Captain Hornblower
GELERNTER, DAVID
Captain Hornblower Norman Mailer, 1923-2007 BY DAVID GELERNTER The Norman Invasion was the talk of New York in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Norman Podhoretz gave the defi nitive brief...
...He admired manliness and bravery, even among patriotic Americans...
...And Mailer has the saving grace, as he usually did in later years, of not taking himself too seriously and recognizing the pomposity and self-importance that he could laugh at even if he couldn’t shake it...
...yet the narrative moves with the rocketing momentum of an IRT express...
...But it’s fair to point out, nonetheless, that Mailer transformed himself by sheer force of will into one of the best English stylists of the later 20th century and wrote several books that will last...
...and it wasn’t pretty...
...But at his best he was as funny as Philip Roth, as lyrically evocative as John Updike, as thoughtful and profoundly observant as Saul Bellow— and at his very best was better than any of them...
...And once again, where you would expect the wacko-leftist Mailer to be hostile or patronizing, he isn’t...
...Ancient Evenings (1983) was his fi rst great novel, an uncanny evocation of ancient Egypt and a world almost inconceivably foreign...
...But he did write four fi rst-rate books, of which two were masterpieces (and three were generally dismissed...
...But Mailer had his own kind of signifi cance...
...Read the account, toward the beginning, of a near-accident on an icy road...
...The Armies of the Night (1968) is a faintly disgusting account of the most famous, and the largest, antiwar march on the Pentagon, in October 1967, of which Mailer was one of the leaders...
...His Picasso biography (1995) was bad enough, but his retelling of the Gospel story (1997) was so inept it is painful even to think about...
...David Gelernter, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author, most recently, of Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion...
...It has some good passages, but how the New York literary world (in its pre-decadent state...
...In fact, he did many strange things, but the one I have in mind is this: He transformed himself into a superb writer with a memorable, wholly distinctive, voice...
...Its dense, rambling verbal underbrush accidentally evokes the jungle in which the story takes place...
...In sheer imaginative power there are few novels to compare to it in the 20th century, or any century, but few seemed to care...
...But Of a Fire on the Moon (1970) is, by far, the best book written about Apollo 11, an event that should have inspired many good books...
...Mailer promised to write a second installment, but Part One was so widely disliked, it’s no surprise that he never got around to it...
...his career was as poorly edited as his novels...
...Only one of his four fi nest books was recognized as such at the time...
...On fi nding himself a famous author, however, Mailer did a strange thing...
...could have seen the hand of a master in this third-rate pile is anybody’s guess...
...He was a victim of his own premature fame and his lust for celebrity...
...It is brilliant and commanding, sometimes poetic, even majestic...
...It’s true, of course, that Mailer had the disconcerting habit of regularly issuing awful books...
...Harlot’s Ghost is loosely structured, and like many of Mailer’s books, needs pruning as much as a leggy rosebush...
...History will show (if it hasn’t already) that Podhoretz was the more important Norman by far...
...But with all its faults, it will stand among the best American novels of the 20th century...
...His next three masterpieces were generally ignored or dismissed...
...And by the way, there is nothing condescending or nasty in Mailer’s tone when he writes about the American heroes of the moon program...
...It’s an old story: He blew his horn so loudly and often that when he fi nally produced novels worth celebrating, the party was over and everyone had gone home...
...Norman Podhoretz gave the defi nitive brief account of his co-Norman’s character and personality in Ex-Friends...
...Of course, for Mailer to write something great (or even good) was like bench-pressing 300 pounds: He was rarely up to it, or rarely bothered...
...Yet it was a smash hit compared with his greatest work, Harlot’s Ghost (1991), a thousand-page novel about the CIA...
...He had no facility, and like C?zanne, achieved greatness by a ferocious effort that made every sentence electric...
...The Naked and the Dead (1948), which made his reputation, is a loosely written, barely edited account of the Second World War on a South Pacifi c island (where Mailer himself had fought...
...The action is ugly and so (in the light of his book) was the author...
...As a prominent American he did little for America...
...In Harlot’s Ghost, Mailer’s prose reaches maturity at last...
...For Norman Mailer, writing came easily, but not good writing—and that fact underlies his literary career...
...At the end of Harlot’s Ghost the action stops in the middle, with the mystery of Harlot’s death unsolved...
...And now that he is dead, his very best is what counts...
...as a prominent Jew he did little for the Jews...
Vol. 13 • November 2007 • No. 11
