I just learned that Norman Mailer died, which is sad, sort of, although there’s something about Mailer that militates against too much sadness. He’s more of an Irish wake kind of guy, too much of a lovable asshole, for too long, for me to feel as though he died too soon. I think he died just about right.
No one seems to think he was much of a novelist in the last few decades of his life (I’ve never read any of his fiction, so I can’t really judge, though I think he was over-rated as a nonfictionista), but he wrote some very good political stuff in the last few years, mostly on the Bush administration, and he continued to be a good interviewee to pretty much the very last, which is all impressive evidence of an mind that never stopped struggling to be authentic. Consider this exchange, for instance, from a 2007 interview with the Paris Review, in which he takes partial responsibility for Norman Podhoretz’s notorious switch from the left to the right (which is a story, by the way, I’ll be telling in my book).
The Paris Review’s latest issue devotes its Art of Fiction interview to Norman Mailer. Two-thirds of the way in, Andrew O’Hagan, the interviewer (and Scottish writer), hears that Mailer still calls himself “a left conservative,” then asks him about Norman Podhoretz and neoconservatism: “It has become such a thing in America. I’m interested in your relationship with people like Norman Podhoretz, people who went on a journey that took them very far from the place where they started.” Mailer’s answer:
Well, I can understand it. And in fact, I feel partly responsible for Podhoretz. He and I were close friends at one point. He wrote a book called “Making It,” and the book got trashed terribly. He was unpopular on the left. I never quite understood why he was so unpopular. But they trashed his book like you wouldn’t believe. It was truly ugly. And I hadn’t read it yet—or I’d read the first half of it, which was pretty good. And I witnessed this trashing and said to him, I’m going to write a review. So I read all of the book. And the book betrays itself. The second half is god-awful. In the first half, his thesis is that the dirty little secret among the left, among artists and intellectuals, is that they really want to make it, and they want to make it big. And they conceal that from themselves and from others. But this is really the motivating factor that is never talked about. You can talk about sex but you can’t talk about ambition and desire for success. So he does all that. And then he starts to give portraits of all the people on the left who have made it-pious, sweet little portraits, with people who we know goddamn well are not that at all. And I was horrified at the way he could betray his own book. There was a failure in nerve there-in other words, if you want to be strong theoretically, you better be strong in detail as well. That’s what makes a good general. Strong at both ends. And he wasn’t.
So I ended up mocking his book, too. And I was pretty cruel. Looking back on it, I was probably too cruel. He went into a depression and stayed there for about a year? just didn’t do much. Worked on his magazine and listened to music and hardly saw anyone. And by the end of that time, he’d moved over to the right. Podhoretz is nothing if not active and enterprising. So the moment he moved over to the right, it wasn’t enough to be on the right, he had to be far to the right. And so I feel that I’m responsible, to whatever degree, for helping to have shoved him over there. Which is too bad, because he now is paying for his sins on the right by having supported the war in Iraq and he has to live with it—has to live with all the idiocies of the neoconservatives.
My affection for Mailer was cemented after going to a screening, last year, of the D.A. Pennebaker/Chris Hegedus documentary "Town Bloody Hall," which I’d never heard of until I saw an announcement for the screening and which is, unfortunately, very hard to find (Netflix doesn’t have it). It’s basically a slightly edited broadcast of a 1979 debate in which Mailer faced off against not only a panel of feminists (most notable Germaine Greer) who thought his recent anti-feminist tract in Harper’s was obnoxious (which, of course, it was), but a hostile crowd and a series of brilliant feminist questioners from the audience that included Gloria Steinem, Susan Sontag, and Cynthia Ozick.
It wasn’t that Mailer won the argument — I don’t think he was even trying to win the argument, or even necessarily believed much of what he’d written — so much as that he won everyone over with his charisma, and that he made the night fascinating. He was funny, witty, commanding, flirtatious, combative, and even humble at a few choice moments (most spectacularly when Cynthia Ozick called him out for something he’d once written about how a great writer really need to put his balls out there on the page; Ozick wondered "what color ink do you dip your balls in when you put them on the page?"). He was there to have a good argument, and that was more important than being nice or polite or accomodating, and the result, in the film, is the best public debate I’ve ever seen, one in which really really smart people actually use each other to think through difficult issues out loud. It’s also a total spectacle, mostly because of Mailer (though Jiill Johnston essentially having foreplay on stage helped).
Mailer was sexist, but he was also willing to set the stage for the women with whom he was sparring to be amazing in their deconstruction of him. He made himself a sacrificial lamb for the sake of his fellow speakers and for the sake of the audience. And that’s actually quite a rare thing for a public figure to do.
Anyway, I don’t know how he’ll be remembered, but that’s how I’ll remember him.
