Why is norman Mailer still famous? He hasn't written a good book since The Executioner's Song, which is 19 years old. Except for The Naked and the Dead, none of his novels continues to be read, and his magazine journalism long ago curdled into self-parody. I have never met anyone under 40 who took him seriously. Yet Random House, which so far as I know is not a charitable institution, celebrated his 75th birthday by bringing out in the US a 1,200-page anthology of his writing, chosen by the master himself (in Britain it is published by Little, Brown). That's a pretty fancy birthday present-given that it will probably wind up on the remainder tables by the year's end.
Mailer has been writing badly for so long that it is easy to forget that many intelligent people once took him almost as seriously as he took himself. And The Time of Our Time contains ample proof that for all his faults, the young Mailer really did have talent to burn. He could blather on for page after page about existential anguish, then snap into focus and toss off the kind of brilliantly exact description which made his colleagues sweat with envy. Here is Truman Capote, pinned down in one perfect sentence: "'I didn't want to do this show,' he said in a dry little voice that seemed to issue from an unmoistened reed in his nostril."
The trouble with Mailer is that he was drunk on ideas, a deadly tipple for woolly-minded pseudo-intellectuals. Sensing that liberalism had run its course, he made the mistake of assuming that radicalism was the only way out; and complicated matters further by opting for a romantic radicalism rooted in sexual mysticism. As a result, his style grew bloated and slack, especially on the frequent occasions when he grappled with imperfectly digested philosophical concepts.
Yet Mailer had little choice but to write about ideas. The publication in 1948 of The Naked and the Dead left him "prominent and empty" at the age of 25; he spent the rest of his youth and middle age living in the glare of renown, making it impossible for him to accumulate the private experience out of which good novels are spun. He wrote interestingly about this problem in Advertisements for Myself ("My farewell to an average man's experience was too abrupt... I was a node in a new electronic landscape of celebrity, personality, and status"), but that was a trick which could be brought off only once.
It was thus inevitable that he would turn to journalism, which supplies the gifted but unformed writer with pre-set subjects on which to hone his style. But his celebrity made it impossible for him to undergo a normal period of apprenticeship: he was thrown in at the deep end, and his self-indulgent flounderings were mistaken for originality. To be sure, The Presidential Papers, The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago and Of a Fire on the Moon are not without their bright spots, and "The Liberal Party," the chapter of The Armies of the Night in which Mailer describes a visit to a party thrown by "an attractive liberal couple," is a masterpiece of social observation:
"Conservative professors tend to have a private income, so their homes show the flowering of their taste, the articulation of their hobbies, collections adhere to their cabinets and odd statements of whim stand up in the nooks; but liberal instructors, liberal associate professors are usually poor and programmatic, so secretly they despise the arts of home adornment... the artist on the wall is a friend of the host and has the right political ideas...."
But even at his best, Mailer was addicted to navel-gazing; his insistence on placing himself on stage, although initially refreshing, ultimately proved disastrous. It is no coincidence that the two most successful pieces of reportage to come out of the 1960s, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, avoid the self-aggrandisement that was Mailer's trademark-or that The Executioner's Song, by far Mailer's strongest piece of journalism, is also one of the few non-fiction books he has written in which he does not feature as a main character.
So, what is it about this 75-year-old has-been which continues to make ageing editors weak at the knees? The answer, I think, is that he is to literature what the Kennedys are to politics: a living relic of the vanished era of high hopes. Even though he was already washed up as a novelist by 1960, Mailer had retooled himself as a middlebrow journalist just in time to bang the drum for JFK. Mailer had spent the 1950s bemoaning the "partially totalitarian society" that was the US under Dwight Eisenhower, and along came a handsome young Democratic philosopher-king, a glamorous millionaire who wrote books, flattered authors and hung out with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe. All at once everything seemed possible, from racial equality to free love: "Yes, this candidate for all his record, his good, sound, conventional liberal record, has a patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz."
Mailer became the chief chronicler of the 1960s, the high-priced hired gun for whom magazine editors with money to burn sent whenever they wanted to put the seal of literary seriousness on political conventions or moon shots. He was the first US novelist since Hemingway to be known by name to people who didn't read books. It begins to look as if he'll be the last. But like so many quondam revolutionaries, he proved unwilling to ride the train to the end of the line, revealing himself, in The Prisoner of Sex (1971), to be opposed to the women's liberation movement, a blunder which brought to an end his quarter-century-long run as the golden boy of US letters.
At this point, a better writer might have finally got down to business and produced the memorable novels everybody had expected Mailer to write. But not since Sinclair Lewis has an author of note ground out so dreary a string of flops.
Mailer, like Kennedy, will probably never lack bootlickers, at least while his generation is alive. It is hard to accept that a once-promising writer has become a burnt-out case, especially when the memory of his promise is part of your lost youth. Who would have guessed in 1960 that the first literary star of the electronic age would end his days as a nostalgia act, the Glenn Miller of Camelot? Once again, Jack Kennedy got it wrong: life is fair-all you have to do is give it time.
l © 1998 By National Review, Inc., 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10016. Reprinted by permission
The time of our time
Norman Mailer
Little, Brown 1998, ?25
