Obituaries

last updated 8 January 2015

Norman Mailer, who dominated the U.S. literary scene for more than a half-century with his grandiose ambition and the sheer force of his personality, was haunted all his life by one dream that eluded him—writing the Great American Novel. The author of more than 30 books and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Mailer wholeheartedly subscribed to the notion of the writer as an existential hero, and was famous for his feuds with such other outspoken literary celebrities as Gore Vidal and Germaine Greer. A journalist, filmmaker, brawler, and relentless self-aggrandizer who once compared himself to Tolstoy, he was married six times, fathered eight children, stabbed one of his wives during a booze-fueled party, and once ran for mayor of New York City on a platform succinctly expressed as “No more bulls---.” Mailer was born Norman Kingsley Mailer in suburban Long Branch, N.J., said The New York Times. Isaac, his father, was a mild-mannered accountant who had emigrated from South Africa. Mailer’s doting mother, Fanny, came from Long Branch, where her father was “the town’s unofficial rabbi.” After the Wall Street crash of 1929, the family moved to a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, where the studious Mailer attended public schools. He won a scholarship to Harvard, where he enrolled as a freshman when he was just 16. He soon gave up his earlier goal of becoming an aeronautical engineer in favor of being a writer, approaching the task with what would become characteristic bravado. He set himself a daily quota of 3,000 words, “on the theory that this was the way to get bad writing out of his system.” By 1941, he was “sufficiently purged” to win a national short-story contest, and immediately after graduating, in 1943, embarked on a (never published) 1,000-page novel set in a mental hospital. He also immersed himself in the novels of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and James T. Farrell, whose gritty working-class epic Studs Lonigan he particularly admired. In the spring of 1944, after marrying Bea Silverman, he was drafted and sent to the Philippines. Mailer’s duties as a rifleman in a reconnaissance unit in the waning months of the war proved “relatively uneventful,” said the London Times. Yet he was able to draw on memories of life in a platoon and on “a three-day patrol behind enemy lines” to begin work on The Naked and the Dead upon his discharge. The novel’s unflattering depictions of officers and graphic portrayal of the infantry’s fear and boredom catapulted Mailer “into the front ranks of American writers” when it was published, in 1948. He was only 25 when his new life as a celebrity began. “Part of me thought it was possibly the greatest book written since War and Peace,” Mailer later said of The Naked and the Dead. “On the other hand, I also thought, I don’t know anything about writing. I am an imposter.” Critics shared Mailer’s mixed appraisal of his work, said the San Francisco Chronicle. With F. Scott Fitzgerald dead and Hemingway’s best writing behind him, many saw Mailer as the best choice “to inherit the mantle of great American author.” Yet his next two novels, Barbary Shore and The Deer Park, were commercial and critical flops, and for much of the 1950s, he was frequently drunk or stoned—or both. But in 1955, he and two friends founded The Village Voice, and while writing a column for the legendary alternative weekly, Mailer seemed to find his own voice—bold, poetic, metaphysical, blended with his own version of hipsterism. In 1959, he published a brutally candid, if immodest, collection of essays titled Advertisements for Myself. It included the essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” which notoriously argued that rape and murder had a certain logic and beauty. The next year, Mailer seriously wounded his second wife, Adele Morales, with a penknife during an all-night party, after he announced his intention to run for mayor of New York. She declined to press charges. Mailer’s star “never shone brighter” than in 1968, when he published The Armies of the Night, said the London Independent. That work of nonfiction, about the 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon, won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. It also put Mailer in the vanguard of the emerging form known as “new journalism,” in which novelistic techniques are used to describe real people and events. He mastered the genre again in 1969, with Miami and the Siege of Chicago, about the presidential conventions. But while his nonfiction work was now paying the bills, Mailer never abandoned his need to speak the “larger truths” he felt fiction—his fiction—alone could capture. Yet Mailer would become better known for his antics than his writing, said the Los Angeles Times. At the height of the women’s movement, feminists reviled him as the ultimate male chauvinist, after he characterized women as “low, sloppy beasts” made to bear children. In 1981, Mailer sponsored the release of Jack Henry Abbott, a convicted murderer with literary aspirations; six weeks after his release, Abbott stabbed a waiter to death. Mailer once head-butted fellow novelist Gore Vidal after Vidal compared Mailer’s violent streak to the murderous rage of mass killer Charles Manson. “Words failed Norman Mailer yet again,” Vidal remarked after the assault. Mailer’s later works included The Executioner’s Song, about convicted murderer Gary Gilmore; Oswald’s Tale: An Ameri- can Mystery, about Lee Harvey Oswald, and Harlot’s Ghost, a 1,310-page novel about the Central Intelligence Agency. In the 1990s, his health began to fail, and Mailer curtailed his legendary drinking, although his productivity—and ambition— remained undiminished. His last book, The Castle in the Forest (2007), is the story of Hitler’s childhood, narrated by the devil—a character to whom Mailer said he related. “We are devils when all is said and done,” he remarked. At the 2005 National Book Award ceremony, Mailer was given a lifetime achievement award. “I’ve come to the simple recognition that could have saved me much woe 30 or 40 or 50 years ago,” Mailer said during the occasion: “One’s eventual reputation has very little to do with one’s talent. History determines it, not the order of your words.”