Stormin’ Norman
Barnaby Smith takes a look at the political clairvoyance of American literary heavyweight, Norman Mailer
In Woody Allen’s 1973 futuristic comedy Sleeper, Allen’s character says to a scientist: ‘This is a picture of Norman Mailer. He left his ego to the Harvard Medical School.’ In an episode of the surreal sixties cartoon The Bullwinkle Show, students reject the famously moronic moose’s attempts to instigate some riotous college fun with the excuse that ‘We’re going to the student union to protest Norman Mailer.’ More recently, the author’s ‘latest claptrap about his waning libido’ has been uncompromisingly pilloried in an episode of The Simpsons, and the 85-year-old has been name checked in both King Of The Hill and Family Guy. Most stunningly bizarre is his guest appearance in a 2004 episode of cosy, middle class American drama The Gilmore Girls in an episode called ‘Norman Mailer, I’m pregnant’. Basically, the infuriating, lovable, egotistical, funny, visionary, detestable Jewish-American from Brooklyn has been satirised just about everywhere – a clear indication of the extent to which he has infiltrated twentieth century American culture. He is, you might say, woven into its very fabric.
Dedicated follower of fashion
Mailer is a real life Leonard Zelig. In the late 1940s, he lived with Arthur Miller while together they forged a new post-war identity for American literature. In what must have been a laugh-a-minute living arrangement, Miller worked on All My Sons while Mailer wrote his critically acclaimed first novel, The Naked and the Dead. The author was also there a decade later when Kerouac, Ginsberg and friends forced America to confront both its potential and its damnation. His essay ‘The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster’, remains one of the beat generation’s key, though relatively unheralded, texts. In the fifties, he co-founded the iconic Village Voice. An arrest during an anti-Vietnam march plugged him into the counter-cultural zeitgeist of the sixties, and at the end of that decade and beyond, along with Tom Wolfe, Hunter S Thompson, Joan Didion and others, he became central to the emerging New Journalism genre with works such as The Fight.
That, my friends, is moving with the times. The Observer’s Robert McCrum recently interviewed Mailer (it seems appropriate with many old stalwarts of American literature to call their interviews ‘rare’, but Mailer does hundreds upon hundreds. Evidently his ego is not at Harvard Medical School yet), and remarked that, contradicting F Scott Fitzgerald’s adage that ‘there are no second acts in American lives’, Mailer is reborn every few years, often as the nucleus of any popular new confrontational mood that grips his nation.
And now, nearly fifty years after his first, he has a new novel out: The Castle in the Forest. It is, ho hum, the story of Adolf Hitler’s childhood narrated by Satan inhabiting the body of a SS Officer. In McCrum’s interview Mailer said: ‘The book is going to be offensive to a lot of Jews … The right wing will hate it … a lot of radicals will believe it retrogressive’. His enduring and unflinching indifference to courting popularity makes it a wonder he is an icon that Allen, The Simpsons et al feel they must lampoon.
Norm of all trades
McCrum, potentially at the risk of his own health, confronted Mailer with the fact that many regard him as ‘not much of a novelist, but a pretty good journalist’. Instead of getting a walking stick in his earhole, McCrum was merely told: ‘The day has come where I think I’m the best writer’.
But this is an issue Mailer has been saddled with for some time. The Fight, a book in which Mailer reports on the 1975 George Foreman – Muhammad Ali World Heavyweight fight in Zaire, is a masterpiece of ‘literary’ journalism, up there with Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Employing novelistic devices such as dialogue, subjective description and a good deal of passion, Mailer’s book is regarded as one of the finest pieces of sports journalism ever written. His fiction career has also enjoyed many critical highpoints: The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park and Ancient Evenings, while The Castle in the Forest has also been received well in many quarters.
However, he has long been a target for feminists who believe him the living embodiment of male chauvinism, due to a prevalence of sexual violence in his work. (Mailer’s defence is not exactly helped by the fact he stabbed his second wife at a Manhattan party back in 1960.) Also threatening the author’s status as a bona fide literary heavyweight is the propensity for his characters to be rather embarrassing, vulgarly exaggerated versions of himself. Like some kind of third-rate Hemingway, he sets up his male protagonists as the anti-hero he always dreamed he might be. In An American Dream, the protagonist gets drunk, comes close to suicide, strangles his wife, throws her body from a ten-storey height and then has sex with the maid – and that’s just the first chapter. This melodramatic, pompous streak has compromised his standing among contemporary literary greats, who he himself listed in the McCrum interview as Roth, Updike, Doctorow, Irving, Vonnegut and Vidal.
