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I hate to say it, but the United States is a better place without Mr. Mailer. He was a communist and a liar. He said things about America that were baseless and without merit. He was incredibly wealthy, but like Barbra Streisand, he sat on his pallets of money but at the same time wanted the U.S. Government to foot the bill for the poor and the dying. He was a drunkard and a lout. He was also a media darling because like all liberals, he was a toadie for the socialist agenda in America. I would NEVER say a bad word about his obvious talent. He was a wonderful writer and an insightful director as well. But socially he was a mental midget. JD
If Norman Mailer, who died Saturday in a New York hospital of acute renal failure, wasn’t larger than life, he sure gave it a run for its money.
Perhaps the quintessential American author of our era, Mailer, 84, married six times, fathered eight children, stabbed one of his wives during a booze-fueled party, once ran for mayor of New York City, and carried on feuds with other writers with such bloodlust that the whiny dustup between Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell seems like a lovers’ tiff.
Scrappy, outspoken and built more like a dock worker than a pen-pusher, Mailer had speech mannerisms that were mesmerizing even if you didn’t always grasp what he was talking about. His tone of voice, which evolved from his birth in New Jersey on Jan. 31, 1923, and childhood in Brooklyn, took on a mid-Atlantic accent – American with posh British undertones. For any other writer, it would have been an odd vocal mix, but it seemed to fit Mailer, reflecting at once his pugnacious, rough-and-tumble public persona, his seemingly insatiable intellectual and cultural curiosity, and his erudition. Oh, and perhaps a bit of self-aggrandizement to boot.
Mailer came from average, middle-class stock. His father, Isaac, was an accountant born in South Africa, while his mother, Fanny, owned a housekeeping and nursing employment agency.
After attending public schools in New York, he went to Harvard to study aeronautical engineering. By the time he earned his degree in 1943, he’d already made up his mind to be a writer, but had to put that idea on hold when he was drafted into the Army and shipped to the Philippines.
In many ways, World War II was the best thing that could have happened to the scrappy Brooklynite: He was getting material firsthand that would later form the basis of his first novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” written after the war while he was studying in Paris on the GI Bill and published in 1948. The book was a huge critical and commercial success, which may seem like a good thing for a beginning writer, but then the question is always put: What’s next? It’s not always easy to come up with the answer, and Mailer flailed around at first, with his second book, “Barbary Shore,” considered pretty much a bust.
For much of his life, Mailer pursued the concept of the great American novel. Or, perhaps it’s better to say it pursued him. The notion seemed to haunt him. Seemingly with each new book, no matter how well reviewed it was, the “big book” remained his version of Gatsby’s green light, something always beyond his reach on a far shore.
With F. Scott Fitzgerald having left the world after collapsing to the floor of a Hollywood bungalow and much of Ernest Hemingway’s best writing behind him, Mailer seemed the logical choice to inherit the mantel of great American author from the Romulus and Remus of 20th century American letters.
Fitzgerald, a “victim” of early success himself, had once said there were no second acts in American lives, and that often seemed to hold true for Mailer. For every great book he published in his six decades as a writer, there were the head-scratchers and groaners, like his highly self-touted novel “Ancient Evenings,” perhaps the biggest failure of his career. But there were also the works that not only further defined Mailer’s singular gift, but also defined us as a nation and a culture.
Mailer gravitated toward the nascent beat culture of the ’50s, writing commentary pieces for the Village Voice, cozying up to writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and offering the essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections of a Young Hipster,” which looked to African American culture as the foundation for the counterculture in general.
San Francisco author Herbert Gold (“Fathers,” “Haiti: Best Nightmare on Earth”) remembers Mailer from those days.
“I knew him during the time of the late ’50s in New York, when he was writing ‘Advertisements for Myself.’ He was very committed to feuding then,” Gold said. “My great adventure with him at a party at George Plimpton’s place. (Mailer was trying to stare him down.) You know, alpha male makes the other person drop his eyes. He fixed me with a stare, and instead of dropping my eyes, I blew him a kiss. He jumped up, said, ‘Let’s fight.’
“We went outside, and I took my glasses off. It was stupid, but I didn’t know what else to do. So I put them in my pocket. But since no one was watching us, and that’s the key, he put his arm around me and said, ‘You’re OK, Gold.’ ”
Mailer had his share of flops in that era, including “Barbary Shore” (1951) and “The Deer Park,” a novel about the film industry’s reaction to political pressure from Washington.
But as the nation began to creak and groan toward the seismic culture shift of the ’60s, Mailer found his real footing. The social and political upheavals fit Mailer’s style and persona. He never seemed to quite “get” Eisenhower America the way he got what was happening in the Summer of Love, the 1967 anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon that became the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Armies of the Night,” and the Republican and Democratic National Conventions of 1968 that became “Miami and the Siege of Chicago.” The novel “Why Are We in Vietnam?” looked not to the White House or the Pentagon for the reason our young men were dying in a foreign country, but, rather, to our own culture for the answer.
