An established antiestablishment guru

Of course, the Beats were not the only figures who harbingered the “worship of juvenile values” and helped prepare the way for the long march of America’s cultural revolution. They had many collaborators. Indeed, the Beats, by being ostentatiously bohemian, insinuated themselves and their values into American life only gradually. It took a decade or more for America fully to catch up with the adolescent ethos they represented. Other figures, although equally preposterous, were embraced with far greater alacrity by the establishment culture. And because they were taken more seriously to begin with, the toxic ideas they promulgated found a large, eager, and influential audience even earlier.

One such figure was Norman Mailer, novelist, wifestabber, political activist, sometime candidate for mayor of New York, and perpetual enfant terrible. Mailer epitomized a certain species of macho, adolescent radicalism that helped to inure the wider public to displays of violence, anti-American tirades, and sexual braggadocio.

It didn’t start out that way. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1923, Mailer was brought up in Brooklyn, “a nice Jewish boy,” as he once put it, from a middle-class family of first-generation immigrants. It was a background from which he has been endeavoring to escape ever since. “Mailer,” Norman Podhoretz observed in his memoir Ex-Friends, “would spend the rest of his life overcoming the stigma of this reputation as a ‘nice Jewish boy’ by doing as an adult all the hooliganish things he had failed to do in childhood and adolescence.” After a dutiful childhood, Mailer matriculated at Harvard in 1939. His parents had made a “big sacrifice” to send their intense, studious son to the elite institution, and he was “not going to let them down.” Although he did some writing in college, he majored in aeronautical engineering, graduating in 1942. In 1944, he married for the first of (so far) six times; and then from 1944 to 1946, he served with the U.S. Army in the Philippines and Japan.

In 1948, when he was only twenty-five, Mailer’s war novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published. For most critics of war fiction, The Naked and the Dead ranks somewhere between the novels of Herman Wouk (e.g., The Caine Mutiny) and James Jones (From Here to Eternity). It is more pretentious, but less well-crafted, and its narrative develops less momentum. Its heavy-handed psychologizing and use of four-letter words were thought smart in 1948; most contemporary readers will find them quaint if not downright embarrassing. Nevertheless, The Naked and the Dead was an immediate and immense success. The novel catapulted its young author to an atmosphere of wealth, adulation, and celebrity from which he has yet to descend. Whatever else can be said about it, the reception of The Naked and the Dead is an object lesson in the perils—what it might please Norman Mailer to call the “existential” perils —of early success. Mailer himself has never recovered.

For readers who did not witness his elevation to the role of literary-political culture hero, it is difficult to appreciate the awe with which Norman Mailer was regarded by the literary and academic establishment from the 1950s through the 1960s and into the 1970s. A typical paean is Diana Trilling’s convoluted 1962 essay on “The Radical Moralism of Norman Mailer,” which concludes by comparing Mailer to the prophet Moses “with a stopover at Marx.” “His moral imagination,” Mrs. Trilling assured her readers, “is the imagination not of art but of theology, theology in action.” Which means ... ? Very little, alas, although talk of “theology in action” (as distinct, perhaps, from “theology asleep”?) doubtless sparked interesting vibrations in susceptible souls. As Mailer more or less admitted in what is probably his best-known collection, Advertisements for Myself (1959)—a title that could be used again for his complete works—he was a sucker for mystification: “mate the absurd with the apocalyptic, and I was captive.”

No one, not even Susan Sontag, combined critical regard, popular celebrity, and radical chic politics with quite the same insouciance as did Mailer. From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania. Although he modeled his persona on some of the less attractive features of Ernest Hemingway—booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads—he managed to update that pathetic, shopworn machismo with some significant postwar embellishments: reefer, radicalism, and Reich, for starters. There was also the matter of another “R”: royalties. Mailer’s first royalty check for The Naked and the Dead was $40,000 —eminently respectable even today, but an enormous sum in the late 1940s. The glittering example of Mailer’s commercial success was obviously the cynosure that many aspiring writers set out to follow: his neat trick was to combine cachet with large amounts of cash.

In 1955, Mailer helped to found The Village Voice, which, though always riven by internal dissension, quickly became a megaphone barking New Left thought, such as it was, into the mainstream culture. By the mid-1960s, he had emerged as an established antiestablishment guru. In Scriptures for a Generation, a left-leaning synopsis of radical texts from the Sixties, the critic Philip Beidler observed that

there is no doubt that Mailer as a literary intellectual wished to assume the mantle of ’60s youth-illuminatus, at once existential prophet and pied piper. Accordingly, his career across the decade revealed a relentless, almost obsessive wish to be the voice of ’60s adversarial culture in its broadest sense: a voice uniting the radical intelligentsia and dissenting youth in a new project of revolutionary consciousness spilling over from bohemian lofts and campus enclaves into the streets of the nation at large.

