Norman Mailer 1923 - 2007
Posted by Jeremy at 11/11/2007 4:09 PM and is filed under uncategorized 
Granted that Norman Mailer was an unusual public figure, the sodden verbiage at his death reminds one of the turgid inaccuracy of his worst prose. When the Times online finally fixes on a headline with the embedded adjective 'towering', one has read enough. But one still ventures into an apparently independent assessment in a West Coast online journal, only to find wire service rehash.
When I reread Armies of the Night, a decade or so after its publication, I was disappointed by its intellectual shallowness and irrelevance. If it is still cited, I assume that results from nostalgia or cultural inertia. Today, it may revivify some of the action. But always, Norman Mailer obtrudes, with his peculiarly stultifying breast-beating. His 'intellectualism' still strikes me as pseudo and superficial. Existentialism was faddist philosophy at the time. And while Mailer may have read his share of the going texts, he seems to have been one of those readers who can hear the words clearly enough, but never really follows the idea below or beyond the verbal scurf. What gave him the illusion of punditry was his dense and contradictory prose. But anyone who had a clear ear could recognize the force: Norman Mailer vs. Norman Mailer.
His single dazzling success, The Executioner's Song, was the perfect synthesis of novel by committee and writer as editorial autocrat - although Mailer managed to blemish the tract with a final, presumably fictional fillip - brazening, once again, his tortured arrogance. And while Mailer himself viewed his foreshortened role as a fault, we should mark the whole of the performance as a cultural virtue: Mailer was the perfect midwife for something as culturally determined as Pollock or Op and Pop, and of the same context.
But it was that same tortured and angst-driven persona - so much the public and self-conscious sufferer that one is forced to question its sincerity while simultaneously admiring the hammered brazen texture of the product - that brings us to the final cultural value of Mailer himself. He defined that East Coast, New York angst-driven street intellectual voice with a precision that eluded even Allen Ginsberg. Allen ran away to embrace himself. But Mailer stood his ground and duked it out with Mailer, knowing the absurdity of his posture, but stepping beyond risk itself, putting on the motley of his time to fight the naked and greased Mailer who should have been for all time. Instead of writing the great novel, he fixes the great language, the archetype of mid-20th century American.
Like Pollock and Op and Pop, he is finally rooted in the 50's, as much as he seems to have spilled over into the 60's. The 60's text has yet to be written, oddly enough. Henry Miller may have been more of the 60's novelist than Norman Mailer. Miller finally didn't give a damn about 'time', and his masterpiece was written into the mid-60's. But Mailer was all about time. Journalism was inevitable - if what Mailer did was journalism. But the claims are ridiculous. Historically, the novel began with journalism. And, as Miller noted, Emerson was already predicting that the novel would end in 'journalism' in some sense.
As a culture, we still have no clue what to do with Mailer's gift. The lapidary prose learned in schools and grafted into the structured novel, which is equally 'teachable', are travesties both of what Mailer intended and what he achieved. He has given us a voice, a ground. He had to cover the range of topics and living characters indigenous in his journalism: no other field could display the effectiveness of that peculiar, self-defying pugnacious linguistic ligature, that verbal net, large and elastic, with which he ensnared such a popular range of the third quarter of the 20th century.
- Jeremy
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Rereading and sitting with this almost sets me dreaming. It sounds harsher than I intented, but I wouldn't change it. But I read a blog piece by Dick Cavett in the Times about a late night show he did with Mailer, Vidal and Flanner and I start to remember the 60's in terms of that weird 50's energy that not only spilled out of the 50's but also really defined the 60's.
If everyone pretends that everything is hunky-dwinky long enough, pretty soon you get this crazed angst energy, because the world is never basically OK. Maybe we're back there now. It's not just everyone saying it's AOK, but having some oppressive force and then coming out of it saying things are alright -- like the Depression and WW II for the 50's. Now it's the 'war on terror' and no real philosophy. At the moment, that real anxiety vibration is still a very low tone from where I sit -- maybe it's more forceful for the kids. But, in any case, it's got to come out at some point.
Cavett's thing reminds us of how television once had a legitimate intellectual dimension. As much as I whack Mailer for his posturing about philosophy when he really didn't have a clue, the fact that he postured says something telling about then and now.
And Mailer DID give us a voice for that crazy angst energy that came out of the 50's and propelled and defined so much of what happened in the 60's.
It almost makes me want to write something larger.
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