When, if ever, does the talent of an individual attain such heights that it lessens, or even negates the impact of their horrific deeds? Can a writer’s past be ignored or, as Johann Hari puts it, glossed over, in an effort to recognise his work?
Perhaps an even more important question is can you do justice to an individual without listing the parts that made up the whole?
Norman Mailer (Kingsley) was born to a well known Jewish family in New Jersey. His father, Barney, was an accountant born in South Africa. Raised in Brooklyn, he graduated as an aeronautical engineer at Harvard.
While he served in World War II he was later arrested for protesting against the war in Vietnam.
His first story was published when he was 18 and he went on to become a great American novelist, playwright, journalist, screenwriter and film director.
Or did he?
Mailer was married six times and his attacks on women — both physical and through his writing — should leave no-one in any doubt about his feelings on the subject.
Matthew Syed of the Times of London refers to his penchant for violence; stabbing his second wife in the neck and punching her in the stomach while she was pregnant.
Maxwell Yim, a columnist for the Daily Californian sums up Mailer’s contribution as: “But in the end, I read Norman Mailer, and that is, a celebrity wordsmith who has carved a semi-distinguishable character of the American vernacular. Aside from his command of the English language, there really isn’t anything magnificent about this guy. He’s typically American in all of the worst ways — egocentric, naive, illiterate, short-sighted and narrow-minded. But he’s endearing, and we all learn to love the fighter, the wife-beater, the charismatic radical despot (the celebrated standard bearer for unchampioned charity cases). So, yes, this isn’t my ideal. Nor should it be anyone’s ideal in this new century. OK, so Mailer’s a bullshit, misogynist creep (but make sure that you criticise him on grounds more substantial than character evidence, of course).”
The Scotsman has a short piece introducing Mailer’s final interview which you can download for free, without any mention of his misdemeanors.
Having battled through a number of Mailer’s novels, I can’t say that I was a big fan. His latest, The Castle in the Forest, tells the story of a young Adolf Hitler through the eyes of a demon who has been sent to guide him.
The book is disturbing, not because of the subject matter but because of the mind at work churning out those pages. Page after page we are treated to the rationale behind evil to the point that it almost glorifies it.
As critic Lee Siegel at the New York Times in assessing this novel submits, Mailer doesn’t so much inhabit his characters as possess them.
“For Mailer, a novelist fanatically committed to the truth, the problem of the ego’s relation to other people has been for many years now the problem of the narrator’s relation to his material. In his eyes, writing must be an authentic presentation of the self.
As Mailer sees it, great writing puts before the reader life’s harshest enigmas with clarity and compassion.
”The novelist is out there early with a particular necessity that may become the necessity of us all,” he wrote.
”It is to deal with life as something God did not offer us as eternal and immutable. Rather, it is our human destiny to enlarge what we were given. Perhaps we are meant to clarify a world which is always different in one manner or another from the way we have seen it on the day before. And once you have authentically presented yourself in your writing, you can no longer practice the expedience of concealing yourself as a person.”
Mailer, in my humble submission cannot conceal himself as a person. Through his work we meet the mind operating behind the typewriter — a violent, spiteful man who allowed his hatred to overtake him.
His effort to write the great American novel has not, in my humble opinion, succeeded.
Can we overlook the malevolence that is Mailer and appreciate the talent?
To subtract from the whole is not only a disservice to the individual but asks that we assess his work in a vacuum.
Moreover, if we allow our judgement to be focused on words without context, ie, the writer’s circumstances and state of mind, we are, again in my humble opinion, collecting thoughts without any measure with which to value them.
We must have regard for Mailer the man, his time and the events giving rise to the ideas he is attempting to put across.
That can never be judged in isolation.
Norman Mailer was a disturbed individual whose legacy must be that his works be studied as such.
Anything less would betray his obsession with the truth and his assertion that once you have presented yourself in your writing, you can no longer practice the expedience of concealing yourself as a person.
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