Compare this with his journalism and general cultural commentary, especially in the sixties and seventies. With a style that focuses on analysis, depth, partiality and accessibility, Mailer helped change the face of the profession. He revealed his approach to journalism in a 1965 interview with The Sunday Times in which he criticised the British press, saying: ‘I think your papers are very much worse than ours. In your popular press most of the stories are so short, and a lot of things just can’t be written about shortly.’
The Visionary
Mailer is a seminal sports writer and a ground-breaking chronicler of America’s social turmoil in the sixties, but it is his political commentary – and one article in particular – that this essay, after a rather laboured introduction, would like to draw attention to.
In 1965 he wrote an piece for Village Voice entitled ‘A Vote For Bobby K’, a rationale for supporting Robert Kennedy in the future leadership contest for the Democratic Party. It is a heavy-hearted article, as Mailer details his frustration with a moribund American political climate, a common mood among the liberal-minded following the assassination of JFK two years previously. Interesting as it is as a piece of writing, and as a portrait of the world in which it was written, it is remarkable in a contemporary context too. ‘A Vote For Bobby K’ inadvertently describes the American governmental melée since the late nineties as well as three decades earlier: Mailer the seer.
Mailer is charmed by Bobby Kennedy’s charisma, and this alone, he argues, makes Kennedy worth voting for: ‘When the issues at stake are small, it is natural to vote for the man who has the more arresting personality, as once before, when issues were small, America elected Jack Kennedy’. Jack Kennedy, who swept to power in 1960 on the back of eight years of cultural tepidity and economic stability under Dwight Eisenhower, boasted a magnetism which easily dispatched Richard Nixon in an election, according to Mailer, fought over no major issues.
Mailer 4 Bush?
In 1999, America was faced with a strikingly similar situation. Clinton had pushed America into a position of astonishing economic strength and seen them through a couple of ‘just’ wars. The biggest fuss of his presidency was what occurred one day in his office with a young lady and a cigar, for God’s sake. The unfortunate choice for president in his wake was either Al Gore or George W Bush, and again, there was nothing ‘real and immediate’ at stake. Bush had more charm, more allure, seemed more presidential and therefore he won (arguably). An electorate is naturally predisposed to go for the better-looking, more suave option when the candidates’ policies seem irrelevant.
The curious thing is, that it is quite possible that Mailer the liberal agitator approved of Bush’s success in his first presidential term. In ‘A Vote For Bobby K’ he writes:
So we must vote for one candidate because he is a neutron, or vote for the other because he is an active principal who will grow and change and become – odds are, a powerful leader of the Left or the Right. Posed that way, I take the second alternative. I vote for the active principle. To vote for a man who is neuter is to vote for the plague.
No one is going to claim that Bush has become a powerful leader of any sort, but he was certainly not a neutron. Gore was. Mailer continues:
I would rather vote for a man on the assumption he is a hero and have him turn into a monster than vote for a man who can never be a hero. For follow it through: a hero, even a failed hero, or a hero-as-monster, is more likely to create other heroes, by his example or by opposition to him, than a man who gains power and has never been anything at all.
Aha. So, the Bush presidency has been a positive thing because it has mobilised passionate and heroic opposition, and will continue to do so. The Norman Mailer of 1965, with this portentous article, offers hope for America’s future in 2007 – depending whose side you’re on.
Back then, Mailer’s words never had the chance to be proven right. Bobby Kennedy’s ascendancy was cut short by his assassination in 1968. But now it seems, Mailer’s argument in this obscure article is at last being realised. The 2008 election is not exactly going to be short on ‘real and immediate political issues’ exactly because of the ‘hero-as-monster’ Bush became. It has taken almost forty years to ring true, but yet again, Mailer sits comfortable and lordly in the centre of America’s consciousness, whether they like it or not. Oh, and don’t forget the new book.
Works:
The Naked and the Dead (1948)
‘The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster’ (1957)
The Fight (1975)
The Castle in the Forest (2007)
The Deer Park (1955)
Ancient Evenings (1983)
An American Dream (1965)
‘A Vote For Bobby K’ (1965)
