Mailer's Jewish Mother

...Wasn't it Camus who said we never know who a person is until he is dead...

...A certain kindness, his softness...

...By the end, it is sputtering along like an old car in need of a tune-up...

...Naturally, nothing less than greatness woulddo...

...He began churning out 3,000 words each day, "as disciplined as a West Pointer," forging a craftsman's identity...

...Fanny continues to live in Brooklyn Heights, not far from her son...

...Young Norman, in his mother's eyes, was a genius who could do no wrong...

...The publication two years ago of his Egyptian novel, Ancient Evenings, signaled the start of a grandiose three-volume project that may evoke mixed feelings in his readers yet will alter our perception and judgment of his entire oeuvre...

...Thus, whereas Manso's opening chapters form natural set-pieces—Mailer in Brooklyn, Mailer at Harvard, Mailer in the Army—his book loses all focus as it approaches the present...

...After Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele, Fanny is reported to have remarked: "If Norman would stop marrying these women who make him do these terrible things...

...His mind was possessed of that intolerable masculine pressure to command which develops in sons outrageously beloved by their mothers...

...Mailer is an unfinished work, premature, promising great things from the author in the future—and, then again, maybe not...

...It is a lamentable tribute to a great writer...

...The newest has come only in the last few years...

...Mailer always retained a sense of professionalism...

...Even those who despise him do so with fascination...

...His mother noticed: "Whenhe came back, something was lost...

...What made Norman run—and Philip and Arthur and Aaron—was an almost aggressive rejection of the past (the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, Mailer has written, is "the one personality [I] found absolutely insupportable...

...Henry James, on the other hand, was as foreign as a ham sandwich...

...Besides format, the books share a " look...

...He died in 1972 from cancer, a disease Mailer has always associated with aborted desire (a genuine biography would examine that reaction...

...Mailer is equally capable of starting a riot whenever he chooses...

...From such comments, a picture emerges of an extremely controlling person who is himself a bit out of control...

...Following graduation in 1943, Mailer went into the Army...

...Mailer's career has run in phases...

...Her husband, Barney, was no match for her, and one does not have to be a Freudian to see in the compulsive gambling that consumed his later life a mastur-batory release...

...We suspected then, now we know, that Mailer was talking about himself...

...Manso was so eager to pull this pie out of the oven, he hasn't even bothered to include a complete list of the writings...

...Since these are necessarily diminished in an oral biography, Mailer ultimately, if unintentionally, belittles its subject...

...But we all come from somewhere, and Norman Mailer, obviously, does not come from ancient Egypt...

...An aura of violence surrounds him (along with a hint of masochism...

...The interview technique was perfect for the life and death of a debutante-decadent, since everything anyone wanted to learn about her was right there on the surface...

...In perhaps his most unjustly criticized book, The Prisoner of Sex, Mailer, writing brilliantly of D.H...

...and a brash, often overweening confidence that the world could actually be conquered by anyone with the ambition to take it on...

...Most of Mailer is crowded with the public figure...

...College roommates remember "a little boy from Brooklyn...

...Instead, desire developed in the womb: The Jewish Mother was the pivot of this will to genius...

...Fanny Schneider Mailer dominates Manso's volume...

...Add to these his contempt for authority and the potential existed for a disaster...

...Now I'd be afraid to run into him...

...After the War, working at white-hot speed, he produced The Naked and the Dead, the best-seller that assured his never having to look back again...

...This is an instance where art cannot hope to compete with life...

...He even looked forward to combat for the chapters it would yield...

...an unbounded exuberance in a freedom Jews had not known for 2,000 years...

...Alfred Kazin comments: "He's the prisoner of Jewish history...

...Nor is there any denying that he possesses a truly remarkable personality, the stuff of literary legend...

...He had three strikes against him before he put his uniform on: He was Jewish, he was sheltered and unathletic, still a momma's boy, and he was Harvard-educated...

...It was like he was on another plane, somewhere else...

...Former wives are said to have groused about having to visit his family every Friday night...

...Maybe he wouldn't hurt me, but that that should even cross one's mind...

...With The Executioner's Songm\919, he produced his best work in a decade, possibly his finest to date, achieving a stylistic transformation that may equal in importance the earlier breakthrough of Advertisements for Myself...

...editors interviewed by Manso consistently praised his lack of temperament...

