Bookplanet: Norman Mailer

Fallen god of small things
By Daniel Swift

If the world is destroyed in the course of this century, I think it will be because of religious wars,” says Norman Mailer. We are sitting in his light-filled apartment in Brooklyn, New York, looking out over the river and the Manhattan skyline. I am here to discuss his literary career and his new book, The Big Empty, but Mailer keeps slipping back into grand speculation about the fate of humanity. He goes on to sketch “the absolute waste of huge spiritual imbroglios between different nations... “ He breaks off, and with a cough and an apology his words collapse into what he calls his “Richard Nixon voice”, all gravel and phlegm. “I wanted to be a good man, but I failed,” he mimics.

That Nixon voice is pure Mailer. In American politics, Nixon’s name is still the catalyst for a quick laugh - particularly if you’re a lifelong liberal. And at the age of 83, Norman Mailer is possibly the grandest liberal journalist alive in the US today. That evening he was due to receive the Legion d’honneur for his contribution to literature and his links to France - he lived and studied in Paris after the second world war - and the gleeful coverage of the award by the French press has stressed Mailer’s repeated mockery of George W. Bush. “He’s a delight to write about,” Mailer tells me. “That’s the best thing I’ll say about him.”

Since the 1948 publication of his novel The Naked and the Dead, Mailer has been one of the most influential figures in American literature. Born in 1923 in New Jersey, he hasn’t paused since, with six marriages, nine children, two Pulitzers and a National Book Award to his name. In more than 30 books, as well as essays, screenplays, profiles and poetry, his has been a voice of extravagant, occasionally malevolent and always passionate energy. His 1998 selected works, The Time Of Our Time, looms at nearly 1,300 pages. At their best his fiction and non-fiction are hauntingly beautiful, incandescent with hot truth, and reliably counter-establishment, as in The Armies of the Night, his 1968 account of anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, or The Executioner’s Song, his novel about the death penalty (1979). So his new book, The Big Empty, arrives heavy with the weight of expectation.

Mailer’s career spans the half century during which the US rejected its isolationism to trumpet its domestic and foreign policies through the world. His literary contemporaries are Truman Capote, Joan Didion and the journalist-novelists who made up the 1960s movement known as New Journalism. But where Capote and Didion are read today for the literary thrill of their works, Mailer himself has always been politically engaged. In 1969, he ran - unsuccessfully - as mayor of New York City.

He has covered the presidential conventions six times, and in print has pronounced on all the cultural and political shifts of his time: feminism, Vietnam, the space programme, Hollywood, the CIA, the cold war and the roaring nineties. For historians of America’s fashioning and faults in the second half of the 20th century, Mailer’s works are a first-hand archive.

But Mailer is almost better known for being himself than for his books. His name prompts alarmed anecdotes. Didn’t he stab his wife with a pen-knife? (He did.) Didn’t he head-butt Gore Vidal? (That too.) He is name-checked in songs by John Lennon, Simon & Garfunkel, and the Manic Street Preachers. Mailer, who has spent much of his life writing about the great American mythic icons - Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, Lee Harvey Oswald - has himself been fossilised in the cultural imagination.

The Nixon joke is also, of course, self-conscious; it is part of Mailer’s repertoire. I’d heard it only the day before, when Mailer and his son, the playwright John Buffalo Mailer, appeared on a radio chat show to discuss The Big Empty. The volume is largely a series of conversations between father and son in which they despair at the America they see around them. “Confidence in the authority to deal with large questions has never been more eroded,” writes Mailer in his introduction. “It is as if we are coming to the end of the Enlightenment, for humankind is no longer seen as necessarily capable of creating a world of reason.”

The Big Empty is a book of grand pronouncements. “The more powerful we become, the more ignorance we reveal of the nature of other cultures,” says Mailer, “because knowledge is now too easy to acquire.” Commenting on Senator John McCain, he observes: “The moment a politician says to himself, ‘America needs it,’ he can shift the direction of the wind within the halls of his own brain.” The opportunistic cheapness of political knowledge and the intellectual thrift of patriotism have long been Mailer’s hallmark themes. He has the voice and poise of a prophet, which matches his puritan political imagination.

“Each generation must be alert to the dangers that threaten democracy as directly as each human who wishes to be good must learn how to survive in the labyrinths of envy, greed, and the confusions of moral judgment,” writes Mailer. It’s hard to doubt ideas so forcefully articulated.

