Alpha Mailer

Author Norman Mailer in 1971. (Associated Press)

“Larger than life” is a lazy way of describing anyone, especially a titan of literature and an avowed foe of cliché. But in reading Norman Mailer, who died of renal failure on Nov. 10 at the age of 84, you can sense a writer always trying to expand the limits of experience. The weight of his sentences, the size of his books, the magnitude of his ego — all suggest a man whose intellect could barely be contained.

Like most of the greats, Mailer seemed to arrive a fully formed genius. His debut novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), is a powerful exemplar of war literature, examining the psychological dimension of soldiering like few books before it. Based on Mailer’s own experiences in the Pacific theatre in the Second World War, the novel earned him an international reputation.

Though greatly anticipated, his next two novels, Barbary Shore (1951) and Deer Park (1955), bombed. Mailer soon found non-fiction a more powerful outlet. He began writing political columns for The Village Voice (which he co-founded), and in 1959 he published Advertisements for Myself, a book of sharp, startlingly frank essays about the counterculture. Its most famous piece is “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” which documented an emerging white youth that identified strongly with black culture.

Vietnam brought Mailer even more to the fore. First, there was his withering critique, Why Are We in Vietnam?; then, he took part in the 1967 March on Washington, which formed the basis for perhaps his single greatest work, The Armies of the Night (1968). “History as a novel, the novel as history” is how he billed this dense, nervy, self-reflexive, slangy, digressive, angry look at the U.S. government’s clashes with the antiwar movement.

This was the New Journalism; alongside Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote, Mailer put subjectivity in the service of truth. Two years after the release of Capote’s pioneering “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood, however, Mailer was doing things Capote wouldn’t even dare. Not only did Mailer write himself into The Armies of the Night, into the messy crush of the march, but he did it in the third person (“Mailer was a Left Conservative…”, “Mailer was a snob of the worst sort…”, “Mailer thought he was about to be interrogated…”).

Bold? Yes. Groundbreaking? No doubt. Self-aggrandizing? Absolutely. The book earned him the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and remains an essential title in any discussion of America in the ’60s.

Mailer brought a new rigour to fiction, and a sense of play to non-fiction. His prose is muscular, philosophical, restless — if you read it aloud, it can leave you literally breathless, like this passage from Advertisements for Myself:

There is a time when an ambitious type should fight his way through the jungle and up the mountain — it is the time when experience is rich and you can learn more than you ever will again, but if it goes on too long, you wither from the high tension, you drop away drunk or a burned-out brain, you learn what it is to lose seriously in love, or how it goes when your best friend and you are no longer speaking; it is inevitable that a bad fall comes to the strong-willed man who is not strong enough to reach his own peak.

(Breathe!)

Then there are his themes. Mailer never bothered with the trivial stuff, choosing to grapple only with the Big Topics — God, sex, politics, war. His final novel, The Castle in the Forest, told the childhood story of Adolf Hitler. Martin Amis once noted, “If every writer has a private mental thesaurus, a slim volume of key word-clusters, then Mailer’s would read as follows: ego, bitch, blood, obscenity, psyche, hip, soul, tears, risk, dare, danger, death. Especially death.” Mailer dedicated an entire 1,000-page book to it: The Executioner’s Song (1979), his novelistic study of Gary Gilmore, a petty thief turned multiple murderer who, in the midst of his appeals process, demanded to be executed (and was). A triumph of research and narrative voice, it won Mailer his second Pulitzer.

In print and in person, he demonstrated few of the qualities we associate with writers, traits like humility, forbearance, graciousness. He was vindictive toward critics; in 1958, he told writer William Styron: “I will invite you to a fight in which I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.” Some of his public outbursts now seem droll: he once sat on Truman Capote and, twice, he waylaid Gore Vidal (a head-butt on the set of The Dick Cavett Show in ’71, a punch several years later). Other stories speak to a more troubling fury. In 1960, he stabbed (and nearly killed) his second wife, Adele, with a penknife (a shocking outburst that she recounted in her 1997 memoir The Last Party). That incident, as well as Mailer’s 1971 polemic The Prisoner of Sex, garnered him lifelong scorn from feminists.

Mailer would eventually address his legendary rage, without exactly apologizing for it. Less prolific and prominent in his final years, Mailer was irascible to the end, fulminating about the current U.S. administration (“Masters of the Advertising Sciences (Mendacity and Public Manipulation)”), but also America’s enemies (“all-out terrorism is a new species of human disease”). My favourite recent Mailerism is this quote about George W. Bush: “You just can’t trust a man who’s never been embarrassed by himself.” Mailer possessed a rare combination of literary gusto, social conscience and shameless bravado. The publishing industry is unlikely to see such a ferocious figure again.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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