|
|
Jan. 18, 2008
A man and his words fall apart
Norman Mailer's life and his novels became the voice for a confused generation.
EUGENE KAELLIS
The first time I saw Norman Mailer was in a televised debate between him and William Buckley, the Yale-ie, near ultramontanist Catholic, conservative, intellectual, a man of erudition, apparent wit and presumed sincerity. Buckley quickly took the measure of Mailer and played him like a harp. He deftly plucked the right strings, as Mailer, smiling like a child who had finally received a long desired toy, went down, seemingly obliviously, to flaming defeat.
Along with millions of others, I had read Mailer's first novel, by far his best, The Naked and the Dead (1948). So engaged was I by his insights, his honesty and a well-crafted punchy, staccato, vernacular style, that along with his other readers, I didn't realize at the time that what I was really reading was a story about tough warriors embattled in a far away place, all of them – Mailer. Perhaps it's inevitable that people write about themselves, or at least aspects of themselves, no matter what characters they create. With Mailer, as his life progressed, some of the forces, many demonic, that drove him, became increasingly evident in his personal life.
I should have guessed. Mailer loved Ernest Hemingway, whom he tried, in many ways, to emulate – tough, turgid writing along with a tough, turgid and adventure-seeking, then danger-seeking, personal machismo: boxing, pretend bull-fighting, drinking, always eager for sex. But for Hemingway, it was part of a carefully constructed persona. Many of his readers knew that he had exaggerated much of his alleged involvement in the Spanish Civil War. He was somewhat of a poseur and he, like Mailer, could easily become the object of pity, not for failing to find his authenticity – that's everybody's task and often failure – but in apparently giving up the search and sinking deeper and deeper into his persona.
The incredible success of The Naked and the Dead, while this was not a first novel rarity, was, as is often the case, a blessing and a curse. James Jones's From Here to Eternity, a war novel written about the same time, was his first and only well-received book. Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind was her only exceptional (and enormously profitable) novel: she never achieved anything like it again. So, Mailer's problem, like theirs, was to outdo himself in his future writings: most critics believe he didn't.
Mailer was born in 1923 in New Jersey. He was a good student who wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. He considered writing as a career only after his first year of engineering. After receiving his degree in 1943, he was drafted and served in the infantry in the Pacific and later in Japan with the American occupation forces. A fellow soldier, who later became a novelist himself, recalls that Mailer was short, scrawny, "gentle, shy and quiet, but reckless and brave."
The front jacket of one of Mailer's biographies shows him on the dust cover, full face, a mop of thick, unruly hair, his brow furrowed and his eyes expressing, or so it seems to me, an only slightly recondite sadness. The picture on the back shows Mailer on the deck of his house, in the process of falling off a tight rope. He didn't have far to go.
After his discharge, Mailer retuned to New York and started writing The Naked and the Dead, the first of many novels and periodical pieces. He also started developing what was to become his author persona.
His personal life increasingly revolved around his frequent and heavy use of alcohol, perhaps initially to lubricate his writer's imagination but, after that, to ease his passage through any problem he encountered. His extensive marital history reads like a bad movie. He was married six times (Hemingway, only three) and had nine children and countless mistresses. One marriage lasted less than a year. His last was to Beverly Bentley, an actress who became his widow upon his death in 2007 of kidney failure, a predictable outcome of his drinking. It was apparently a toss-up between which would fail first, his liver or his kidneys. It's amazing that he almost reached 85.
In an appearance at Brown University in 1949, Mailer, the invited speaker, was apparently drunk. He kept murmuring about knives being the symbol of manhood. He had been aggressively inebriated many times before and made a rude gesture to a hapless student who had asked him to read an excerpt from one of his novels. Later that month, at a party in a posh Manhattan apartment, at which he was supposed to announce his candidacy for mayor of New York, it is reported that a drunken Mailer became surly enough to frighten some guests into leaving. He tried to box with some men (shades again of Papa Hemingway), then fell on his face. He left but returned at 4:30 a.m., still drunk and pretending to be a bull-fighter (again Hemingway-esque), and stabbed his wife in the abdomen and back, somehow luckily avoiding her heart muscle. Mailer got her to agree to a fictional version of the event, which, got him off the hook, but he was ordered to the psychiatric ward at New York's Bellevue Hospital and stayed there for 17 days.
Mailer later told his friend and fellow writer Gore Vidal that he was afraid that Jewish doctors would decide that he needed a long confinement because, according to Mailer, "Jews don't do this sort of thing unless they are really crazy."
It's one of the very few times Mailer identified himself as a Jew. Once, with a friend, he attended a Lubavitcher Yom Kippur service. Attracted to the crude setting, the exoticism, the apparent "toughness" of the participants, he nonetheless never again explored this aspect of his background. Once, he started a novel about the death camps, but he dropped it. He had no apparent interest in Israel.
His "non-Jewishness" didn't prevent others from making that identification for him. As a student at Harvard, he accepted the university's policy of having Jews "bunched," i.e., rooming together, and having all their academic records marked with a symbol identifying them as Jews. Harvard had had a long history of anti-Semitism. After the First World War, its president wanted a specific, stated numerus clausus for Jews, but was overridden by the faculty. An informal quota system nonetheless operated and clubs and fraternities were strictly out of bounds to Jewish students.
Mailer may have been an imitator, but he was never an obedient follower. In the United States, especially in the turbulent '60s, there were all kinds of outlets for fighting the establishment. Such were the mores of the times among "progressives" that Mailer, approaching or having reached the age of invalidation (I think it was Tom Hayden who said, "Never trust anybody over 30"), tried to outdo his younger supporters in sheer freakiness. One of my vivid memories of that period was of him speaking drunkenly to a wildly responsive crowd of war protesters with an open beer can in one hand, dramatically gesticulating with the other. Mailer, having explored various ideologies, found his element in the unstructured and spontaneous contra-rationalism and wildness of the '60s left.
Mailer, who could be finely talented, was never satisfied with his own life, with the women he chose to love, with his fame and success and, hackneyed though be the diagnosis, with himself.
Eugene Kaellis is a writer and retired academic living in New Westminster.
^TOP
|
|
