THE HERO AND THE FOOL

 

A not-unreasonable question that I get asked is why did Norman Mailer seem to go out of his way to be so divisive among the reading public? The easy answer , and likely the most apt, is that Mailer was deeply insecure about how much of a mark he could make on the all of human kind through the power of his writing and more more or less, early on, took a vow to present the world with a novelist/politician/philosopher/film maker/ playwright who would do anything he had to do to bring attention to himself and the message he was trying to get across. He confessed this in his 1959 collection Advertisements for Myself. He declares that he had been running for President in his mind for years, that he had an ego that would settle for nothing less that revolutionizing human conciousness by the force of his writing and deeds, and that it would do the anthology no favors to pretend that he was more modest that he really was. At the time he sounded willing to take on all comers, chasing his best and worst ideas with equal energy, accepting he may be hailed as a hero or forever perceived as a fool charging at windmills. At any rate, the author remained active and in the public eye and wrote a great deal and, to the surprise of many of the decades, wrote some books that are masterpieces. Mailer was many of things, many of them off putting and offensive to many people , but there was a method to his obnoxiousness. I suppose that he realized that his awareness of his outsized ego would be the vehicle with which he could make his contrariness something resembling high art. He considered himself a novelist first and foremost, and though his fiction contains much brilliance , they display genius that can't get beyond the conceits Mailer's sprawling plots contained. 

His best work, his best writing, his several legitimate masterpieces, are his nonfiction, particularly his political writings, his decades as frequent essayist, his over all cultural commentaries. The Executioner's Song, Armies of the Night, Fire on the Moon, The Fight, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Oswald's Tale--these are his greatest works, where every strength he had a prose stylist and public intellectual are in full evidence. Still, there is the matter that Mailer's persona was difficult for many readers to take. His performative obnoxiousness was a tool he used to keep public attention on him--he didn't want to report the news, he wanted to be part of the news--but the downside of it is that it likely stopped many from reading him. Think about the bistros you won't patronize again because the service was dreadful, no matter how good the cusine was. Same with Mailer, which is a drag, because he was a writer worth reading.

It's worth wondering what Mailer, who extolled the virtues of the White Negro, would have thought of  the insurectionists who invaded the capital building January 6th, 2021. I'm thinking particularly of the bearded goon who wore the faux Viking helmet during the invasion. Mailer would be disgusted, no doubt, since he walked back his wild-man existentialism and his assertions that directed psychopathy are a path to liberating humanity from the crucifying and cancer causing effects of corporate capitalism. As he became older , he be came an institutionalist of sorts, a believer in the institutions that make the idea and function of representative government possible. He did remark more than once late in life that he believed democracy such as ours is an idea worth dying for, as was fighting for racial equality. Too little too late, some would say, and they'd be right, his awful ideas are out there and will be used as cudgels against him, as well they should. You really can't "contextualize" the events that led Mailer to stab his wife Adele ; it was an heinous act from a man who'd romanticized about the purgative benefits of violence and who used the power of his celebrity to affect the release of convicted killer John Henry Abbott solely on the basis of some well written prison letters Abbott wrote Mailer. Abbott's release, on the premise that he redeemed himself through artistic expression, resulted in Abbott killing yet another man. It may have been the case that had he lived, Mailer would be disgusted and silent on the matter of the alt right goons.

One might consider that maybe the ever contentious Mailer might have been pissed off that those alt right idiots were doing the whole develop-the-psychopath-within the wrong way. Witness his fascination and eventual love of the CIA, charged with protecting our democratic institutions and way of life by any means they can get away with, more or less. Those black ops guys , he'd reason, were psychotic to a degree, or at least sociopathic, but they at least had an purpose, an ethos (to echo The Big Lebowski). The CIA was actually fighting for something with their violent skullduggery. Incidently, the higher officers of the CIA loved Harlots Ghost .