But The Big Empty is loose on the details. “The corporations are stifling our lives,” he claims, but he refuses to develop how, why, whether this is new or whether it matters. The conversations between Mailer father and son are well-meaning, sincere and articulate but their ideas tend to the throwaway, gnomic wisdom of the fortune cookie. “Women are closer to the universe,” he declares. “Closer to creation than we are. So, they have different instincts.” We’ve never read Mailer for his sensitive appraisal of the gender divide, but even this is disappointing. He argues that oil led the US into Iraq, and “Without a full wrestler’s grip on control of the oil of the Middle East, America’s problems will continue to expand.” But this both overstates America’s dependence on specifically Middle Eastern oil and underestimates the problems that the US currently faces, many of which - healthcare, low levels of education, an ageing workforce with limited pensions - have little to do with oil. Here and throughout, the book’s refusal to apply its insights leaves it gasping for breath. In short, it’s in need of a Richard Nixon impersonation.

For the Nixon impersonation is not really a political comment, it’s a character study. The intricacies of characters, and the close reading of how individuals act in specific contexts, are the centrepiece of Mailer’s literary achievement.

Again and again in his works, the lure of the grand pronouncement is held in check only by a close eye for detail. His 1979 true-life novel, The Executioner’s Song, is desert-wide in its ambitions: a 1,000-page attempt to get inside the head of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, and through him touch on the American myths of violence and redemption in the west. But its strength and pleasure lie in its dogged steps through the everyday.

The book forces us to understand the full cycle of crime and punishment, of incarceration and desire, that ended with the firing squad that Gilmore requested. But to do that Mailer shows us how Gilmore talked, his faulty 1966 Ford Mustang, and the pickup truck he so badly wanted; the petty thefts, of water-skis and beer, and how he liked running so much that the first thing he bought himself once out of jail was a pair of trainers. Here lie the little beginnings of his disappointment with the world, and the world’s disappointment with him.

Mailer’s portraits of people in his non-fiction are also wonders of observation and verbal quirk. In his famous essay “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Mailer writes of John F. Kennedy that he “had the deep orange-brown suntan of a ski instructor, and when he smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white and clearly visible at a distance of fifty yards.” In The Fight, his account of the epic 1974 boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, he noted boxing promoter Don King’s “magical eyes”, and for Ali himself, “Wonder was as close as he ever came to doubt.” Profiling Kissinger in 1972, Mailer gives us “a sensuous man with a small mouth and plump lips, a Hapsburg mouth” speaking “that German voice, deep, fortified with an accent that promised emoluments, savories, even meat gravies of culture at the tip of one’s tongue - what European wealth!”

Across the enormous body of his writings this generous attention to the details of individual characters is a remarkable constant. When I ask him about technology, one of his obsessions for many years, he brings discussion back to the personal. “It gives people the illusion that they are more important and larger than they really are.” He pauses, and plays out his point. “You can notice it in the stance of really very attractive young girls when they are on the cellphone,” he notes, and - holding out his own right hand and twisting stiffly in his chair like a worshipping Fifth Avenue mannequin - continues: “The way they hold it, it is as if they had an amulet.” He laughs with a twinkle, and straightens. The old man’s eye for a young woman’s form translates to a novelist’s love for the details of character.

Everything begins with the characters. “A novel should be organic, not plotted,” he says to me. “If your characters are real enough, they will lead you through your story. They will create the story for you.” This awareness of the creative and disruptive centrality of character to the making and reporting of ideas provided Mailer with his greatest journalistic innovation: to put the reporter - himself - at the centre of the story he was telling. “Let’s stop pretending that an Indian chieftain and a delicate lesbian are coming from the same point of objectivity,” he insists. “A so-called fact is a piece of information that’s received around a corner, and the corner is precisely the journalist.”

So Mailer celebrated his own presence. As he says today, “My feeling always was in journalism that the account you get is worth nothing unless you know something about the person who’s writing it.” But he is understating his own role. In the raucous opening pages of The Armies of the Night, when a drunken “Mailer” berates the press conference assembled to hear why he was ing against the Vietnam war, or in the sad and proud scene in The Fight where the amateur boxer “Norman” goes for a run with Ali and can’t really keep up with the champion, Mailer himself was the story. The pleasures of his writing, theen the pleasure of Mailer himself.

Norman Mailer is self-consciously at the centre of his own literary world. Reading him is an intimate experience; as if you were there in his imagination. The play of his language, the thrill of ideas crawling through syntax on to the page are the reward for time spent in Mailer’s company and the raucous fluidity of his mind. But his dizzying self-reference comes at a cost, and that cost may perhaps be given a name: the big empty. His new book is the consequence of a lifetime orman Mailer. It has all the egocentric bravura that we have come to expect of him, but without the tight grasp of the tiny that made him important in the first place. It is the shell of his own identity. As I leave Mailer’s apartment and walk into the harsh winter sunlight, a TV crew is busy filming the outside of the building.

THE BIG EMPTY: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America
Norman Mailer and John Buffalo Mailer
THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG
Norman Mailer
THE FIGHT
Norman Mailer
THE TIME OF OUR TIME
Norman Mailer