The Norman Mailer Centennial

100 years ago today saw the birth of Norman Mailer (Nachem Malech Mailer, 1923-2007).

I was rash enough to seem dismissive of Mailer in my recent Gore Vidal post, including both authors among a small set of so-called public intellectuals of the television age who failed to impress me. In Mailer’s case, his public image tended to overshadow his literary one, but honestly my main point was more that ALL the writers of the 20th century (and the present one), as a general class, are pretty poor specimens in relation to those of previous ages, such as the figures of the Enlightenment Era or the Victorian Age. It’s a bias I have because I spend much more time reading classics, beside which more recent authors and poets seem but pipsqueaks. (That wasn’t intended as a rib of Mailer’s diminutive physical stature; let’s just call it a happy accident.)

At any rate, a variety of justifications arose to make me realize that Mailer merits better than a cold shoulder here. One is that in 1955 he co-founded the publication to which I proudly contributed 30 articles and reviews between 2000 and 2010, The Village Voice. Another is that the world’s pre-eminent Mailer scholar (and his official biographer and archivist) J. Michael Lennon is my sister-in-law’s cousin. (And boy did I get an earful after that Vidal piece!) And lastly, I finally got around to reading Mailer’s premiere effort The Naked and the Dead (1948), which I both enjoyed immensely and recognize as a great literary achievement.

Like many first novels, you can tell that Mailer threw his entire body and soul into that work, which depicts the fairly futile adventures of an army infantry unit on a Pacific Island during World War Two. Drawn from Mailer’s own experiences as a young man during the war, the book combines extreme realism with modernist touches that remind me somewhat of John Dos Passos, though Hemingway is no doubt the more obvious model. The book is utterly lacking in romanticism or false patriotism, and contains elements, such as crude language, that made it both controversial and influential when it was published. Rampant Anti-Semitism is depicted. The “Greatest Generation” is painted as somewhat less than “Great”. A Mexican character has grown somewhat dated; the Japanese enemy is naturally cast in strongly negative terms. There is also a thinly veiled homosexual subplot. One of the more interesting elements to me was that it has no main character — it tells the stories of a couple of dozen diverse characters. This large-ensemble canvas feels like it must have been influential on movies like The Longest Day and Tora! Tora! Tora!

As it happens The Naked and the Dead was adapted into a rather bowdlerized movie by Raoul Walsh in 1958, one of the very last films to come out of RKO. The cast included Aldo Ray,Raymond Massey, Cliff Robertson,Joey Bishop, Jerry Paris, Max Showalter, and in flashbacks, sexpots Lily St. Cyr and Barbara Nichols. It’s not widely regarded as a classic; it should be remade at some point and matched more closely to the novel.

As I say, I only read this novel recently. The first of Mailer’s writings I ever read were his influential (and now very dated) long-form essay The White Negro (1957) and Advertisements for Myself (1959), the title of which had attracted me. There had been other books in the decade between The Naked and the Dead and these writings, but as always we make our survey 100% subjective.

In 1960, Mailer hit a bottom so low most people would never have recovered from it. At the tail end of a long, drunken, unruly party intended to launch his run for the mayoralty of New York City, in the wee hours of the morning, a blotto Norman Mailer stabbed his wife twice with a knife, very nearly killing her. The wound was quite close to her heart. The wife (the second of six) was uninterested in pressing charges. Mailer was placed in Bellevue for a couple of weeks for psychiatric observation, then was given three years’ probation for the crime of assault. I only know of one incident of violence by an author against his wife (William S. Burroughs and the William Tell incident) that strikes me as worse than this savagery. I’m not quite sure how he ever transcended it, how he was ever able to show his face in public ever again. But he was basically given a pass. It became part of his macho legend, something to dine out on. Whitewashed! One of the few things he has in common with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

By 1964, a psychedelic rock band paid Mailer homage by naming themselves The Fugs, after the substitute for the F word he had used in The Naked and the Dead which had allowed it to be published. Other than Richard Pryor I can think of no other major public figure who did more to mainstream the F word (previously used by, oh, sailors, and criminals) in the society at large.

Mailer’s mostly non-fiction writings of the ’60s made him a darling of the New Left, the counterculture, and the anti-war movement. His books of this period included The Presidential Papers (1963), Cannibals and Christians (1966), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), the Pulitzer Prize winning The Armies of the Night (1968, about a major protest march on the Pentagon), The Idol and the Octopus: Political Writings on the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations (1968), and Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968. 

In 1969, Mailer ran for Mayor of New York City, on a ticket with journalist Jimmy Breslin. The Beatles song “Come Together”, composed and sung by John Lennon, was initially intended to be their campaign song. Mailer and Breslin only garnered 5% of the vote. Like John and Yoko, Mailer also dabbled in experimental film at around this time, directing Wild 90 (1968), Beyond the Law (1968) and Maidstone (1970). Maidstone captured an actual fight between Mailer and Rip Torn, in which Torn hit Mailer with a hammer, and Mailer bit Torn’s ear. In 1971, an inebriated Mailer appeared on The Dick Cavett Show with Gore Vidal, headbutting the latter backstage and berating him on air, apparently for his tepid review of one of his recent books. He was also fighting a major battle with the most prominent feminist leaders of the day at around this time, captured by D.A. Pennebaker in his film Town Bloody Hall and in Mailer’s own book The Prisoner of Sex. Mailer also wrote a couple of books about boxing matches in the ’70s. (Witness photo above).

In 1979 came Mailer’s Capotesque nonfiction novel The Executioners Song, about Gary Gilmore, the first man to receive capital punishment in the U.S. in a decade. The 1982 TV movie version starred Tommy Lee Jones, Eli Wallach,Christine Lahti, and Rosanna Arquette. Jones won an Emmy for his performance.

In 1980, Mailer was instrumental in securing the parole of a convicted murderer named Jack Abbott, and helped him publish his memoir In the Belly of the Beast. Six weeks after getting out of jail, Abbott stabbed someone else to death. Are we beginning to smell a pattern here?

In 1981 Mailer played Stanford White in Milos Forman’s screen adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. By rights, shouldn’t he have played Harry Thaw?

In 1984 he wrote Tough Guys Don’t Dance, a Mickey Spillane type mystery novel, which he himself adapted into a film in 1987, featuring Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. Today it is widely regarded as a camp classic, roughly on par with Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 The Room.

In 1991 Mailer published his 1300 page CIA/ Washington novel Harlot’s Ghost. I was working in a bookstore at the time. I regard lifting boxes full of the damn thing up and down stairs all day as my own personal, unsung, triumph of machismo.

Mailer also wrote biographies of such diverse figures as Marilyn Monroe, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jesus. His last published work The Castle in the Forest (2007) depicts the nonage of Adolf Hitler, as recounted (and affected) by a demon sent to earth for that purpose. Thus Miller’s literary career began and ended with contemplations on World War Two. The Harvard-educated, Brooklyn bred Mailer was only 22 when he went over there. It was liable to make a mark on his psyche.

Ready for another sock in the jaw? David Denby wrote a TERRIFIC centennial appreciation of Mailer for The New Yorker, available here.

Addendum: A new documentary How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer,by Jeff Zimbalist, was released in June, 2024. Learn about it here.