Norman Mailer's literary career
Bromwich, David
NORMAN MAILER came to public attention as the young author of a best-selling novel of 1948, The Naked and the Dead. It quickly became one of three war novels by Americans that any reader of...
...The striving of American blacks for civil rights, and the insurgency of "the young radicals" on campus, both under the shadow of a war that was our worst until Iraq—these were Mailer's subject through the sixties and early seventies...
...while a stretch of years in prison might yield at last only resignation and despair...
...Mailer was an inspired talker...
...But by the mid1950s, he had embarked on becoming something, if not more valuable, rarer than a respected novelist...
...He did not overrate the part he played, but he found a way to include himself in the picture...
...part of the scene, and watching and wondering at it...
...On the other hand, he could always (it seemed) make a jewel out of a contract asNOTEBOOK signment like The Fight, his book on the AliForeman championship match...
...One recalls the Lego-block "vertical city," built by Mailer, on the cover of his collection of essays Cannibals and Christians— a utopian essay in itself, and no average idea for a jacket illustration...
...An antiwar book (in some broad sense), it was, more emphatically, anti-statist and anti-militarist...
...Written from a strange half-hallucinatory sobriety, in prose less layered and exhibitionist than that of his first novel, it opens with one of the great first sentences of American fiction: "Probably I was in the war...
...And yet, to immerse oneself in the brutality of that war was unimaginable without bitter revenges of the soul...
...It is impossible to think about America in the second half of the twentieth century without being glad that Norman Mailer was there...
...under its miscellaneous texture the work of an acute social critic and observer, whose formats from now on would be various: fiction, essays, reviews, interviews, cemented by autobiographical prose of undeniable charm and valor...
...He made his case still harder by admiring the rebel for gratuitous acts that could only be perceived as psychopathic—hoping, at the same time, that such acts might somehow come to have a critical meaning...
...His most considered statement on the subject would be the novel Why Are We In Vietnam?, which transfers the dedication and mania of a fully equipped soldier to a scene of civilian life: a bear hunt, conducted by helicopter and assisted by the most advanced weaponry...
...He rewrote the book in keyed-up intervals, and it became a modest best seller...
...DAVID BROMWICH teaches literature at Yale and writes on America's wars and constitutional liberty for the Huffington Post...
...There was a problem of naming, here, which he never properly got into focus...
...Later novels like Tough Guys Don't Dance and Harlot's Ghost showed once again the problem of the controlling reactive voice-on-voice...
...Mailer lived for several months in Hollywood, and his third novel, The Deer Park, set in Palm Springs, would deal satirically with the Blacklist...
...Mailer's was the most complex in design and the most ambitious in what it aimed to say, not about the war but about American society as seen through the institutions of war...
...His keenness to live at the edge was a major fact of his life, all through his thirties and forties...
...a curious mixture and not unfamiliar to readers of Byron—a writer with whom he had a good many other affinities...
...Occupation: Writer was the title Robert i Graves chose for one of his miscellaneous books, and it would do for Mailer's whole career...
...He saw that the students who took draft deferments, though they were doing the prudent thing, would come into the manhood of their generation having missed some essential test of 98 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 courage...
...Now, in his writing, he was changing himself to accommodate the rhythms of the dialectician and improvisateur...
...ET US NOT pretend to sum him up...
...The novel An American Dream is best understood as a monologue on that theme...
...The story tells of rebellion and mystic self-isolation, and it is a memorable and melancholic piece of work, closer to the later Melville than to the mainstream talents of the 1950s...
...and he published many afterthoughts on the charisma, cynicism, and romantic insolubility of the Kennedy myth...
...His second novel, Barbary Shore, came out of that moment...
...His first completed draft was resonant and rounded, every sentence a work of aesthetic measure, while the rewritten version was nervy, skittish, an erased and scuffed-up reaction against the first, which bore the imprint (fatal to art) of an author winking at the reader to hear the effects of his tone...
...Yet he had a larger insight into Vietnam...
...IF MAILER'S writings of the 1950s and 1960s had a single preoccupation, it was the necessity of working oneself free of the corrupt settlement many people make with the order and the bureaucratized violence of the state...
