Norman Mailer entered Harvard in the fall of 1939, just as World War II began. His famous novel about part of that war, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948, and at age 25, like Lord Byron, he awoke to find himself famous. Sixty years later, looking back on the book’s immense success—it topped the New York Times Book Review’s bestseller list for 11 consecutive weeks and remained on that list for 62 more—he commented on the experience of sudden fame: “I knew I’d be a celebrity when I came back to America [he and his wife were living in Paris] and I felt very funny towards it, totally unprepared. . . . I’ve always seen myself as an observer. And now I knew, realized, that I was going to be an actor on the American stage, so to speak.”
From that time until his death in 2007, Mailer’s career both as observer and actor—manifested in the 40 or so books he would write—gave us, in the words of Warner Berthoff, “a uniquely substantial record of what it had meant to be alive” in that long era.
Although Mailer has been capably biographed before and was the subject of a large oral history by Peter Manso, J. Michael Lennon’s 960-page account of him won’t be improved upon. Not satisfied with producing this herculean biography, Lennon has followed it with a comparably thick selection of Mailer’s letters. Lennon knew Mailer for decades, talked extensively with him, and recorded what he heard. Unlike many biographers, Lennon feels the need to say something in judgment, however brief, of every one of Mailer’s books. To do this, while keeping the “life” narrative moving along, is a feat he performs with care and without pomposity.
Lennon is especially attentive to Mailer’s undergraduate life, where he compiled a lopsided academic record, with a major in engineering sciences and six courses in creative writing. As a sophomore, he read D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and what works of Henry Miller he could lay his hands on; both Lawrence and Miller would be central figures for the writer Mailer became. He wrote stories, published a novella (A Calculus at Heaven), and wrote a long unpublished one, A Transit to Narcissus, about a “lunatic asylum” in Mattapan, where he briefly worked. In an often-quoted anecdote, we find him, a few days after Pearl Harbor, debating with himself whether the war novel he was to write would be best set in Europe or the Pacific. Deciding that he didn’t know enough European history, he chose a scene that few knew much about: the Philippine terrain of The Naked and the Dead.
Some of Lennon’s most fascinating pages are about Mailer’s service as an infantryman in the war and, after the war’s end, as a cook in Japan. Lennon points out how the urban Mailer, child of Brooklyn and Harvard, nevertheless wrote, in more than one of his books, landscape descriptions that “crackle and pulse with energy,” ranking with the best of postwar American writers. Diana Trilling, one of Mailer’s earliest supportive critics, noted that the most dramatic moments in The Naked and the Dead “are precipitated by intensities in nature.”
Such intensities, however, were absent from the two novels that followed his bestseller. In the mid-1950s, Mailer, stung by the failure of his second novel, Barbary Shore (1951), and the mixed reception of his third, The Deer Park (1955), dreamed up the first of his impossible projects, that of writing eight interlocking novels that would explore topics such as pleasure, crime, communism, and homosexuality, ending with mysticism. The sequence would emanate from the mind of a character, Sam Slovoda, the protagonist of Mailer’s lively story “The Man Who Studied Yoga.”
What eventually ensued was not a novel at all but the first and best of Mailer’s miscellaneous books of nonfiction, Advertisements for Myself (1959), a work that more or less coincided with his stabbing of his second wife, Adele Morales. In her own book about the event, Morales testifies that Mailer said to her, as she was being wheeled into the operating room, “I love you and I had to save you from cancer”—which is perhaps enough, and too much, to prove the madness that he succumbed to. His public explanation, scarcely a better one, was that “a decade’s anger” was responsible.
It was about this time that I began to read Norman Mailer with excitement, his dreadful off-the-page behavior notwithstanding. The polemics of Advertisements, conducted (in Lennon’s words) in an “obscene, prickly, but conversational” tone, enlivened his no-holds-barred reviewing of contemporary fictionists, as it did the braggadocio, heavily tinged with comedy, of his story “The Time of Her Time.” As a mild-mannered English professor who spent his own time admiring, among others, the words of Henry James and Robert Frost, I found this impossible person more than good company.
I followed Mailer avidly through the 1960s, what may be called his great decade: through the collections of prose that succeeded Advertisements (The Presidential Papers, 1963; Cannibals and Christians, 1966); the surprisingly assaultive, not exactly well-made novels (An American Dream, 1965; Why Are We in Vietnam? 1967); and his memorable accounts of the political conventions of 1968 (Miami and the Siege of Chicago). His burgeoning confidence that he could take on any subject produced a book about the moon landing (Of a Fire on the Moon, 1970) and one about women’s liberation (The Prisoner of Sex, 1971). The insistently combative figure who graced these books was well-described by Richard Poirier in his still-important critical study of 1972:
The metaphor of war, which Poirier explores as a key item in Mailer’s work, was perfectly in tune with the announcement Mailer had made in Advertisements that he was “imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” Heady stuff, especially for one, like myself, not at all inclined toward revolution of any sort.
As the positive force of Mailer’s journalism added up, with reports on everything from prizefights to Marilyn Monroe, one began to think of him less as a novelist who wrote books with a beginning, middle, and end than as a performer, with himself invariably at the center of things, entertaining ideas to see how long they entertained him and his readers. The novels he would write in the decades after Why Are We in Vietnam? was published—Ancient Evenings (1983), Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984), Harlot’s Ghost (1991), and The Castle in the Forest (2007)—all fail, except for Harlot, to emerge as books we want to reread (and rereading Harlot, all 1,300 pages of it, is not to be undertaken lightly).
