Raging Bull

Norman Mailer’s chest-thumping machismo, his clownish behavior and even his occasional acts of violence have tended, through the years, to confuse his admirers and inflame his detractors. Among the more notorious incidents and controversies (and there have been many) are his head-butt of Gore Vidal on “The Dick Cavett Show,” the stabbing of one wife with a penknife, his drunken confession of urinating on the bathroom floor in a speech before a crowd assembled to march on the Pentagon and his frank contempt for his own “lazy audience” in his short-lived column for the Village Voice--prompting one reader to write in, “This guy Mailer. He’s a hostile, narcissistic pest. Lose him.”

Behind much of it, of course, was a shameless desire for the spotlight. Indeed, Mailer’s rebellious stance has always been a form of self-promotion, and a lucrative one at that. In the process, Mailer has helped to define a certain idea of “the writer” in the popular imagination, much the way Hemingway did a generation before him. If he behaved badly, it was after all the kind of thing writers were supposed to do. And it was seen as proof of his iconoclasm in the intellectual arena.

Mailer was, alas, less intellectually iconoclastic than his reputation suggests. Too often he was simply vulgar--particularly in his observations about homosexuals, women and people of color. Mailer frequently baited homosexuals in print, condemning them as symptomatic of the loss of virility in America. Masculinity, he insisted, was something that had to be earned, often at the expense of others. Nowhere is this more evident than in his volatile relations with the sex he professed to admire. In his infamous attack on the feminist critic Kate Millet in “The Prisoner of Sex” (1971), Mailer claims that “man’s sense of awe before . . . women made [him] detest [them], revile them, humiliate them, defecate symbolically upon them . . . so that one might dare to enter them.”

On the question of race, he was no better. In “The White Negro” (1959), Mailer argued that the role of the proletariat as the agent of history had been usurped in America by the white hipster who borrowed his cultural style from the Negro: “Hated from outside and therefore hating himself, the Negro was forced into the position of exploring all those moral wildernesses of civilized life . . . and in the worst of perversion, promiscuity, pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash . . . the Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom” that the hipster could appropriate as his own. Crude and reductionistic, it is hard to read “The Prisoner of Sex” and “The White Negro” without concluding that they are elaborate charades, bad jokes that will be acknowledged at any moment. But Mailer drones on, utterly convinced by his arguments (which he has since qualified, but never entirely rejected). It is a measure of the times and Mailer’s reputation that these essays were taken seriously by many of his readers.

And yet--one hastens to add--the pugnacity that contributed to his worst vulgarities is also responsible for his greatest insights. For as Mailer observes in a short essay on boxing: “In the ring [as in writing], genius is transcendent moxie--the audacity to know that what usually does not work, or is too dangerous to attempt, can in a special case, prove the winning move. . . . The best move can lie very close to the worst.” That has always been the case in Mailer’s work, his best and worst moves lie side by side, often within the same book and sometimes within the same paragraph.

He is like the knock-kneed bullfighter he admires in “Homage to El Loco” (1972), whose awkward, uninspired performances earn the contempt of the crowd until he dazzles them with a series of breathtaking gallicinas and derechazos: “Amado was clumsy in his approach and stepped on his cape when he was done, but there was one moment of lightning in the middle when you saw clear sky after days of fog.” One reads Mailer for those moments of clear sky. It would be a shame if the fog of his antics and accusations, the sheer prolixity of his work, were allowed to obscure them.

All of this and more is on display in “The Time of Our Time,” an anthology of Mailer’s work edited by the author himself on the occasion of his 75th birthday. As the title suggests, the arrangement of the excerpts attempts to provide a rough chronology of American life--Mailer’s own hyperbolic map of reality--from the 1940s to the 1970s, after which the organization breaks down, with readings from “Ancient Evenings” (1983) and “The Gospel According to the Son” (1997). It is a teasing idea that isn’t particularly illuminating, in large part because the material is too wide-ranging. Like all anthologies, “The Time of Our Time” is finally unsatisfying: giving you just enough to whet your appetite but (except in the case of the shorter pieces) not enough to satisfy it. Nevertheless, the publication of this anthology provides the occasion for a reexamination of Mailer’s work.

His first novel, “The Naked and the Dead” (1948), is still the best novel of World War II (if not the best war novel in American letters), a curious claim, especially when one considers that there are no more than 50 pages devoted to scenes of battle in a novel that is more than 700 pages long. The rest details the daily life of a platoon of American GIs during an obscure Pacific campaign as they slog through the mud, grouse about their superiors, nurse private resentments against one another, and grapple with heat, fatigue and their own doubts about their courage. In its portrait of male camaraderie (and its pointed limitations), and its unsentimental, albeit occasionally rapturous, depiction of the natural world against which these men struggle, the novel recalls the great American 19th century novels by James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville.