...Loads of photographs are sprinkled throughout...

...It launched the Norman Mailer everyone knows, the one who is forever forcing himself to live up to his willed identity...

...in Manso's case, over 200 people were taped, some for as long as 10 hours, producing almost 20,000 transcript pages of material...

...When his father objected to his messy room, she replied: "Leave him alone...

...It was like he wasn't with us...

...I'm not quaking in fear...

...The Army was a knife that severed the person he was from his vocation...

...Audacious greenhorns scarcely beyond Yiddish dared to believe they could write the Great American Novel, Play or Symphony...

...Indeed, it is hard to escape the thought that Mailer is an account of the 20th-century American Jew's eruption from parochialism to a position of cultural eminence...

...understand it when I see him break against that restraint, only there is also a positive side to being Jewish, which he hasn't begun to acknowledge.' Norman Podhoretz concurs: "I know he wants to see himself as the existential hero without ties to the past...

...Farrell's milieu...

...There, apparently, many of his obsessions with courage and masculinity were formed...

...It goes without saying that most of Mailer's several wives were not good enough for him—untrustworthy or cold or simply meshugge...

...If her son failed to get an "A" in third-grade reading, the reason was anti-Semitism, and if today he has not received the Nobel Prize for Literature, she has an explanation for that, too: " I think he might've hurt somebody's feelings, and that went against him...

...Cousins describe his Bar Mitzvah, when he offended the congregation with a speech on Spinoza...

...A Jew from Brooklyn, thechildofimmigrants, couldreadily grasp JamesT...

...Based solely on the evidence presented in the interviews, a jury might well convict Mailer of being scarcely more than a beery and unpredictable rogue...

...Both are oral-history biographies, spliced together from hundreds of snippets of interviews the "authors" conducted with their subjects' friends, relatives and acquaintances...

...It is much less effective in the case of Mailer—not merely because, as a writer with a pronounced philosophical bent, he has made ideas central to his concerns, but also, and quite simply, becausehe is still very much alive...

...If Norman asked me to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge," says George Plimpton, "I have the awful feeling I might actually think about it...

...As a perpetual celebrity, he has moved among numerous worlds—politics, Hollywood, sports, high society, the arts...

...Lawrence, says: "Hewasamomma'sboy, spoiled rotten...

...Hitlers develop out of such balance derived from imbalance, and great generals and great novelists (for what is a novelist but a general who sends his troops across fields of paper...

...Diana Trilling, James Baldwin and Joe Flaherty note the element of overcompensation for his Jewish background in his public persona...

...Bequeathed by his mother an assurance more valuable than any preppy's trust fund, Mailer traveled the light years from Brooklyn to Harvard, where, as a freshman, he decided he would be a writer...

...What saved Mailer was his new self-definition: Everything that happened to him was refracted through his writer's eye as material for a book...

...Literary critics rebuke him for ignoring his heritage...

...What redeems the life is the work, the books that swallow contemporary America whole as no others have done...

...They have brief bios of the contributors at the end, together with elaborate family trees of Mailer and Edie Sedgwick, respectively...

...Almost everyone Manso talked to seems to have something to say about it...

...I just feel it would be a very unpleasant experience...

...He's going to be a great man...

...Her presence is so thermonuclear that she reduces the savagery of Philip Roth's and Bruce Jay Friedman's fictional Jewish mothers to the colorless ash at ground zero...

...There is no lack of individuals eager to have their say about him...

...At the same time, he was self-consciously devouring experience, fodder for his typewriter, shunning the murderous nuances of New England gentility for the dirt-un-der-the-fingernails brusquerie of Boston's Irish...

...Mailer is capable of charming anyone he meets, and of inspiring a loyalty so intense that it sometimes tests the bounds of good sense...

...Somewhat surprisingly, the theme that emerges most strongly is Mailer's Jewishness...

...On a more serious note, it is rather disconcerting to learn how many people besides his mother considered him a "victim" after he nearly murdered Adele...

...The fathers of Mailer's generation, legions of tailors, salesmen and accountants, burdened down by the ferocious pressures of immigrant survival, were unlikely inspirations for these Napoleonic sons...

...The notorious boozing, brawling and bloody shenanigans fill page after page, and one critic, James Atlas, is literally scared of him because of a New York Times profile he wrote that displeased Mailer...