NORMAN MAILER IS DEAD. And we are all the poorer for it. He brawled. He made brash statements -- sometimes laughably so. He championed causes both worthy and foolish. He lived hard, drank hard, and loved hard. He left behind broken marriages and children, and finally mellowed in his twilight years to a kind of literary elder statesman.If you are a writer, you cannot ignore Mailer. He is some sort of essential template. The man lurched through life -- intellect and ego fighting one another. He turned a phrase that could strip paint. If you read The Naked and the Dead or The Executioner's Song, you simply cannot deny the power of his gift -- and the sometimes astonishing way he wielded it.
Mailer was a writer and he lived. He pronounced, declaimed, lectured, hectored, forgave, accused, and remembered. He moved thinking along, sparked discourse and disgust and outrage. Who among us would not like to have that said about them when they're gone? Who dared more to make sense of the great struggle of this life?
I have a fear that stalks me sometimes at night. I fear that the age when a literary life, the age where thinking and thought and discourse was popular -- I fear that this has eluded us, finally. The days where Kurt Vonnegut or Mailer might appear as a guest on a talk show belong to a different time. A time when rigor and thought engaged people across the sphere. Whether your cultural touchstone was high, or low or somewhere in between, lions like Mailer demanded your attention. They demanded to be heard, considered, dealt with.
What we have now is the pale sheen of celebrity. Causism. Activism of a type, yes. But it's all so much product, isn't it? I fear we're slipping past the point where we can have any conversation, because we all retreat to sources that tell us what we want to hear. No one takes us by the head, points us in a direction and commands -- shames us to look.
We are losing our provacateurs. And I fear for what comes next.
I encourage you to read the full obituary of Mailer in the New York Times, by Charles McGrath. (No relation, and while we're at it, that photo above was taken by Tyler Hicks.) Then, when you're done, go out and say something bold and stupid and real to someone. Speak a truth that you know and that no one will tell.
Norman Mailer, the combative, controversial and often outspoken novelist who loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation, died today in Manhattan. He was 84.
Mr. Mailer burst on the scene in 1948 with “The Naked and the Dead,” a partly autobiographical novel about World War II, and for the next six decades he was rarely far from the center stage. He published more than 30 books, including novels, biographies and works of nonfiction, and twice won the Pulitzer Prize: for “The Armies of the Night” (1968), which also won the National Book Award, and “The Executioner’s Song” (1979).
He also wrote, directed, and acted in several low-budget movies, helped found The Village Voice and for many years was a regular guest on television talk shows, where he could reliably be counted on to make oracular pronouncements and deliver provocative opinions, sometimes coherently and sometimes not.
It's a little early, but tonight, tonight I'll raise a whiskey to you, sir. Thanks for Executioner's Song and Harlot's Ghost and The Naked and the Dead. Thanks for it all.
“It’s such an odd notion, particularly in this technological society, of whether your life is justified by being a novelist. And the nice thing about getting older is that I no longer worry about that. I’ve come to the simple recognition that would have saved me much woe 30 or 40 or 50 years ago — that one’s eventual reputation has very little to do with one’s talent. History determines it, not the order of your words.”The title of this post comes from one of my favorite Mailer quotes; one that I think sums up his attitude -- and the measure of the loss of him, quite well:
Shaking his head, he added: “In two years I will have been a published novelist for 60 years. That’s not true for very many of us.” And he recalled something he had said at the National Book Award ceremony in 2005, when he was given a lifetime achievement award: that he felt like an old coachmaker who looks with horror at the turn of the 20th century, watching automobiles roar by with their fumes.
“I think the novel is on the way out,” he said. “I also believe, because it’s natural to take one’s own occupation more seriously than others, that the world may be the less for that.”
"With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance."
Rest in Peace.
2 comments:
You are correct, the age of intellectual engagement, in North America anyway, is over. It wouldn't do to have a writer on a chat show these days because so few people read. This is not conjecture, it is demonstated, in a frightening way, by book sales. Today, through any of a number of distribution systems, people, rather more passively, watch television.
Right on. Absolutely.
Norman Mailer still has one of the best quotes about George W. Bush that I have ever read:
"He has spent a lifetime trying to act manly in the company of manly men.". (something like that)
This 'decline-of-the-great-public-intellectual' tragectory which you describe is exactly the trajectory Mailer was referring to when he described America as 'drifting' into 'corporation land'. The two things
are related.
Literature as a catalytic force in our culture and society was usurped by popular music some time in the sixties. But as a reflection of where we are at today you may notice that even the TV station(s) mandated and dedicated to representing the designed images of this contemporary popular music are now themselves little more than purveyors of tawdry, pathetic, salacious gossip about celebrities coupled with so-called 'reality shows'. This makes up the bulk of their programming. And the celebrities themselves all get younger and more boring all the time. Hence the massive popularity of 'The Hills' and the Britney feeding frenzy. And I don't know what its going to become but its only going to get worse.
The 'thoughtful life' is still there of course for anyone willing to make that choice and work at it (and given the depth and richness of our collective, GLOBAL storehouse of knowledge, culture and library - much of it now digitized and available on line - perhaps such opportunities abound more than ever), but you're right Denis, it exists on more of an autonomous, individualized level. Big Ideas died with The Bomb and The Fall of the Berlin Wall (18 years ago yesterday). We live in the post-modern age and have been for a while. The future will be all about money and television and growing global inequality and environmental dystopia and the efforts of our respective police and security forces to try and control all of this. I used to think that only the Internet could save us now, but this would seem to reflect your premise that we only look to 'people who tell us what we want to hear. I certainly do, for the most part.
The challenge for television writers is to try and find ways of reflecting more of a tragic vision in their work. And the best television shows in this so-called 'Golden Age', in my view - The Wire, the Sopranos, even Mad Men (5 episodes in, and really enjoying it) and others, are all very well written - do precisely this. Unfortunately they - television writers - are in a bind since this is precisely the kind of thing that, for the most part, their 'corporate paymasters' and most of their audience do not want to see. They want redemptive endings. But there is no redemption. We are doomed. The great Greek tragedians understood this and they were writing thousands of years ago. Norman Mailer understood this and had the imagination and the courage to say it. Didn't I read once where David Chase said that he couldn't watch most television since most television existed primarily as propaganda for the corporate state'. Something like that. I would say that he is pretty much spot on there since it is the 'corporate state' that provides the financing for the majority of television in the first place. Consume. Don't worry be happy. And even though you're just a waitress in New York City your apartment - not to mention your clothes, your hair and your body - still look pretty fabulous to me. What does Draper say about advertising in Mad Men - 'its about selling happiness'. But its not just advertising, its the shows themselves. Everybody knows this. I'm not saying anything new here.
Norman Mailer was a deeply flawed person - the guys stabbed his wife and wrote a poem about it - but I always admired his ambition and the challenging nature of his discourse. His nonfiction was always exceptional, provocative and original. 'Executioner's Song' - however derivative of Capote - is still an amazing book. And he could be very funny. Even his so-called 'low fiction' like 'Tough Guys Don't Dance' (which I learned today he wrote in two months!) was a riot. The movie is a riot. I haven't read either 'Armies of the Night' or 'The Naked and the Dead' but I am going to now.
Sure he had a big ego, but he could be as hard on himself as on anything, or anyone else.
He was, at his death, exactly what he aspired to be: An American Giant.
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