By Michael F. Duggan
Norman Mailer would have been 100 this Tuesday. He was certainly not everybody’s cup of tea, but he was one of the most important writers and public intellectual celebrities of the postwar era. I can’t think of anybody today who fills the niche he once occupied.
He had ego and talent and showed real brilliance and occasional hostility in interviews and talk shows during the 1960s and ‘70s (he famously head-butted Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971, after his anger at something Vidal had written about him and and uncompromising boorishness had turned the live audience against him). With the exception of Vidal, he tended to like his artistic competitors and ideological opponents. He and Bill Buckley were wary friends.
But there is something loutishly impressive about him—he was a real sweating human being with real insights, unlike so many of the increasingly mainstream extremists, cable TV cheap shot artists, conspiracy gurus, and tepid, blow-dried network lightweights of our own time. He was problematic and didn’t pull punches (literally or figuratively) or water down his message. Although he once called himself a “libertarian socialist,” and was critical of mainstream progressivism, he was of that last generation of liberals who had guts and were not afraid to stir the pot and say exactly what they thought regardless of the consequences. It is hard to square the puckish old man who discussed his book, The Spooky Art (about writing), with Charlie Rose in 2003, and who made an appearance on The Gilmore Girls the following year, with the two-fisted brawler of a few decades before who mixed it up with feminists and reactionaries alike.
One of the most notable postwar American realists ( that included Saul Bellow, James Jones, Philip Roth, and John Updike), Mailer was a best-selling author at 25, having written what is either the greatest or second greatest American novel about WWII, The Naked and the Dead (Catch-22 is arguably more important, if less realistic; Slaughterhouse Five and some of James Jones’s novels are also up there). This book, which was published in 1948 and added the word “fug” to the American lexicon, also has much to say about our own time (see “Mailer’s Ghost” on this blog, November 7, 2022). Notably, he was every adolescent boy’s instant excuse for “reading” Playboy.
His best books are good, but he wrote a lot, and, in some of his articles, you have to wade through a fair amount of crap to get to the gold nuggets. He had real psychological insight, in part growing out of a deep and honest understanding of himself and his own flaws. The chief problem with his analyses of US policy was a tendency to reduce events to the personal psychology of national leaders.
His nonfiction novels The Armies of the Night (on the antiwar march on the Pentagon in 1967), and The Executioner’s Song (about Gary Gilmore) are classics of journalistic realism. If you have a chance, take the time to look at Buckley’s interviews with him on these books as well as Mailer’s confrontation with Vidal on the Cavett show. His 1959 collection of articles and short fiction, Advertisements for Myself, is considered a milestone of the New Journalism. He admired Hemingway, although by his own admission, his writing style is more verbose and less distinctive. He was a student and practitioner of the hip, but eluded labels like hipster (original meaning) and beat. In 1955 he was one of the founders of The Village Voice.
A liberal who was frequently accused of sexism, he was married six times and appears to have been unhinged at times (he stabbed one wife and had a penchant for the “sport” of head-butting people at parties)1 In 1969 he ran for mayor of New York City with legendary reporter, Jimmy Breslin, under the slogans “No More Bullshit!” and “Vote the Bums in!” Their platform included a plan to make the city the 51st state.
While we should not emulate the worst sides of Norman Mailer, there is something authentic and original about him. I am not sure how many people read him anymore, but he has a lot to offer our troubled, if morally superior, times. He died on November 10, 2007.
Note
1). Mailer’s enthusiasm for head-butting is well known. According to James Grady, Mailer head-butted G. Gordon Liddy one night in September 1990, sending the Watergate tough guy fleeing into the darkness.
https://lithub.com/the-time-i-watched-norman-mailer-try-to-fight-g-gordon-liddy-in-the-street/