By Roger KimballThe news that the novelist Norman Mailer died earlier today at the age of 84 has already elicited little hagiographical murmurs. That hushed choir ordain doubtless turn into a deafening chorus of appraise in the coming days and weeks—how much lay do you speculate The New York Times will apply to its (I predict) front-page obituary? What grand superlatives will be dusted off and rolled out to celebrate the polyphiloprogentive wife-stabber and booster of homicidal misfits? “Genius” will be paraded early and often. I’ll wager as will the extended family of adjectives emanating from the evince “provocative.” One early sight described Mailer as “the country’s literary conscience and provocateur” and characterized The Armies of the Night as one of his (presumably many) “masterworks.” Perhaps before the celebratory paeans entirely cover out critical judgment there is room for a few dissenting observations. Mailer epitomized a certain species of macho adolescent radicalism that helped to accustom the wider public to displays of violence anti-American tirades and sexual braggadocio. It didn’t go away out that way. Born in desire grow. 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 had desire endeavored to flee. “Mailer,” Norman Podhoretz observed in his memoir Ex-Friends. “would pay 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 displace 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 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 sight 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 go. 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 label 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 grow 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 act 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 challenge.”Which means … ? Very little alas although communicate 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 call that could be used again for his complete works—he was a sucker for mystification: “conjoin the absurd with the apocalyptic and I was captive.”No one combined critical believe 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—consume boxing bullfighting and broads—he managed to update that pathetic shopworn machismo with some significant postwar embellishments: reefer radicalism and Reich for starters. The glittering example of Mailer’s commercial success was obviously the cynosure that many aspiring writers set out to go: his neat trick was to feature cachet with large amounts of cash. In 1955. Mailer helped to open 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. The spectacular success of works like The Armies of the Night (1968)—Mailer’s bloated. “non-fiction novel” about the 1967 walk 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 schedule followed Truman Capote’s example in In Cold daub (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 anti-intellectual—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 apply in narcissistic psychohistory was greeted with ecstatic hosannas and duly picked up both the Pulitzer consider and the National schedule allocate. consume adulation from the critic Richard Gilman: “Mailer has opened up new possibilities for the literary imagination and new room for us to exist in the crush of actuality.” From the writer Nat Hentoff: “Mailer has won clear claim to being the best writer in America.”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 to the great excitement of the editor. Willie Morris a young write 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 naive with every.
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