In Warren's Words

Thoughts on the Death of Norman Mailer

The day I was drafted in January 1951 during the Korean War, I was bussed up to Fort Devens in Massachusetts from downtown Manhattan. Somewhat disoriented by the process and having said goodbye to my teary-eyed parents in their Brooklyn apartment, I brought along a copy of  The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer to accompany me on the journey.

Reading novels has always been my primary choice of reading matter, especially on long trips, and I guess it seemed appropriate to read a book that might prepare me for the grit and hazards to be expected in combat. To a young man whose only ambition was to write novels, the Mailer debut four years earlier was the prime example of instant literary success that we wannabe aspirants burned to achieve.

It is ironic that in his later years, Mailer declared that the novel, the very mode of literary delivery that had made him instantly famous, was expiring. From his perspective, this contention has some currency. Novelists of today are no longer celebrated and sought after as they had been in the era before television, the computer and the Internet. Notwithstanding Oprah’s attempt to publicize and glorify some contemporary novelists and the worldwide spate of hyped-up prize events, the gloss of author notoriety is short with only a modest flicker of staying power.

In Mailer’s day, novelists were towering figures, genuine celebrities. They were canonized in the mass media and a major force in a world where novels were considered highly valued, and reading was the life’s blood of one’s cultural zeitgeist and a necessary element in the never-ending search for stories that inspire awareness, meaning, insight and, perhaps, wisdom.

In Mailer’s day, novelists were towering figures, genuine celebrities.

In my opinion, the novel still demands respect, and there are battalions of budding writers who are determined to stake out careers as novelists despite the diminishing odds of financial security and finding a loyal and committed readership. There will always be a niche audience for good, meaningful, serious, and engaging novels. The hunger for stories is as much a part of our DNA as the genes that determine the color of our eyes, and the novel is essentially a long story, a chronicle of imaginary lives lived that engages our curiosity and holds our interest. “What happens next” is the heart and soul of all imaginative writing and the essential impulse of all readers.

Nevertheless, there are ominous signs on the horizon. The competition for attention is fierce, complicated by the explosion of technology, which has spawned an infinite number of content choices. Time and human concentration are finite, and setting aside the hours to read a novel must compete with informational and entertainment offerings of staggering variety.

The novel reading public may be shrinking, although, when one counts all the various genres that include mysteries, fantasy, science fiction, romance, graphic novels and subdivisions of each, that may be an exaggeration. I will leave all that to the bean counters. What I am discussing here is the novel. True novel readers and writers know what I mean, although I refuse to define it and suffer the accusations of snobbery, especially since I hate the designation literary novel, which I have never heard adequately defined.

I do not believe, as Mailer had contended, that the novel is expiring. What is expiring is the novelist as celebrity. Mailer may have been the last of the breed.

Often outrageous, sometimes eloquent, frequently clownish, Mailer found a way to keep his name alive and attract readers and maintain an image of literary celebrity.

In the year of the Mailer 1947 debut, I was a copy boy at the New York Daily News, earning $14 a week and aflame with literary ambition. There he was on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, the baby faced curly haired nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, making it as a big time novelist with his first novel. I must confess I did not rush out to buy the book, which would have taken far too much out of my paycheck. Perhaps it was jealousy, although even now, I would never admit to such a base emotion.

I was dead certain I knew what had inspired him to reach that pinnacle of recognition. In that era, wannabe novelists lived in thrall to the celebrated writers of the first half of the twentieth century. To boys of my generation, Earnest Hemingway was the great God of the contemporary literary firmament with Fitzgerald and  Faulkner not far behind and a host of others trailing in their wake. While we teethed on Hemingway, we did not flinch from  Steinbeck,  Dos Passos,  Dreiser,  Sinclair Lewis,  John O’Hara and other American writers, and we drew added inspiration from the immortal Russian, French, and English novelists who had created the underpinnings of our literary education. 

But Hemingway was the gold standard for we wannabes. His tight prose, polished to shining perfection, his devotion to the simple declarative sentence, the pounding narrative drive of his novels and short stories, his dissection of manhood and how one must act when confronting death, danger, and disappointment without sentimentality and self-pity were the touchstones of what it meant to be a writer and tell what was true, absolutely unconditionally achingly true.

This is not to say that his writing was exclusively for males. I have met numerous women who celebrate his work with equal enthusiasm. After all, great writers are universal and above the politically correct dividing lines of race, gender and nationality. Admittedly, I am a captive of my time and gender, but literary inspiration, I believe, is neutral and objective for a real writer to whom writing works of the imagination is a mysterious and obsessive calling.

In his private and public life, Hemingway was the exemplar of the macho lifestyle. He drank too much and womanized, self-advertised, bragged and boasted, created a heroic fantasy of himself and insisted attention must be paid to his well-publicized antics. He had been praised and coddled as a great literary figure and believed that he needed to add yet another dimension to assure his longevity. In the end, of course, the body and mind revolted, and he blew away the one thing that created his gift, his mind.

In Mailer’s case, I would argue that while his work, in my opinion, never came up to Hemingway’s gold standard, he tried to emulate Hemingway’s outrageous and overindulgent personal life turning his violence against others, like stabbing one of his wives. Hemingway’s violence was, in the end, directed against himself.

I hope this doesn’t sound like a critique of Mailer’s work. I disdain those who pass judgment of an author’s work without reading it, or enough of it, to form an honest opinion. Although I have read all of Hemingway, I have not read much of Mailer, although The Naked and the Dead is vaguely remembered because I read it at a crucial moment of my life. The point is to suggest that Mailer’s role model, whom I believe he acknowledged, was Earnest Hemingway. This is something I can relate to and fully understand.

Today there are many who dismiss Hemingway as a perpetual adolescent with problems of gender identity, who are put off by his themes, although his style is cited, even by naysayers, with grudging admiration. Mailer’s style from the little I’ve read seems more like a giant avalanche of words roaring haphazardly down a high mountain, while Hemingway’s flows purposefully like a clear swiftly cascading, pebble-polishing stream.

Yet Mailer’s volcanic personal life does suggest a comparison to Hemingway as a kind of literary roustabout, an image that Mailer cultivated with canny zeal. He managed to stay in the public eye for more than half a century and that is no small feat. He was often outrageous, sometimes eloquent, frequently clownish, but he found a way to keep his name alive and attract readers and maintain an image of literary celebrity.

For an author, name recognition, however earned, is an important commodity. Who knows how his public persona amply publicized inspired others to embark on the literary life? That alone is worth the candle and helps keep alive the myth that attention must be paid to those who have the temerity and fortitude to pursue the writing of novels.

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