all of them men, the younger of them now over 60.
Mailer, channeling Hemingway through the mind of a Jewish Harvard student, became famous with a war novel, then spent much of his physical and literary energy trying to embody the attributes of a man's man. Sometimes he was successful, other times, in his own view, he sadly and comically failed. This was always an experience that involved a not-to-be resolved conflict with a woman – indeed, with all women. Not incidentally, he spent a short period in Bellevue Hospital for stabbing one of his many wives with a penknife during a cocktail party fracas.
In the next-gen literary world, where most of the readers and writers would be women, this was not prescient positioning.
And then there was the public man. More than any other American writer since Hemingway, Mailer lived in the press. He was what would likely now be called a troll. He invited and provoked controversy and enmity in a way that is very … un-Brooklyn.
Indeed, the men who are left in the current women's literary world, are mostly in the new Brooklyn mode. Manhattan is for sleazeballs and Brooklyn is for the artistic and literary middle class – defanged, and respectable.
Mailer was a sleazeball. Not just for his unreconstructed sexual adventurism, but for his manic pursuit of glamour, attention, and dough.
Ambition, a literal slugging it out in ever-striving America, was one of his great subjects. His 1959 book, Advertisements for Myself, that very antithesis of the earnest self-effacement that Brooklyn would come to represent, was a naked and reckless exposure of not just his desires but his desperation.
Opening the book, he proclaimed:
Like many a vain, empty, and bullying body of your time, I have been running for President the last ten years in the privacy of my mind, and it occurs to me I am less close now than when I began.
His whorishness, media and otherwise, his view that to understand American grandiosity you had to participate in it, his show-off and often purple prose, his constant over-blown pronouncements, his ever-contradictory politics, all of these traits would have no place in the present, earnest, literary world.
Even his major contribution, his journalism – as ground breaking and as immodest as any work in 20th century American letters – would likely get a sour and resentful Twitter reaction today.
The contemporary journalist eschews, for better or worse, flamboyance, experimentation, and self-dramatization. Their politics must be consistent and not contrary or capricious. And high-flying prose itself is, nowadays, a suspect conceit more than a journalistic virtue. Literal-mindedness is the currency. Given those limitations, Mailer has no children working today. It is actually hard to imagine who might be publishing him now.
Even Michael Hastings – the just-announced posthumous winner of the 2013 Norman Mailer prize who was killed in a June car crash – noted for his passionate war writing and his investigation of US surveillance efforts would, with his by-the-book outrage, likely have bored silly the author of the Armies of the Night.
I do not think the pendulum is going to soon swing back to Norman, not in this generation anyway. Though it certainly would be fun.
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