Norman Mailer in his New York apartment in January 2003. (Kathy Willens/Associated Press) By Charles McGrath
NEW YORK (The International Herald Tribune), November 11, 2007:
Norman Mailer, the combative, controversial and outspoken novelist who loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation, has died in New York. He was 84. The cause of his death, early Saturday, was acute renal failure, his family said.
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" in 1968, which also won the National Book Award, and "The Executioner's Song" in 1979.
He also wrote, directed and acted in several low-budget movies, helped found the weekly newspaper The Village Voice and for many years was a regular guest on television talk shows, where he could be counted on to deliver oracular pronouncements and provocative opinions, sometimes coherently and sometimes not.
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 made him instantly recognizable.
At different points in his life 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, a war 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.
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.
Norman Kingsley - or, in Hebrew, Nachem Malek - Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on Jan. 31, 1923. His father, Isaac Barnett, 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 Mailer's mother, Fanny Schneider, who came from a vibrant clan in Long Branch, where her father ran a grocery and was the town's unofficial rabbi. Although another child, Barbara, was born in 1927, Norman remained his mother's favorite.
Mailer graduated from Harvard in 1943, bent on a literary career. He was called up by the U.S. Army in the spring of 1944, after marrying Bea Silverman in January, and was sent to the Philippines. He 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 American literary map.
January 2007 Photo By Christina PabstMailer 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. It sold 200,000 copies in just three months - a huge number in those days - and remains Mailer's greatest literary and commercial success.
He 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.' "
For much of the 1950s he drifted, frequently drunk or stoned or both. 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.
The most famous, or infamous, version of this philosophy was 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."
In November 1960, Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a penknife, seriously wounding her. It happened at the end of an all-night party announcing Mailer's intention to run in the 1961 mayoral campaign, and he, like many of his guests, had been drinking heavily. 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, Mailer was married six times and had eight children. For all his hipsterism, he 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 for the sake of a quick payday and also to take on freelance magazine assignments.
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," and articles for Harper's and Commentary about the 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon were the basis for "The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History."
Mailer's best book, he said in an interview in September 2006, 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 was not entirely his project.
"The Executioner's Song," 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 Gilmore and his family.
Schiller also assisted Mailer with "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery," his 1995 book about Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy. In a review for The Sunday Times of London, Martin Amis noted that it recalled 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."
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 Mailer. Mailer saw literary talent in Abbott's letters and helped him publish them in an acclaimed volume called "In the Belly of the Beast." He also lobbied to get Abbott paroled. A few weeks after being released, in June 1981, Abbott, now a darling in leftist literary circles, stabbed and killed a waiter in a New York restaurant.
The episode was the last great controversy of Mailer's career. Chastened, perhaps, and stabilized by his marriage to Norris Church, a former model he wed in November 1980, Mailer mellowed and even turned sedate. The former hostess-baiter and scourge of parties became a regular guest at black-tie benefits and dinners.
In the 1990s 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.
His last 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," he said.
"We are devils, when all is said and done."
Copyright © 2007 The International Herald Tribune
