Posted on 11/10/2007 9:47:43 PM PST by saganite
NEW YORK - Norman Mailer, the pugnacious prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Executioner's Song," has died at the age of 84.
Mailer died Saturday of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, J. Michael Lennon, the author's literary executor and biographer, said.
"He was a great American voice," said a tearful Joan Didion, author of "The Year of Magical Thinking" and other works, struggling for words upon learning of Mailer's death.
From his classic debut novel to such masterworks of literary journalism as "The Armies of the Night," the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality.
Some of his works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old "enfant terrible."
Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as bellicose, street-wise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.
He had nine children, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New York City on a "left conservative" platform, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women's liberation.
Mailer had numerous minor run-ins with the law, usually for being drunk or disorderly, but was also jailed briefly during the Pentagon protests in the late 1960s. While directing the film "Maidstone" in 1968, the self-described "old club fighter" punched actor Lane Smith, breaking his jaw, and bit actor Rip Torn's ear in another scuffle.
But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, "In the end, it is the writing that will count."
Mailer, he wrote, possessed "a superb natural style that does not crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and characters with real blood streams and nervous systems, a great openness and eagerness for experience, a sense of urgency about the need to test thought and character in the crucible of a difficult era."
Norman Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, N.J. His father, Isaac, a South Africa-born accountant, and mother, Fanny, who ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, soon moved to Brooklyn.
Mailer earned an engineering science degree in 1943 from Harvard University, where he decided to become a writer, and was soon drafted into the Army. Sent to the Philippines as an infantryman, he saw enough of soldiering to provide a basis for his first book, "The Naked and the Dead," published in 1948 while he was a postgraduate student in Paris.
The book became a best seller, and Mailer returned home to find himself anointed the new Hemingway, Dos Passos and Melville.
Buoyed by instant literary celebrity, Mailer embraced the early 1950s counterculture, defining "hip" in his essay "The White Negro," allying himself with Beat Generation gurus Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and writing social and political commentary for the Village Voice, which he helped found. He also churned out two more novels, "Barbary Shore" (1951) and "Deer Park" (1955), neither embraced kindly by readers or critics.
Mailer turned reporter to cover the 1960 Democratic Party convention for Esquire and later claimed, with typical hubris, that his piece, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," had made the difference in John F. Kennedy's razor-thin margin of victory over Republican Richard M. Nixon.
While Life magazine called his next book, "An American Dream" (1965), "the big comeback of Norman Mailer," the author-journalist was chronicling major events of the day: an anti-war march on Washington, the 1968 political conventions, the Ali-Patterson fight, an Apollo moon shot.
His 1968 account of the peace march on the Pentagon, "The Armies of the Night," won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and was listed in the top 20 on a 1999 New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.
When he covered the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago for Harper's magazine, Mailer was torn between keeping to a tight deadline or joining the anti-war protests that led to a violent police crackdown. "I was in a moral quandary. I didn't know if I was being scared or being professional," he later testified in the trial of the so-called Chicago Seven.
Jorge Herralde, editor of Mailer's Spanish publishers, Anagrama, said Saturday that Mailer was a titan of literature who, like Kafka, was never awarded a Nobel prize. "He surely had too excessive a profile for that award," Herralde said.
Mailer's personal life was as turbulent as the times in which he lived. In 1960, at a party at his Brooklyn Heights home, he stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a knife. She declined to press charges, and it was not until 1997 that she revealed in her memoir how close she had come to dying.
His other wives were: Beatrice Silverman, Lady Jeanne Campbell, Beverly Bentley, Carol Stevens and Norris Church. He had five daughters, three sons and a stepson.
"He had such a compendious vision of what it meant to be alive. He had serious opinions on everything there was to have an opinion on, and everything he had was so original," friend William Kennedy, author of "Ironweed."
Mailer's suspicion of technology — "insidious, debilitating and depressing" — was so deep that while most writers used typewriters or computers, he wrote with a pen, some 1,500 words a day. In a 1971 magazine piece about the new women's liberation movement, Mailer equated the dehumanizing effect of technology with what he said was feminists' need to abolish the mystery, romance and "blind, goat-kicking lust" from sex.
Time magazine said the broadside should "earn him a permanent niche in their pantheon of male chauvinist pigs."
"He could do anything he wanted to do — the movie business, writing, theater, politics," author Gay Talese said Saturday. "He never thought the boundaries were restricted. He'd go anywhere and try anything. He was a courageous person, a great person, fully confident, with a great sense of optimism."
In "Advertisements for Myself" (1959), Mailer promised to write the greatest novel yet, but later conceded he had not. Among other notable works: "Cannibals and Christians" (1966); "Why Are We in Vietnam?" (1967); and "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" (1968).
"The Executioner's Song" (1979), an epic account of the life and death of petty criminal Gary Gilmore, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. "Ancient Evenings" (1983), a novel of ancient Egypt that took 11 years to complete, was critically panned.
"Tough Guys Don't Dance" (1984) became a 1987 film. Some critics found "Harlot's Ghost" (1991), a novel about the CIA, surprisingly sympathetic, considering Mailer's left-leaning past. In 1997, he came out with "The Gospel According to the Son," a novel told from Jesus Christ's point of view. The following year, he marked his 75th birthday with the epic-length anthology "The Time of Our Time."
Mailer lived for decades in a Brooklyn Heights town house with a view of New York harbor and lower Manhattan from the rooftop "crow's nest," and kept a home in Provincetown, Mass., where he spent increasing time in his later years.
Despite heart surgery, hearing loss and arthritic knees that forced him to walk with canes, Mailer retained his enthusiasm for writing and in early 2007 released "The Castle in the Forest," a novel about Hitler's early years. "On God: An Uncommon Conversation," came out in the fall.
