The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time. Whether rightly or wrongly, it is then obvious that I would go so far as to think it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years. I could be wrong, and if I am, then I’m the fool who will pay the bill, but I think we can all agree it would cheat this collection of its true interest to present myself as more modest than I am.
--Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself



I went to the New York Times web page this morning and read that novelist Norman Mailer had died at age 84, and to this moment I bow my head and seriously consider a major chapter in my own life closed. This hardly means that my book has ended, as Mailer's has, but it is true that Norman Mailer was the largest single influence in instilling the desire in me to write sentences that mean something large, important, and exciting. That desire was vanity, no doubt, but Mailer and the books he wrote-The Presidential Papers, An American Dream, Why Are We In Viet Nam, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Harlot's Ghost, The Executioner's Song, The Castle in the Forest among them-- were instrumental in getting me to pick up a pen and write away, transferring later to an Underwood 5, an IBM Selectric and various word processing programs afterward, all in the duty to speak truth to power as Mailer had, in metaphors of nuance, multiplied dualisms, rolling, Jamesian cadences mixed with the critical eye of a Mencken and the eroticized awareness of a Henry Miller.

Norman Mailer has had a radical trajectory through the course of his career, and then, at age 75 with fifty years as a professional writer behind him, a summary collection is the fashion, and The Time of Our Time is the door stopper through which posterity should judge either his ascension or decline in our literary Olympus. It's amazing, actually, how Mailer has controlled the course of criticism of his work, as he did with Advertisements for Myself and later with the Prisoner of Sex, both books through which his aesthetics were linked with a peculiarly Maileresque cosmology. There is much to argue with in The Prisoner of Sex, and though I'm in sympathy with the aims of the women’s movement, I cheer Mailer’s defense of the artists’ right to use their sexuality and sense of the sensual world as proper fodder for poetic expression. What makes the book important is precisely the fact that Mailer felt there was a need for a man to stand up and have a word against and about the rising tide of Feminist theory;

while many male writers were too confused, adrift in daydreams of irony or bottled up rage, and while the academy was surrendering its arms without a shot being fired, Mailer spoke up and wrote that there was a profound and important difference between the sexes, and that while social justice must and will prevail regarding the rights of women in the work place and overall social sphere, one cannot maintain, straight faced, that the only difference between the sexes has to do with genitalia.

There are times when Mailer- the- mystic clogs up an otherwise lacerating argument, where his romanticism veers dangerously towards a lunatic’s hallucinations, but his defense of Miller, Lawrence and Genet against the clumsier moments of Millet's original critique in Sexual Politics is literary criticism at its most emphatic. The Prisoner of Sex is, I'm afraid, incoherent at times, but there are long passages of rich knock-out prose that demonstrate why Mailer is thought by many to be one of the premiere stylists of the times, and if nothing else, his lyrical defense of D.H.Lawrence is worth the purchase by itself. One might despise Mailer and his philosophy, but a critic was still trapped discussing the work through the author's obsessions. And that is the mark of brilliance, Mailer could get his readers to talk about things he wanted to speak to, because his language is strangely persuasive, at his high point, even as it addresses the dark and obscene corners of the imagination, and the baser instincts of American power.

The Time of Our Time again makes us consider his entire career through Mailer's filter, and understandably, it can be aggravating for someone expecting an easy path into the body of his work. But it gives us the rewards, with generous selections form his best work, The Naked and the Dead, Armies of the Night, Executioner's Song, An American Dream--and likewise long excerpts from slighter efforts, like The Gospel According to the Son and his recent Picasso biography. There is an impressive reach over the five decades that he's been in the public eye, an early brashness turning into a combative and provocative brilliance that at times trips over its own eloquence that later turned into thoughtful, epic scale storytelling through which the previous egocentric prose vanished behind the tragedy writ in the Gary Gilmore saga.

It's difficult not to be impressed with the range of Mailer's topics in fiction, journalism, and essays! --World War 2 in the Pacific, Moon Landings, Black power, Women's Rights, Hunting, Reichian sexuality, the failure of Marxism, The Kennedy Assassination, Ancient Egypt, masculinity and American Literature, the dread of Modern architecture, the real meaning of the right wing, Boxing--and while Mailer at times seems breathless and throat clearing in his writing, that he's spreading a style too thin to cover the feeling that he is, for the moment, bereft of anything interesting to say, you note the way he changes tact, changes styles, and ushers in another period of solid books that stand as his strongest. The Time of Our Time provides an overly long reflection of a career that has been victim of the author's proclaimed desire to be the champ of his generation, but it also gives us a chance to appreciate a brilliant talent that found expression in spite of Mailer's self-annihilating quirks. Controversial, problematic, self-absorbed, but quintessentially American, he remains one of the best witnesses we could have had for the second half of the century.

Hardly a perfect writer, Norman Mailer was someone I called "our best writer" because he dared not to be retiring and falsely modest, and he wasn't afraid of taking risk or playing the fool. He had succeeded, Charles Heimler told me in conversation, in being "avant-garde and mainstream at the same time;” rigorously experimental, Mailer was a nineteenth century moralist who found his intellectual bearings in the High Modernism of the Fifties, who developed a sort of post-modern strategy of narrative quick change to keep his characters, situations, and core ideas alive, thriving, relevant. Mailer was oracular, a visionary, a mystic, a religious existential of his own design, but he was also one of the best observers of the American scene, a trenchant political reporter, a social pundit , a thoroughly devastating and subtle literary critic, a sublime and contentious commentator on painting, architecture, graffiti, theatre, movies. Novelist, essayist, film maker, journalist, Norman Mailer was someone you read, he was someone you listened to, someone you argued with and argued over with friends (or near friends); Norman Mailer was someone you paid attention to.