These books, and others, had a major impact on American readers, not just because Mailer wrote them, but because he was becoming a master of the kind of stylistically amalgamated writing practiced by others such as Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe, known as the New Journalism. The style was a good fit for a writer who had touted his own greatness in the 1959 book “Advertisements for Myself.” You didn’t have to make a choice between pure fiction and journalism anymore: You could capture a real-life scene and insert yourself directly into it, rather than gazing from the distance of traditional reportage.
Long before an appearance on “Good Morning America” was deemed crucial to a book’s success, Mailer figured out the cult of personality. He was no doubt as much a press representative’s dream as nightmare. No matter what he did, Mailer always called attention to himself. And if the attention was negative, it never seemed to bother him.
The late critic Anatole Broyard once observed of Mailer, “His career seems to be a brawl between his talent and his exhibitionism.” Those words were written in 1967, but looking back on the full span of Mailer’s career today, one might instead suggest his career was a marriage of talent and exhibitionism.
He carried on epic feuds with writers such as Gore Vidal and Erica Jong. He ran for mayor of New York and came in fifth. He directed several films, including the movie version of his 1984 book “Tough Guys Don’t Dance.” Taking a page from the Hemingway chapbook, he loved bullfighting and boxing, whether in an actual ring or weaving around a party where another guest seemingly insulted him. He stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a pen knife, but was never charged. In her own book 10 years ago, Morales revealed that the cut was severe enough to have endangered her life.
Tom Luddy of Berkeley, the executive producer of “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” recalled that Mailer “was very natural and warm toward everybody on the film.”
“Of all the films I’ve produced, it’s the one where all of us stayed friends and stayed in touch,” he said. “That rarely happens.”
American life calmed down a bit during the ’70s, but Mailer had learned how to hold the spotlight. Understanding cultural iconography as well as he did, Mailer didn’t hesitate to write the text for the coffee-table book “Marilyn” in 1973. And when the nation erupted in debate over the reinstatement of the death penalty, Mailer wrote a book about Gary Gilmore, the first person executed in the United States in more than a decade. Gilmore was executed by firing squad in 1977, and “The Executioner’s Song” won Mailer another Pulitzer.
After all his marriages, Mailer finally settled down with sixth wife, Norris Church. Coincidentally, Church’s early paintings often seem to replicate family snapshots, complete with the shadow of the photographer in the frame – much like Mailer’s New Journalism style.
His other wives were Beatrice Silverman, Lady Jeanne Campbell, Beverly Bentley and actress Carol Stevens. He had five daughters, three sons and a stepson.
For years, Mailer divided his time between Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., and Provincetown, Mass., where he had a house on the water on Commercial Street.
Although he rarely drew the intensity of attention he enjoyed in the ’60s and ’70s, Mailer was never out of the public eye for long. He continued to publish, right up to the end of his life. His latest novel, “The Castle in the Forest,” gave Mailer a way of examining Adolf Hitler’s early life to understand the nature of evil. Writing in the Chronicle Book Review in January, Alan Cheuse said the book “comes 10 years after the publication of Mailer’s weakest novel, ‘The Gospel According to the Son,’ and it reads like one of his strongest.”
Two years ago, Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement from the National Book Awards.
While he could be mercurial, argumentative, perhaps even insufferable at times, Mailer enjoyed wide respect and affection among other writers.
Said San Francisco author Leo Litwak (“Nobody’s Baby and Other Stories”): “I think his early book ‘Advertisements for Myself’ was enormously influential. It challenged us, in effect, to move outside the law, to give vent to our instincts and desire, to be more public about what we wanted. It was a further move away from the kind of Henry James writing that still had influence.
“It’s an enormous loss,” he added. “I had mixed feelings about Mailer, but I miss him.”
“He had such a compendious vision of what it meant to be alive,” said friend and fellow author William Kennedy. “He had serious opinions on everything there was to have an opinion on, and everything was so original.”
“He could do anything he wanted to do – the movie business, writing, theater, politics,” said author Gay Talese, husband of publisher Nan Talese. “He never thought the boundaries were restricted. He’d go anywhere and try anything. He was a courageous person.”
In a recent interview with John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, for the Chronicle Book Review, Mailer talked about his early years, when he told the world about that great American novel he would write. He seemed to understand, though, that the time had passed.
“I may have made announcements 50 years ago of the kind of book I was going to write. But I’m not going to stick to those predictions,” he said.
Perhaps, though, he has: As memorable as so many Mailer books will remain, the man himself was perhaps Mailer’s best creation – the great American author.
Chronicle Book Editor Oscar Villalon and Chronicle news services contributed to this report. E-mail David Wiegand at dwiegand@sfchronicle.com.
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