In 2005, Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards, where he deplored what he called the "withering" of general interest in the "serious novel." Authors like himself, he said often, had become anachronisms as people focused on television and young writers aspired to screenwriting or journalism.
Lennon said arrangements for a private service and burial for family members and close friends would be announced next week, and a memorial service would be held in New York in the coming months.
Heh. That’s pretty much what I’ve read. I was quite impressed with “The Naked and the Dead”. I can see why you might call it cynical, with its obsession with “the shoddy motive” and the downbeat point of view, but I didn’t really see it that way. I do think it’s ironic that the movie based on the book reversed almost every incident and outcome to make it into an upbeat story. There is cause for cynicism!
I’ve always had a soft spot for “Of a Fire on the Moon”. This was serialized in Life magazine, or at least portions of it. Mailer by no means identified himself with the Apollo ethos, but he was impressed by it and gave it due respect. Plus, he assumed that it was going to prevail, and struggled to accommodate himself to it in his writing. Little did he realize that it could or would fade as rapidly as it arose, and this book remains as a record of that ascendant mood.
I was always quite impressed that he faithfully recorded the exact “first words” uttered by Aldrin and Armstrong after their landing. These were on a vinyl record insert in National Geographic, but I couldn’t make all of them out, and Mailer was virtually the only printed source for many years. Even NASA materials edit them down. The first words? ... “OK, engine stop. ACA out of detente. Modes control both auto. Descent engine command override off. Engine arm off. 413 is in.” Then came, “We copy you down, Eagle”.
Fair enough Saganite, keep in mind that everyone’s life is a mix of things to be proud of and things to be ashamed of, Mailer is no exception.
Why focus on a the man’s bad things right after he is passed on? Would you want people doing the same when you pass on?
IMO, Conservatives have more class then to do that sort of thing.
It’s a respect that decent people afford the recently departed, the Dems on the other hand turned the Wellstone funeral/memorial into a huge pep rally for electing Democrats in MN.
Mailer went off to world war II to print fashionable failure template of WWI on his war experiences. He produced “the naked and the dead”.
His work was akin to liberal reporters going to Iraq to impose the liberal viet nam template on their experiences rather than let their experiences speak for themselves.
I was impressed with “armies of the night” when I was in my 20’s. 30 years later the book looks like gibberish.
RIP. I will remember him fondly for that quote. The two books of his I read, The Naked and the Dead and Armies of the Night I found forgettable. The weakness of his writing is that he was so much of his time. And unnecessarily vulgar, too. But he worked hard, didn't he? I liked that he boxed. His moral vision was a little blurry, but he stuck up for some truths at great expense—okay, while punting on others, but I will pray for him.
Requiescat in pace.
I will not miss him, nor his liberally-inspired ‘hero-worship” by the NY “elites” ...
Perhaps now he will find out what the unnamed rich man discovered in the Lazarous story.
It’s been a very long time since I even tried to read any Mailer. The last one I finished was his about the moon launch. It had enough behind the scenes information about the NASA culture and launch event to finish, but his method of making it all secondary to HIM, (ie-Aquarius) was pathetic. Not Armstrong, not NASA, not the moon itself, the only story he really was telling was Mailer. And wasn’t the world lucky NASA was created to provide him a mirror where he could look at himself.
“Ancient Evenings” I tried to read. I made it through about 60 pages before casting it aside. Gibberish from a man who seemed like he was being paid by the word and intended to cash in.
A pre-People magazine “celebrity”. If he hadn’t been such a celebrity he might actually have lived up to the role he imagined for himself. The books might then have been about the stories, instead of just fuel for his ego. I can’t imagine time will be kind to his work or reputation.
There goes his biggest fan
.
He did a real smear job on Marilyn Monroe. He admitted to printing every cockamamie rumor about her to sell books.
No loss.
“One was called SCUM, the Society for Cutting up Men, where they believed all men were incomplete or aborted females.”
I like blasts from the past like this. You know, this ought to be in every history textbook just to show that it’s not just white males that can be so unremittingly bigoted. And as far as Mailer is concerned, I really hate when people who possess such talent are usually morally lost and so their influence is that much a greater negative to society.
I wonder why no mention of this?
Pity.
I made the mistake of picking up “Ancient Evenings” for my first Mailer book. I couldn’t get very far. As someone said above, it was too vulgar. I never picked up another Mailer.
Yup,Jack Abbott sure had a lot to give the world of literature.Of course he had trouble taking “no” for an answer...particularly from waiters.
I had the same reaction and threw the thing in the garbage.
Semper Fi,
True enough.But Mailer,unlike me (and,I assume,unlike you as well) played a pivotal role in securing the release from prison of a guy (Jack Abbott) who had already committed *one* murder and who,just a few weeks after his release,went on to murder again...this time a 22 year old kid who had the temerity to tell Abbott that he couldn't use the bathroom.
True GSC, he also said a bunch of stuff in 2003 or so about the Iraq War being “The last hurrah of the white male”.
I never cared for the man’s writings, nor his opinions, and when Abbot murdered that waiter, Mailer basically said “Oops, I guess I was wrong” that was about all he had to say about it.
That was 25 years ago, and I can still remember that “news” story even though I was quite young at the time, Mailer’s culpability was the first step in my own rejection of Liberalism. Even though I was maybe 10 or 11 at the time, I thought that was one of the most unfair and unjust things that I ever heard.
The more Mailer talked, the more I understood Liberalism.
For me, Mailer and his books and opinions WERE Liberalism encapsulated. He embodied “Them” for me while he thought he was advancing Liberal causes, instead he was planting seeds of liberalism’s repudiation.
The Pulitzer is as meaningless as the Nobel Peace Prize.
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