As Kant notes someplace or other in the third Critique, we all thnk our tastes are tne normative expressions of universal common sense. In much the same way, none of us can imagine being dead; it's a kind of limit. You say Norman Mailer was "our" best writer and the one who best expressed "our" needs and thoughts in "our" world, but what you are talking about, Ted, is you.

" It's difficult not to be impressed with the range of Mailer's topics in fiction, journalism, and essays! --World War 2 in the Pacific, Moon Landings, Black power, Women's Rights, Hunting, Reichian sexuality, the failure of Marxism, The Kennedy Assassination, Ancient Egypt, masculinity and American Literature, the dread of Modern architecture, the real meaning of the right wing, Boxing..."

And about every single one of those topics, Mailer's thoughts were borrowed, pedestrian and superficial. He was a large though not vast compendium of the okay thoughts of the upper-west-side "intellectuals" of his time. True, he was just a taste more radical than some, especially as those some have now become, but he was always so fucking Ordinary that i long since gave up reading him for content, or for style, for that matter. If you want to read those Jamesian dependent clauses, dropping in place like the contents of a trunk being dragged down stairs, read William Gass. He wasn't so breathlessly and trivially informative, but when it came to writing about literature, he was in a class above Mailer. There are, about every single one of Mailer's stable of hobbyhorses, better writers. So why read him, now?

To sentimentalize Mailer, from your standpoint, is to sentimentalize a time of one's life; a time when one was indisputably younger than one is now. But i have to argue with one of your choices of texts to celebrate: Mailer's wretched _Prisoner of Sex_. In this awful essay, Mailer takes on a far better, far more thoughtfully written and cogently argued book, Kate Millett's _Sexual Politics_. Nobody much seems to read Millett's book these days, and that saddens me, because if all you know about it is that Mailer wrote a shit book in response to it, you know just about nothing. You have to actually READ Millett to discover that her reading of Henry Miller is actually more sympathetic than Mailer's, which stands to reason, as she had no oedipal axe to grind against a presumed father figure, though there is not much, really, that Mailer and Miller have in common, excepting a certain bluff, hormonal self-assurance. Because of that self-assurance and its importance to their work, both tend to reassure themselves constantly about their presence in the world; that it's bigger, harder, more deeply penetrative and longer-lasting than anyone else's.

There's an essay someplace; one of his NYRB essays, in which Gass takes on the Mailer/Millett pissing contest (I think it's in the third among his essay collections) and deals as well with Miller and Lawrence. All of these gents have, supposedly, been victimized by academic feminism. Ted, you seem to be a victim of that supposition. This did not happen. What happened to Lawrence was that a wave of puritanism removed his books from his primary audience, which was always high school kids. Lawrence amd Miller are perfect reading for a sixteen-year-old, just as Raphael Sabatini is best read at twelve. Like Durrell, Kerouac, or Tolkein, you have to read them young if you're going to read them at all.

One thing for which, even if you can't bring yourself to actually read her, you have to give Millett credit is that the criticism of Miller and Lawrence improved considerably after it had to respond to her. Mailer got in as one of the early entries in that field, but _Prisoner_ is, like its author, confused and superficial.

There was a moment in Mailer's campaign for Mayor, in which it struck Jimmy Bresllin, as if by lightning, that Maier had convinced himself that he was really running for the office, not just running as a piece of Brechtian theater in the round. That drive to always take himself seriously, no matter the role, was Mailer's primary talent. How exhausting it is to be around people like that: they use up so much air and give so little back.

one cannot maintain, straight faced, that the only difference between the sexes has to do with genitalia Well, of course one can't, because that argument is an absurd straw-man one relied upon by Mailer in his soggy, silly text. As "Melvyn" rightfully observed, Millett is far more incisive, not to mention delightfully pugnacious and life-affirming, on Mailer and gender than the inverse. As was James Baldwin in his classic response to White Negro, The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy. I am astonished at entirely inaccurate media claims about Mailer, cleaning him up so now. His stabbing his wife becomes "hi-jinks"; the Times dedicates an entire column to distancing themselves from their own role in their mutually incontinent advocacy for the release of Jack Abbott; and Mailer's views on blacks and women are everywhere excused, minimized, or flatly denied. If Mailer were a man of principle, it would seem that he'd despise this revision of his views. But I imagine the opposite would be more accurate. Too bad he's being accommodated, post-mortem, on the record.

Mailers' movie making and his run for Mayor of New York were "hi jinks" ,stabbing his wife Adele was a tragedy, a monstrous act. Even Mailer said that, on many occasions.

Mailer was an articulate loud mouth who riffed on things beyond his expertise and knowledge, but he was voluminous in his production, and enough of worth and greatness remains after his departure that elevates him to the higher shelves of American literature. A condition of genius , I'd say, is an individual's ability to transcend their own fuckedupedness and to produce work that stands apart from the imperfect source that produced it.

The mainstream press's summaries of Mailer's life and career are respectful and for the most part absent of the deeper grievances against him as artist and personality, but it would make sense for journalist to concentrate on why Mailer was taken seriously in the first place. The estimating will continue apace, and it may well be that it's Mailer who has the last laugh , since many are still arguing over him after he's dead. It's likely his name will inspire more contretemps, and that's a tip of a hat from me. He did not go quietly.

I know it's petty, since we're at a wake and all, but my chosen name on this board is MELVYL, as in Melvyl Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System, founder of America's first Library School and of the ALA, and as generally nuts as any of the great Victorian wackos.

Jeebus, people, get a grip.

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