The spectacular success of works like The Armies of the Night (1968)—Mailer’s bloated, “non-fiction novel” about the 1967 march on the Pentagon and his own role in the demonstration—bore witness to his gifts for literary demagoguery. Subtitled History as a Novel, the Novel as History, the book followed Truman Capote’s example in In Cold Blood (1966), deliberately blurring fact and fiction, a procedure gratefully seized upon by a public eager to sacrifice truth to the demands of ideological zeal. Indeed, it was a procedure that characterized the intellectual—or, more accurately, the antiintellectual—temper of a generation battened on mind-altering drugs and taught to regard any appeal to facts as an unacceptably “authoritarian” threat. Among anti-Vietnam War radicals—which is to say, among nine out of ten establishment intellectuals—Mailer’s exercise in narcissistic psychohistory was greeted with ecstatic hosannas, and duly picked up both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Sample adulation from the critic Richard Gilman: “Mailer has opened up new possibilities for the literary imagination and new room for us to breathe in the crush of actuality.” From the writer Nat Hentoff: “Mailer has won clear claim to being the best writer in America.”

Getting away with murder

In fact, like almost all of Mailer’s books, The Armies of the Night is badly written—almost preposterously so. It has often been observed that Mailer’s early literary heroes were Hemingway and John Dos Passos. But his own writing totally lacks Hemingway’s lapidary craftsmanship and Dos Passos’s cinematic control. When The Armies of the Night was serialized in Harper’s,⁵ to the great excitement of the editor, Willie Morris, a young copy editor complained about Mailer’s prose and, as one witness recollects, asked, “I wonder what he writes like when he’s sober?” The unfortunate copy editor was promptly fired. But she was right: The Armies of the Night is a hyperbolic, self-indulgent mess that looks sillier and more naïve with every year that passes. Its famous third-person narrative strikes one now as a facile gimmick: “Mailer discovered he was jealous. Not of the talent. [Robert] Lowell’s talent was very large, but then Mailer was a bulldog about the value of his own talent.... Nonetheless, to Mailer it was now mano a mano.” That “mano a mano” is about as close to Hemingway as Mailer gets.

The adulation that greeted The Armies of the Night underscores an important fact about Mailer’s success. It is part of Mailer’s genius to have been able to calibrate his appetites and deficiencies precisely to the appetites and deficiencies of the moment. His obsessions have been celebrated as brave insights because they have mirrored the defining obsessions of the time. For a moment—but only for a moment-they appear to be revelatory insights. Well into the 1970s, anyway, Mailer instinctively knew exactly what register of rhetorical excess would galvanize the left-wing intellectual establishment. This talent made him an important figure in the long march of America’s cultural revolution. It has proved to be immensely profitable, financially and in terms of prestige. By the time Mailer came to write The Prisoner of Sex (1971), he was widely rumored to be up for a Nobel Prize, a rumor that absorbed his full attention for the first thirty pages of that execrable book.

This is not to say that Mailer has escaped criticism. His second and third novels, The Deer Park (1955) and Barbary Shore (1961), were widely attacked, as indeed was An American Dream (1965). An American Dream was the infamous novel in which the hero, Stephen Rojack, a savvy, tough-guy intellectua-just like Norman Mailer, you see—starts out by strangling his wife. He then walks downstairs and buggers his wife’s accommodating German maid, a former Nazi who declares, “I do not know why you have trouble with your wife. You are an absolute genius, Mr. Rojack.” (Buggery—another “B” to put alongside booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads-was to become an obsession with Mailer.) There are numerous Mailerian fingerprints in the novel. President Kennedy (“Jack”) calls to convey his condolences; Rojack’s wife is rumored to have had affairs with men high up in the British, American, and Soviet spy agencies; even Marilyn Monroe-who was to become another of Mailer’s notorious obsessions—makes a posthumous cameo appearance: when Rojack fantasizes about having a telephone conversation with a dead character, he reports that “the girls are swell. Marilyn says to say hello.” But the chief point of the book is that Rojack gets away with the murder. Such, Mailer wants us to believe, is the real if unacknowledged “American dream.”

For those in the know about Mailer, the novel carried an additional frisson. A few years before, at a party he threw to announce his mayoral candidacy on the “Existentialist” ticket, Mailer got drunk and stabbed his wife Adele (number two), nearly killing her. (In 1969, Mailer ran for mayor again, this time on the “Secessionist” ticket, which included proposals that New York City become the fifty-first state and that disputes among young criminals be settled by jousting tournaments in Central Park.) Adele declined to press charges, and so Mailer escaped this outrage with a fortnight in Bellevue for observation.

Mailer’s obsession with violence against women seems to have had a long gestation. Carl Rollyson opens his biography of Mailer with the story of John Maloney, a drunkard and a friend of Mailer and William Styron. In 1954, Maloney stabbed his mistress and fled. He was later jailed but released when charges were dropped. Styron recalled that at the time Mailer said to him: “God, I wish I had the courage to stab a woman like that. That was a real gutsy act.” That tells one all one needs to know about Norman Mailer’s idea of “courage.”

What is perhaps most alarming about Mailer’s violence against his wife was that it seems to have titillated more than it repelled his circle of friends. In any event it brought very little condemnation. “Among ‘uptown intellectuals,’” Irving Howe wrote “there was this feeling of shock and dismay, and I don’t remember anyone judging him. The feeling was that he’d been driven to this by compulsiveness, by madness. He was seen as a victim.” Readers who wonder how stabbing his wife could make Mailer a “victim”—and who ask themselves, further, what Mailer’s being a victim would then make Adele—clearly do not have what it takes to be an “uptown intellectual.” In Dawn Powell’s 1962 novel The Golden Spur, there is a character who observes that “Artists get away with more human nature than anybody else.” Powell had a painter in mind, but Norman Mailer illustrates the point even more graphically than the loutish character of Powell’s imagination.