Mailer Discovers The Novel—And The New Journalism JOSEPH SCOTCHIE

jscotchie@antonmediagroup.com

“There is a good Norman Mailer and a bad Norman Mailer. The good Norman Mailer has won out.”

So claimed Jason Epstein, the man’s editor, sometime in the early 1990s.

Well, it better had won out, or else the novelist was certain to spend his days in the slammer. For decades, Mailer’s life and times---and brawls, one of them nearly fatal----filled the gossip pages as much as his published work.

The youngest of two children born 100 years ago in 1923 to Isaac and Fanny Mailer, the young Norman was an ace student who rose from Crown Heights to matriculation at Harvard at age 16.

At Cambridge, Mailer intended to study engineering. The late 1930s was also a Golden Age of the American novel. Mailer eagerly read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Wolfe, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and Farrell. He wrote his own stories and novels. When Pearl Harbor hit, the teen-aged Mailer vowed to write the great American novel of the war. He soon married and was shipped out to first, Texas and then the Philippines. He told his young bride to save his letters home. The Naked and The Dead, a novel about a colorful cross-section of Americans fighting in the Pacific Theatre was published in 1948. It sat on top of the best seller lists for months.

Mailer was only 25. He would spend the next 60 years trying to top his first novel. Along the way was more fiction, essays, biographies, films, the co-founding of The Village Voice , books about political conventions, the Apollo moon shot, Marilyn Monroe, prize fights and even a run for mayor of New York in 1969.

Whatever else Mailer achieved or didn’t achieve, the man was prolific. Every morning, he put on work jeans, had breakfast with his mother in her neighboring Brooklyn Heights apartment and proceeded to a daily word count that generally hit 1,500---and often, much more.

Mailer’s second novel, Barbary Shore (1951) was panned by the critics. His comeback novel, The Deer Park (1955), a send-up of Hollywood’s decadent side, was more successful. Satisfied that he could write fiction, Mailer turned to journalism. A born polemicist, the man caught a break when Clay Felker, co-founder himself of New York magazine, assigned Mailer to cover the 1960 Democratic Party convention. Mailer was vain enough to believe that his Esquire essay on John F. Kennedy, “Superman Comes To Supermarket,” helped to win the presidency for the man. Still, he had found another niche.

Mailer covered more conventions, two of which, Miami and The Siege of Chicago (1968) and St. George And The Godfather (1972) were book-length reports. If Mailer succeeded in these books, it had to do with his self-styled standing as a “Left Conservative.” He held great hopes for Kennedy-style liberalism. Mailer was no nihilist. He admired Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, but also the traditionalism of Robert Taft and Edmund Burke. This allowed Mailer to sympathize with such reform Democrats as Robert F. Kennedy. He also understood the desire of heartland Republicans seeking to restore a lost “Jesus land” now being obliterated by social revolution.

Mailer continued to write fiction. He also seemed liberated by journalistic ventures. From 1963 to 1975, came a creative streak that the novelist Tom Robbins claimed had no parallel in modern American culture, save the same creative outburst turned in by Bob Dylan over the same period. Mailer’s output included The Presidential Papers, Cannibals and Christians, An America Dream, Why Are We in Vietnam? The Armies of The Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of A Fire On The Moon, Marilyn, Existential Errands, The Faith of Graffiti and The Fight.

I’ll plunk out a few books from that list. Cannibals And Christians is his best non-fiction collection: An angry and fast-paced volume denouncing the deadening effects of technology and mass society on a nation’s soul. (However much he could not escape them, Mailer disliked television and modern architecture, while coming out early against the Vietnam War.)

The Armies Of The Night, Mailer’s dramatic account of the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon was the book that marked his rise as an avatar of the New Journalism, where the author injects himself into the action. Miami, however, is a tighter and more prophetic book: The Vietnam War came and went; however, the civilizational crisis dramatized by the 1968 conventions still plagues the nation.

When Mailer was working on The Naked And The Dead, he showed a draft to Charlie Devlin, another writer also living in Brooklyn Heights. Devlin liked the draft, but scolded Mailer on his inability to construct metaphors, which Devlin claimed marked the true measure of any writer. The young Mailer got the message. And he went to work. Does anyone still remember the riots at the Chicago convention? You will if you read the book.

The police attacked with tear gas, with Mace, and with clubs, they attacked like a chain saw cutting into wood, the teeth of the saw the edge of their clubs, they attacked like a scythe through grass, lines of twenty and thirty policemen striking out in an arc, their clubs beating, demonstrators fleeing. Seen from overhead…it was like a wind blowing dust, or the edge of waves riding foam on the shore.

The Fight is about the 1974 heavyweight title bout between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali is the best single book I know about Sweet Science. In addition to Left Conservatism, Mailer also embraced existentialism. To the end, the man could never fully define the term. It did have everything to do with the novelist being cut from his Brooklyn roots following the success of his first novel. Mailer was condemned to be a celebrity author always promising that Great American Novel. He revered Ernest Hemingway, Ali and most erroneously Fidel Castro as existential heroes, men who stood apart from the crowd and were willing to meet---and overcome--this world on their terms.

Hemingway took his life. Castro turned Cuba into a totalitarian hellhole. That left Ali. Mailer died in 2007 at age 84. Ali lived until 2016. As long as Ali was on this side of the river, Mailer saw hope for this world.

With The Fight, Mailer’s third-person forays into the swirling controversies of the 1960s and ‘70s ended. It was back to the fiction grind. Next week, we’ll look at the man’s ruminations on God, Christianity, and its implications for America.