Mailer: an ego with an insecure streak
The author's flaws and mistakes were as famous as his triumphs, a fitting fact for the era he occupied and reflected.
I met Norman Mailer in the early 1990s, during a party at the New York Athletic Club. The party was for Mailer's friend Richard Stratton, who had a novel out, and Mailer was the host, holding court at the bar, a flushed grin on his face.
Knowing almost no one, I kept to the corners, avoiding Mailer altogether. Still, I couldn't help looking at him periodically, and at one point, I caught his eye.
For a moment, the two of us watched each other, until I turned away. I hadn't taken more than a step or two, though, when I felt a tap on my shoulder, and there was Mailer, hand extended, having come over to introduce himself.
That story illustrates everything one needs to know about Norman Mailer, casting the two essential, contradictory threads of his personality, the ego and the insecurity, in sharp relief.
Mailer, after all, was the sort of author who could both dazzle and infuriate, often within the space of a single paragraph. He was a major talent who could not keep himself from reminding you that he was a major talent, an astute observer of his moment, who tended to operate as if that moment were entirely his.
He was equally famous for his writing and his exploits: the precocious 25-year-old whose 1948 debut, "The Naked and the Dead," is considered by many the greatest American war novel ever written; the provocateur who co-founded the Village Voice in 1955 and, 14 years later, ran for mayor of New York on a secession ticket (Jimmy Breslin was his running mate), with a slogan urging, "Vote the scoundrels in."
Although he liked to dismiss journalism as less than artful -- "generally speaking," he told the St. Petersburg Times in 2004, "journalism is sloppy writing, and unless you have a real talent, it can injure you to write too quickly" -- his legacy rests on "The Armies of the Night" and "The Executioner's Song," the book-length works of reportage for which he won Pulitzer prizes in 1969 and 1980, respectively.
Mailer, for his part, preferred to think of himself as a "novelist," which he saw as the writer's highest calling, even though his own fiction was often sprawling and flawed. In his final book, "On God: An Uncommon Conversation" (published only 3 1/2 weeks ago), he referred to God as a supreme artist, the novelist at the heart of the universe. This tells us more than a little about where his sensibilities stood.
And yet, the fascinating thing about Mailer was that he remained so, well, fascinating, so much at the center of our cultural life.
