Earlier this year, a neighbour and I went to see Norman Mailer speak at an art-house cinema in downtown Sacramento. Mailer was a few days into his 85th year, and had just published what turned out to be his final novel, The Castle in the Forest, an attempt to recreate Hitler's childhood by casting him as literally the creation of an ambitious devil. In many ways, America's literary enfant terrible had outlived his own fame. When I asked my students at the University of California-Davis - a top-tier campus with, presumably, generally top-tier students - if they knew who he was, none did.
Yet, while both Mailer and many of the cultural ideals he represented might have been a bit long in the tooth, the auditorium was packed. Well over a thousand people, most of them middle-aged or older, jammed the building to hang on Mailer's every word. My sense was many of them had come of age reading Mailer, had been amused and titillated and outraged by his writings, and had come to say goodbye to an icon they suspected might not be around for that much longer. They were right. Mailer died this past Saturday, in New York.
The moderator at the Sacramento event was a middle-aged female author, dressed to the nines, and with an almost distasteful preoccupation with Mailer's views on sex and orgiastic excess. Throughout the event, she seemed to be going out of her way to kindle whatever lustful sparks the asthmatic, double-walking stick-wielding old goat might have had left within him. You could almost feel her willing Mailer to kick in his x-ray vision and give her the old once-over. And why not? After all, Mailer's status as a literary sex-hound, and his improbable durability as some sort of pheromone-magnet well into his ninth decade, provides a sort of voyeuristic Technicolor background to his role in American cultural life for six decades.
After storming to fame as a young man in the late 1940s with his second world war novel The Naked and the Dead, Mailer enjoyed his stature as a "controversial" literary giant. And what made him controversial was at least as much to do with his personal behavior and idiomatic moral code as it was to do with his mastery of American English, his fiction creations that always fell just shy of being the definitive "great American novel" and his series of breathtakingly original literary journalism books. His best journalism, the book Miami and the Siege of Chicago, is an extraordinary look at the two political party conventions held in America in 1968, in a year of utter civil turmoil and violence. I first read that book when I was 16 years old, on holiday with my parents in Mexico. It's one of the few books that I can still remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I read individual passages.
Mailer was married six times, stabbed one of his wives, ingested almost as much liquor and almost as many varieties of drugs as did Hunter S Thompson, had a swagger to match that of Muhammad Ali. He lived for excess, loved fights (both those that took place in the boxing ring, and those that he himself got involved in with individuals and ideologies he detested - whether they were right-wing John Birch-types or 1960s feminists) and thrived on being the center of attention. At times that made him something of a buffoon. At other times, it meant he was able to pop whatever balloon of respectability or hypocrisy was in vogue at that particular moment.
Norman Mailer was one of the co-founders of the Village Voice, the greatest, and most durable of the counter-culture weeklies, and that alone is enough in my books to qualify him for some unfettered version of beatification. In the late 1960s, he made a semi-serious run for mayor of New York, with the populist newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin his deputy. Their major campaign idea was to have the city secede from the rest of New York State and set up shop as America's 51st state. For better or worse, they were handily beaten in the Democratic primaries.
He was a left-winger from an era in which it was possible to be left wing and at the same time to love, with no apology, red meat, liquor, tobacco, at least some forms of violence (especially of the sporting variety) and the most un-PC of sexual relationships. Earnestness was not one of his failings.
There's Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, Kerouac, a bit of Balzac and Dostoyevsky and Rimbaud all mixed together in his world-view. And there's also ancient Roman pornographic poets, the savage imagery of the artist Goya, and Soviet cinematographers like Sergei Eisenstein, as well as the bombast of Orson Welles. Like Welles, Mailer was convinced of his own genius. Like Winston Churchill, he was pretty confident history would treat him kindly - at least in part because he intended to write it.
I'm sure Mailer was, in many ways, an absolute bastard. Indeed, my wife, like most of the women of our generation I'd guess, found his personality so repugnant she couldn't even approach his writing objectively. Simply mentioning his name can be enough to throw her into a frenzy of indignant rage. But I'm equally sure the world is a lesser place with his passing. If he'd been all hot-air, his career would have been akin to that of the Hindenburg blimp - a curiosity followed by a spectacular demise. But there was no demise-in-life for Mailer. He remained at the forefront of American literature for 60 years. And when he ceased to be a household name for young people, as did indeed occur in the past few years, it was more to do with the youth culture moving away from any tolerance for serious literature than it was to do with Norman Mailer himself failing to deliver the goods.
When I saw Mailer speak in Sacramento, he suggested he thought it pretty likely God was playing games, experimenting with humanity to see what good and bad could be created out of our raw clay. He also indicated he'd begun to believe in reincarnation. I hope he's right... I can't imagine what a Mailer-redux creature would be like, but I can only hope it would be one half as entertaining and insightful and infuriating as the original version.
