Stormin' Norman

You come to a certain age and looking back along the year, tombstones mark out the months.

Norman Mailer died in November, of kidney failure, in Manhattan, aged 84. His most famous novel, The Naked And The Dead, was the first proper book I ever read for pleasure. I think I was about 14. A man who does that for you enriches your life hence.
Published when he was 25, The Naked And The Dead presented a view of World War Two in the Pacific in coarse contrast to the John Wayne genre of clean-cut GIs in combat against Japs. It was a humanitarian epic of shit and death written from the perspective of a disillusioned grunt. Every page had a paragraph that hit like a hard-knuckle punch.
His second novel, Barbary Shore, was set in a Brooklyn rooming house of reds and refugees, stoolies and spies and a woman haunted by the knowledge that she’d introduced Trotsky to the hoodlum who plunged an ice-pick in his brain. Critics, skulking in wait after the sensational success of The Naked And The Dead, set upon it like scavengers cheated of their last kill.
It would have benefited from editing. But there’s no better intro to the sense of psychic disenchantment which descended on some as the intensity of war gave way to the dourness of a peace that seemed an inadequate return on the investment of pain their generation had made.
Two big books under his belt and not yet 30, he seemed to have written non-stop for the next half century, and published too much. In the 1970s, he was to launch ridiculous assaults on women’s liberation, while drooling over Marilyn Monroe. He had an endless need to demonstrate his masculinity. “Writing is fighting,” he said. Generally speaking, his prose was more muscular than his pugilism.
He did produce one other great sort-of-novel, The Executioner’s Song, the true story of Gary Gilmore, shot by firing squad in 1977 for the casual killing of a gas-station attendant, a steadily-observed, coolly-detached, perfectly-wrought chronicle of a man for whom the meanness of the world was the whole of his life. Read it alongside Capote’s In Cold Blood for the difference between a brilliant craftsman and a brawling genius.
Or read Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery, the total and definitive irrefutable story of how Lee Harvey Oswald came back from Minsk, shrugged, and, all on his own, killed John Kennedy. It will tell you more about madness and America than a sane person need know.
It may be that Mailer’s seeming ephemera will last longer than his literature. Journalism is generally a low trade. But much of his was high art. Mailer was the reporter Hunter S. Thompson might have become had he ever grown up, Tom Wolfe might have been had he ever gotten down. The Armies Of The Night, about the 1967 anti-Vietnam war protest at the Pentagon, and Miami And The Siege of Chicago, about the 1968 presidential primaries, are among the best, most visceral pieces of reportage on the 20th century. He puts himself, naturally, at the heart of the action, charts the swirl and surge of the tumult as if whirl-pooling around his own ego, interjecting memories, comparisons, judgments, jokes, asides. Here’s a front-line dispatch from Chicago, an agitated rumination on the ravaged soul of America in the midst of what seemed momentarily incipient revolution:
“The Marshall’s emotions had obviously been marinating for a week in the very special bile waters American Patriotism reserves for its need... He would not stand a chance with this Marshall – there seemed no place to hit him where he’d be vulnerable: stone larynx, leather testicles, ice cubes for eyes... Whether the Marshall had once been in the Marine Corps or in Vietnam, or if half his family was now in Vietnam, or if he just hated the sheer Jew New York presumption of that slovenly drug-ridden weak contaminating America-hating army of termites outside the fortress walls... He was full of American rectitude, fearless, and savage...”
And on the other side: “Yippies, Hippies, ex-Hippies, diggers, bikers, drop-outs from college, hipsters up from the South. They made a community of sorts, for their principles were simple – everybody, obviously, must be allowed to do (no way around the next three words) his own thing, provided he hurt no one doing it – they were yet to learn that society is built on many people hurting many people, it is just who does the hurting which is forever in dispute. They did not necessarily understand how much their simple presence hurt many good citizens in the secret valve of the heart – did not recognize the depth of schizophrenia on which society is built... a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches... A land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear a situation not controlled... The society was able to stagger on like a 400lb policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state it did not at least have to explode into schizophrenia – life went on. Boys could go patiently to church and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam.”
Or this, on the death of Benny Kid Paret in Madison Square Garden in March 1962 at the fists of Emile Griffith, in the pair’s third bout – they were one apiece – for the welterweight title. After 12 rounds of crunch and blood, Paret, unconscious, entwined himself upright against the ropes. Griffith slugged him to the head rat-a-tat-tat for 12 seconds.
“Paret died on his feet. As he took those eighteen punches something happened to everybody in psychic range. Some part of his death reached out to us. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half-smile of regret as if he were saying, ‘I didn’t know I was going to die just yet,’ and then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe around him... As he passed, so his limbs descended beneath him. He went down more slowly than any fighter has ever gone down, he went down like a large ship that turns on end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like a heavy axe in the distance chopping into a wet log.”
His life was an advertisement for himself. He made huge errors. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice. He directed four feature films. He co-founded The Village Voice. All the big obits called him a Literary Lion but he was more the raging bull of American intellectualism. All his life, ideas burst from his brain like sparks spitting from a fire, and he rarely had control of their trajectory. Born January 31st 1923, died November 10th this year. I have reason to thank him.