...the psychopath (later to be named by psycholoDISSENT / Spring 2008 n 97 NOTEBOOK gists "the sociopath") is by definition someone who defies moral norms because he has no feelings about his actions and no feelings about other people...
...also, that he had a shit detector and used it...
...but the Bay of Pigs destroyed the charm...
...His best-known piece from that period was "The White Negro," first published in the Fall 1957 Dissent, which analyzes and partly defends the moral radicalism of the outsider and hipster—a type that Mailer, in one extended passage, provocatively identified with "the psychopath...
...More admirable were those who resisted the draft and were willing to serve time in prison, as well as those who went to fight, saw the war with honest eyes, and came to oppose it from what they had seen and known...
...It was brushed off by its intended publisher, Rinehart, then irritably accepted, then rejected from a worked-up anxiety about the threat of obscenity prosecutions...
...The ability must have derived in part from his training as an engineer...
...About the violence in himself, and its effect on others, Mailer wrote with honesty and remorse but without regret...
...Nobody else has written about American politics with remotely comparable nerve-power and élan...
...the author listening to the reader respond and answering by anticipation...
...the reader was invited to compare the reprinted parallel texts of certain passages of the Rinehart and Putnam versions and judge which had the edge...
...This, too, Mailer saw clearly, and said as often as he could...
...are novels that remain startling and readable, each for a separate reason...
...The latter owes some of its vitality to the interviewer (his son John Buffalo Mailer), and it offers a more searching indictment than many polished books by fluent journalists half his age...
...Irony and the comedy of egotism are so inseparably blended with moral passion in The Armies of the Night that the book has become a classic without a genre...
...By the time Putnam agreed to publish it, the novelist was in a deep depression, a crisis of self-trust overlaid by binges of drugs and alcohol...
...He wrote masterly reports on the 1960 Democratic and the 1964 Republican conventions and full-length books on the elections of 1968 and 1972...
...Another is a limitless desire to dominate nature...
...War, this novel says—the intoxication of war now enhanced by the dissociated violence of technology—excites dangerous passions that follow us back home...
...It helped that he was a great listener...
...War always feeds the socialized lust of men for cruel exertions of the will...
...Sadism is one such passion...
...but three years later, in his account of the episode in Advertisements for Myself, he was still not sure he had done the right thing...
...His critical intellect came back in full force with his early denunciation of the Vietnam War, during the first year of Lyndon Johnson's administration...
...Whatever his stature as a novelist, Barbary Shore, An American Dream, and Why Are We in Vietnam...
...In the years that followed, Mailer was not yet a public figure but his views were well known, and they were those of a revolutionary socialist—in the early McCarthy period a nonconformist position to the last degree...
...Whereas, the critical personality that Mailer was looking to praise was a romantic rebel...
...Two of his latest productions were books of interviews— one, speculative and sprawling, about God, and one, The Big Empty, about the national security state and the war in Iraq...
...It quickly became one of three war novels by Americans that any reader of that generation was likely to know...
...It honed his suspicion as a political observer...
...We endure and add our part to the surplus repressions of life, and spend all our powers of resistance on externalized targets of loathing such as the murderer and the terrorist...
...He had spoiled a mood of creation, and in consequence (maybe only half intending the consequence) he left behind part of the core of his earliest idea of himself...
...Advertisements for Myself was the first result of those years, and it is one of the original American books...
...He had been enchanted, to his surprise, by JFK in 1960...
...There seems something honorable in the fact that he has become the writer of his generation about whom one cannot "leisurely arrive at an opinion...
...He had the ability, evident as early as the combat patrol in The Naked and the Dead, to master and narrate any intricate process, whether it was the schedule of a boxer's camp, the proper discipline of a protest march, or the sources of the thrust of a rocket booster...
...Mailer thought the idea of a "good war" was seductive but false...
...State terror was a potent element in his understanding of society, an evil he saw embodied in the prison system and in the destructive machinery of the modern state at war...
...Mailer was not a complacent man, and age, from whose defensive fears and prudent wish for shelter so few of the best escape—old age had not paralyzed his anger or narrowed the range of his sympathies...
...It weakened his patience as an artist...
...the others were James Jones's From Here to Eternity and Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions...
...Mailer "shopped" the book to six more publishers and received six rejections...
Vol. 55 • April 2008 • No. 2