Lennon thinks that The Executioner’s Song (1979) may be his greatest book. Yet as the single one in which Mailer as a character withholds himself in favor of Gary Gilmore, there is a daunting lack of the comic energy that animates his best fiction, from “The Time of Her Time” to the best parts of Harlot. In December 2005, near the end of his life, Mailer read aloud some pages from An American Dream and declared, “I’ll never write that well again.” Of course, he had only a brief time to live, but the statement is borne out by most of the fiction he produced after the 1950s.
Looking back over the decades since Mailer announced he would settle for nothing less than making a revolution “in the consciousness of our time,” we might ask just what “our time” was and when it ended. Ben Jonson famously wrote about Shakespeare, “He was not for an age but for all time.” How much of what we most admire in Mailer’s writing was “for an age,” that age being the 1960s and ’70s? Considering his contemporary novelists—Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth—my judgment is that certain of their works will last for a long time, if not for all time. I would be uncertain about claiming any novel of Mailer’s to fit that category, although I would claim it for Armies of the Night (1968).
What Mailer did that his contemporaries did not do was meet head-on every sort of public, social, and political phenomenon in order to “war” on them. To an extent, he shares this combative posture with Gore Vidal, another writer who will live less as a novelist than as an all-purpose gadfly. It was Vidal who told us on television that he would never turn down the opportunity to have sex or to appear on television. Mailer might have said the same thing; perhaps he did.
One of his books that has dropped out of sight is The Prisoner of Sex, in which he responded to the assault on him in Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969), another book very much of its time. In Prisoner, Mailer indulged in homemade philosophy about embryos, eggs, sperm, and the womb that turned off many readers, and not just female ones. But the book has fine oppositional things in it: Mailer’s jostling with what and how Millett quoted, and particularly (if one doesn’t have time for Henry Miller) his chapter on D. H. Lawrence, in which he circles back to the writer he read as a Harvard sophomore and who, he told a correspondent in 1985, changed his life. Lennon calls Mailer’s chapter on Lawrence “arguably his most incisive piece of literary criticism,” a judgment that has its weight. Lennon also quotes the sentence in which Mailer says Lawrence was “possessed of a mind which did not believe that any man on earth had a mind more important than his own.”
That sentence is, of course, about Mailer as well, but it could also be about, say, John Milton. Yet what Milton and Lawrence both lacked, burdened by their uncompromising Protestant genius, was the comic sense present in Mailer’s work, lighting up his best books and essays with extravagant performances.
The performances are there, abundantly, in his letters as well, only a tiny portion of which makes up this outsize selection. Mailer wrote some 45,000 letters, and this selection amounts to less than 2 percent of the whole. For comparative epistolary output from other 20th-century writers, Lennon notes that Willa Cather wrote 2,700, Elizabeth Bishop a few thousand, Hemingway 10,000. When Lennon began work on the project in 2002, he figured it would take a few years; he was soon overwhelmed. By way of accounting for such an extraordinary output, Gay Talese observes that no writer of Mailer’s generation was more accessible: He wrote, by a rough count, to 4,000 individuals, and his typical letter is long rather than short. If letters piled up while he was at work on a book (which was always), then he would answer them in gusts of whirlwind energy. It’s safe to guess that most of those who wrote to Mailer got back at least as much as they put out. Lennon’s notes are full and helpful.
It’s no criticism of the editor to say that if one has read the biography first, there are fewer surprises here than might be expected. At times I wondered just how many letters one might care to read from Mailer to Lillian Hellman and Diana Trilling about their celebrated (and rather boring) feud. Lennon’s account in the biography serves perfectly well to fill us in on the spat, and on Mailer’s awkward attempts to be a pal to both women. The volume also seems heavy, perhaps too heavy, on letters to Mailer’s chums such as Mickey Knox and Buzz Farbar, and to his longtime intellectual friend Jean Malaquis. And there are too many letters to the convict-murderer Jack Abbott, in whom Mailer invested a great deal of energy and time, to no good end.
Since it’s doubtful that many readers will sit down and read through all the correspondence, they can pick and choose a bit. Not to be missed, however, are the wonderful letters he wrote to his parents and to his first wife, Beatrice Silverman, about his wartime experience in the Philippines. There is a freshness and human sympathy in these letters that he couldn’t recapture as he went on to do battle with life after the Army. There is also a subtle, indeed poetic, account of other novelists. To Diana Trilling, recipient of many of his best letters, he insists that writers become great because of, not despite, their infirmities: “Faulkner’s long breath, Hemingway’s command of the short sentence, Proust’s cocoon.” He explains:
But he assures her that he is not becoming the Westbrook Pegler of world letters. Except for John Updike, there was no better novelist-critic of his predecessors and contemporaries in the fiction game than Norman Mailer.
He once confided to a correspondent, “You know, I never had a monstrous ego.” If we’re tempted to respond “Really?” then the variety of other lives with whom he engages in these letters—William F. Buckley and Monica Lewinsky, Clint Eastwood and Jacqueline Kennedy—suggests that he became a major writer by putting his infirmities on display, irrepressibly so.
William H. Pritchard is Henry Clay Folger professor of English at Amherst College.
