Mailer and the posterity question

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Norman Mailer always wrote with one eye on the present and the other on his legacy. He was, he often said, a writer in competition not just with his contemporaries but also with Hemingway and Tolstoy; he wanted to be one of the greats. And yet, in the wake of his death, a quick visit to Amazon.com reveals that many of his books are out of print. Even ‘Advertisements for Myself,’ his groundbreaking 1959 collection of essays and reporting, is available only in a university press edition, with a shipping time of four to six weeks.

All this brings to mind the elusive issue of posterity, which is a force no one can control. It’s common to suggest that writers and other artists want their work to outlive them, that in the act of creation they aspire to a kind of immortality. But I don’t buy that for a second, since we live in a world--a world? a universe--that is degrading relentlessly toward entropy.

‘Writers have this great obsession, to create an immortal work,’ Shelley Jackson noted in an interview a few years ago. ‘But how immortal is it, really? I worked in used bookstores for 10 years, and I saw how much gets lost and disappears.’

Even Mailer, for all his rhetoric, was at his most effective (and, I’d suggest, most fulfilled) when he focused on what he referred to as ‘the time of his time’--the social, political and personal eruptions of mid-to-late 20th century America, from the Vietnam War to the space race to the women’s movement and beyond. That’s an example to remember, a useful lesson in what a writer does. What matters is to engage as fully as you can with the world you live in, and let posterity take care of itself.

David L. Ulin