CULTURE Looking for Mailer
Books: Alasdair McKillop
There’s something exhilarating about discovering a brilliant, challenging writer, even if he happens to be dead. It doesn’t happen often, so maximum enjoyment should be wrung from it. With a new writer you can be enthused by the early potential while waiting in anticipation of future work. With a complete body of work, you are presented with a landscape and decisions have to be made about the direction you want to move in.
The writer in this case is Norman Mailer: novelist, journalist, essayist, controversialist and first-rate narcissist. Without being able to call on any great expertise about the greatest American writers of the 20th century, I imagine it would be difficult to exclude him. The essentials are fairly easy to sketch. Mailer was born in New Jersey, progressed to Harvard in precocious fashion to study engineering and served in the Pacific during the second world war. He published his first and arguably most successful novel in 1948, and had an uneven relationship with the form during a career which spanned almost 60 years until his death in 2007.
He produced articles and essays for leading publications, became a TV personality of sorts, won two Pulitzer prizes – one for a work of non-fiction, one for a sort-of-novel based on real events – and ran for selection as the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City. He was married six times. He stabbed his second wife and spent some time in an institution for the deed. An inch or two of a difference and he might have spent significantly longer somewhere significantly worse. As a writer, he declared early in his career that he was preoccupied with creating ‘a revolution in the consciousness of his time’. This must have seemed audacious at the time. In our age of shrunken human agency and surrender to impersonal, transnational forces as the drivers of change, it’s almost heroic.
To date my acquaintance with his work comprises ‘Mind of an Outlaw’, a collection of articles spanning seven decades, and ‘The Executioner’s Song’. It’s shallow but something to be going on with. In addition, reviews of his books and articles about his life are readily available online, as are some of the interviews he gave during his life. There are two long interviews in the Paris Review, one with Steven Marcus in the Winter-Spring 1964 edition and another with Andrew O’Hagan in Summer 2007. O’Hagan has written about Mailer more than once and briefly comments on his relationship with him in a recent edition of the Scottish Review of Books. An intrepid organiser of events at some Scottish book festival would try to get O’Hagan and Hugh McIlvanney together on this subject.
Fragments of television interviews and documentary clips are also available online. Some of these are clearly from another time and place. It is almost impossible, for example, to imagine something like his head-to-head with William F Buckley Jr being broadcast today. The intellectual depth would not be easily accommodated on contemporary current affairs programmes. Mailer seemingly possessed above-average fluency and an uncommon ability to present the whirlpool of his thoughts. His delivery was quick, clipped and sharp, until later years when it became gruffer. All this added to the impression that he was holding hostage some superior insight into challenging times.
Trying to capture even a little of the essence of Mailer’s writing is a challenge without resorting to direct quotation. His writing exudes masculinity, not just because of the subject matter but somehow in style as well. The only other writer I would describe in similar terms is Ernest Hemingway, despite the stylistic differences. I can well understand that some might find Mailer’s writing unapproachable and tiring after a while. Some hate it and they’re probably worth hearing from. Mailer seemed to be infatuated with Hemingway, in all the degrees and connotations of that word. An article in The Atlantic, regretting the downgrading of Mailer’s love of sport in his official biography written by J Michael Lennon, suggested that one of the motivations behind his essays on bullfighting might have been an attempt to catch the attention of Hemingway.
With Mailer, the reader is never really sure where he is heading or where the next turn might be. Mailer is the locomotive – all moving parts, heat and endeavour – and the reader is the caboose. Any given subject he was liable to treat like a ball of putty: he would stretch it and roll it around and sometimes ask too much of it. But this was all symptomatic of what seemed to be his inclination to be an interrogator – of himself and the world around him, often in the same article.
It was a novel – ‘The Naked and the Dead’ – that brought him fame. He seemed to have a more romantic conception of the novel than of any other art form and it was by the novel that he hoped his legacy would be defined – a hope that seems to run against the grain of the impulses that led him into television, magazines and newspapers. He became a commentator and public figure of sorts, despite the impression that chat show celebrity is not necessarily compatible with the cultivation of an image of a writer in pursuit of the Great American Novel.
And yet. ‘The Executioner’s Song’, the book for which he won his second Pulitzer prize, is a remarkable work because Mailer manages to completely suppress the stylistic tendencies that defined him and still produce something of outstanding quality. It tells the story of Gary Gilmore in great detail. A big book that runs to over 1,000 pages, it bulges with what must be 50,000 simple sentences. There are flourishes and reminders that Mailer is lurking underneath the text, but these are well-contained within the parameters of the book. It also manages to maintain a sense of undeserved tension given that most people reading it must know that it ends with the execution of Gilmore by firing squad in Utah state prison for the murder of two men on consecutive days in 1976. Famously, Gilmore campaigned to have the sentence carried out and became the first person to be executed in the United States in 10 years. By grim coincidence, the governor of Utah has just signed a law making the firing squad the compulsory method of execution if the state is unable to buy the drugs it needs to carry out a lethal injection.
Mailer’s writing was like an extension of him, like a clenched fist. He gives a sense that language and writing are to be deployed in the service of some great campaign, more so than with any other writer who comes quickly to mind. I’ve noted that Mailer was an opinionated television performer. The only time I’ve yet come across him being unable to answer a question was when he was asked how a writer trains. The answer – in writing – seemed obvious but Mailer, uncharacteristically, said he didn’t know. He spent a long life training for battles with himself and the society around him, and the prospect of getting to know more about the outcomes is a pleasing one.
By Alasdair McKillop | June 2015