Mailer faltered in his next two novels, “Barbary Shore” (1951) and “The Deer Park” (1955) (an execrable expose of Hollywood), but he regained his stride with elan in “Advertisements for Myself” (1959), a collection of essays, short stories and interviews linked with Mailer’s frankly self-regarding introductions. That collection inaugurated a bold new style of writing in which the author himself was never far from the center of concern. Never mind. It led to an astonishing run of work--most of it journalistic--during a period of immense upheaval in American life. Indeed, Mailer’s journalism captures the political conventions, riots and anti-war protests, the technological achievements (the Apollo moon landing) and the moral bankruptcy of the ‘60s and ‘70s with insight unequaled by his contemporaries. Here’s a sampling:

On the eroticization of the automobile: “Today . . . a car is sold not because it will help one get a girl, but because it is already a girl. The leather of its seats is worked to a near-skin, the color is lipstick-pink . . . the taillights are cloacal, the rear is split like the cheeks of a drum majorette” (“A Note on Comparative Pornography,” 1959).

On Lyndon B. Johnson’s “totalitarian prose”: “The essence of totalitarian prose is that it does not define, it does not deliver. It oppresses. It obstructs from above. It is profoundly contemptuous of the minds that will receive the message. So it does its best to dull this consciousness with sentences that are nothing but bricked-in power structures. Or, alternately, a totalitarian prose slobbers upon an audience a sentimentality so debauched that admiration for shamelessness is inspired. But then, sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment” (“My Hope for America: A Review of a Book by Lyndon B. Johnson,” 1966).

On the nature of power in the United States: “Nineteenth century generals would not have been permitted to explore the fortress they would attack, but they would have known its storehouse when they took it. Now recapitulate the problem at the Pentagon [for the protesters]: an enormous office building in the shape of a fortress housed the military center of the most powerful nation on earth, yet there was no need for guards--the proliferation of the building itself was its own defense. . . . The Pentagon spoke exclusively of mass man and his civilization; every aspect of the building was anonymous, monotonous, massive, interchangeable” (“The Armies of the Night,” 1968).

On the allure of Ronald Reagan for the Republican Party: “For a party that prided itself on its common sense, they were curiously, even outrageously sentimental” (“Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” 1968).

In “Armies of the Night” and then later in “Marilyn” (1973) and “The Executioner’s Song” (1979), the novelist and the journalist begin to coalesce, creating a hybrid style of writing lying somewhere between fact and fiction that may have earned Mailer the right to describe himself--the way he often did--as the “finest writer in America.” Dismissed as a coffee table book, “Marilyn” is Mailer’s most underappreciated effort. It is less a star bio than a poignant meditation on the limits of love. Meanwhile, “The Executioner’s Song,” or at least the first half of it, is perhaps his most dazzling literary achievement. Mailer’s portrait of Gary Gilmore’s vanity, his pettiness and manipulations, his comic aspirations and his dignity before the death he demanded from the state is so acutely observed that it is worth a carload of case studies. And the book is all the more stunning for its insistence--despite hundreds of pages of reportage--on the eerie blankness of the killer’s motives.

Mailer’s decision to write books on movie stars, murderers and athletes (Muhammad Ali in “The Fight,” 1975) reflects his sense, as he puts it in “The Presidential Papers” (1963), that “since the First World War, Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground: There has been the history of politics, which is concrete, factual, practical, and unbelievably dull . . . and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, a concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.”

Perhaps that is what led him to pursue the subterranean worlds of the CIA and Lee Harvey Oswald in “Harlot’s Ghost” (1991) and “Oswald’s Tale” (1995). These books should have been the capstone to Mailer’s lifelong exploration of the “dream life of the nation.” Instead they are a disappointment. The novelist and the journalist have given up their synergistic embrace with the result that “Harlot’s Ghost” is little more than an overblown spy thriller, while “Oswald’s Tale” is so clotted with undigested documentary material that Mailer manages to make a fascinating story tedious.

Norman Mailer has fallen badly out of fashion in the last few years. However, if “The Time of Our Time” does no more than lead a new generation of readers to sample Mailer’s massive oeuvre, it will have served its purpose. Now that Mailer’s many controversies have become history, a more sober assessment of his work can begin. Mailer’s romantic hipsterism may strike a more cynical age as dated, if not naive: evocative of a time when it was easier to think of one’s own rebellion as pure and the system against which one rebelled as definable and monolithic. But the moral indignation of his work remains undiminished. It beats in the walls of his fiction like Poe’s telltale heart, hectoring Americans who would give up their birthright to a nation of “squares”: “politicians, medicos, policemen, professors, priests, rabbis, ministers, ideologues, psychoanalysts, builders, executives and endless communicators [who] would brick-in modern life with hygiene upon sanity, and middle-brow homily over platitude.”