There's a new biography of Norman Mailer, a massive brilliant book that needs attention because knowing of Mailer's life and work may tell us something about ourselves:
Norman Mailer: A Double Life by J. Michael Lennon (October, 2013).
Norman Mailer was a talented writer. He was also a drunk, a misogynist, a banal philosopher, a mediocre politician, and a man apparently torn between his need to be a person of substance and his need to be a personage playing to the crowd. Since we were contemporaries, I was able to follow his career from before he had a career. When it was first published, The Naked and the Dead was a monumental novel that seemed to be a harbinger of a future literary master and we were all spellbound by it. Why Are We in Vietnam? is probably among the finest political novels ever published and it explained a great deal to people who were asking the question of the title. And yet Mailer never seemed to fulfill his promise. He knew it and his knowledge of it probably wrecked his life.
An important question is why did the failure happen? One possibility was the existence of early onset internal psychological conflicts that prevented the full maturation of his art. Another possibility--one hardly mentioned by the literati--is that the literary and publishing community of New York seduced Mailer into a life as a literary entertainer. As a literary entertainer Mailer made a great deal of money for his publishers and for himself. But like many entertainers, in the last few decades of his life he became a tragic bore. Norman Mailer became the Milton Berle of American Literature.
It seems his failing was that he allowed himself to be seduced into the role--but maybe more blame belongs to those who seduced him. Had Mailer remained out of New York and away from the literati and glitterati of Manhattan--lived elsewhere like Hemingway (Mailer's virtual personal mentor) and others who lived elsewhere--he might have done as well as Hemingway, who had a much shorter life. Hemingway blew out his brains with a gun in his fifties and Mailer lived into his eighties, but it's Hemingway who succeeded as an artist and Mailer who failed as an artist.
Which brings us to the question of the death of the American novel--a death continually predicted since the last few decades of the twentieth century by authors and critics alike. The death of the American novel has usually been attributed to some malaise in the culture, the continuing ignorance of the masses, the apathy of a money-oriented society, and so on. But that may be off the mark. If the American novel is indeed dead or dying, it's more likely a result of the conglomerate corporatization of American publishing, the nepotism in American publishing, the silly belief that university English majors make the best acquiring and line editors (even for books about science and technology), the existence of a horde of literary agents who have been encouraged by publishers to act as gatekeepers when the expertise of agents if they have any is usually marketing and not literature, with many agent-gatekeepers not reading much because, as the old saying goes, their lips get tired. "I don't need to read the book to sell it," one agent liked to say.
Instead of publishing most serious novels in cheap editions to test their markets (as is done in some other societies), the large American publishers choose to have gate-keepers filter serious novels according to guessed at commercial appeal and publish only those novels expected to make money. Their guesses are wrong more often than right--which is why many American publishers lose money faster than they can make it.
Of course there are exceptions to this rule. But the rule exists and it does a great deal of damage to literature, and if any real good will come out of the current ebook revolution it will be to shake American publishing into another business model.
There's never any absolute certainty in pinpointing causes and effects in society. There's too much complexity and often we hardly even know what questions to ask. But from a distance the origin of the failure of Norman Mailer and the origin of the current malaise in American literature look to be endogenous in publishing rather than exogenous in publishing--with an ultimate cause a deficit in common sense and an excess of greed in the publishing community. Greed may be good for business, but if you run the arts only for greed you will ultimately do great damage to the arts--and damage that soon feeds on itself.
Norman Mailer: A Double Life by J. Michael Lennon (October, 2013).
Norman Mailer was a talented writer. He was also a drunk, a misogynist, a banal philosopher, a mediocre politician, and a man apparently torn between his need to be a person of substance and his need to be a personage playing to the crowd. Since we were contemporaries, I was able to follow his career from before he had a career. When it was first published, The Naked and the Dead was a monumental novel that seemed to be a harbinger of a future literary master and we were all spellbound by it. Why Are We in Vietnam? is probably among the finest political novels ever published and it explained a great deal to people who were asking the question of the title. And yet Mailer never seemed to fulfill his promise. He knew it and his knowledge of it probably wrecked his life.
An important question is why did the failure happen? One possibility was the existence of early onset internal psychological conflicts that prevented the full maturation of his art. Another possibility--one hardly mentioned by the literati--is that the literary and publishing community of New York seduced Mailer into a life as a literary entertainer. As a literary entertainer Mailer made a great deal of money for his publishers and for himself. But like many entertainers, in the last few decades of his life he became a tragic bore. Norman Mailer became the Milton Berle of American Literature.
It seems his failing was that he allowed himself to be seduced into the role--but maybe more blame belongs to those who seduced him. Had Mailer remained out of New York and away from the literati and glitterati of Manhattan--lived elsewhere like Hemingway (Mailer's virtual personal mentor) and others who lived elsewhere--he might have done as well as Hemingway, who had a much shorter life. Hemingway blew out his brains with a gun in his fifties and Mailer lived into his eighties, but it's Hemingway who succeeded as an artist and Mailer who failed as an artist.
Which brings us to the question of the death of the American novel--a death continually predicted since the last few decades of the twentieth century by authors and critics alike. The death of the American novel has usually been attributed to some malaise in the culture, the continuing ignorance of the masses, the apathy of a money-oriented society, and so on. But that may be off the mark. If the American novel is indeed dead or dying, it's more likely a result of the conglomerate corporatization of American publishing, the nepotism in American publishing, the silly belief that university English majors make the best acquiring and line editors (even for books about science and technology), the existence of a horde of literary agents who have been encouraged by publishers to act as gatekeepers when the expertise of agents if they have any is usually marketing and not literature, with many agent-gatekeepers not reading much because, as the old saying goes, their lips get tired. "I don't need to read the book to sell it," one agent liked to say.
Instead of publishing most serious novels in cheap editions to test their markets (as is done in some other societies), the large American publishers choose to have gate-keepers filter serious novels according to guessed at commercial appeal and publish only those novels expected to make money. Their guesses are wrong more often than right--which is why many American publishers lose money faster than they can make it.
Of course there are exceptions to this rule. But the rule exists and it does a great deal of damage to literature, and if any real good will come out of the current ebook revolution it will be to shake American publishing into another business model.
There's never any absolute certainty in pinpointing causes and effects in society. There's too much complexity and often we hardly even know what questions to ask. But from a distance the origin of the failure of Norman Mailer and the origin of the current malaise in American literature look to be endogenous in publishing rather than exogenous in publishing--with an ultimate cause a deficit in common sense and an excess of greed in the publishing community. Greed may be good for business, but if you run the arts only for greed you will ultimately do great damage to the arts--and damage that soon feeds on itself.
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