Stormin' Norman
A salute to the raging bull of American intellectualism, Norman Mailer.
Eamonn McCann, 05 Dec 2007
You come to a certain age and looking back along the year, tombstones mark out the months.
Norman Mailer died in November, of kidney failure, in Manhattan, aged 84. His most famous novel, The Naked And The Dead, was the first proper book I ever read for pleasure. I think I was about 14. A man who does that for you enriches your life hence.
Published when he was 25, The Naked And The Dead presented a view of World War Two in the Pacific in coarse contrast to the John Wayne genre of clean-cut GIs in combat against Japs. It was a humanitarian epic of shit and death written from the perspective of a disillusioned grunt. Every page had a paragraph that hit like a hard-knuckle punch.
His second novel, Barbary Shore, was set in a Brooklyn rooming house of reds and refugees, stoolies and spies and a woman haunted by the knowledge that she’d introduced Trotsky to the hoodlum who plunged an ice-pick in his brain. Critics, skulking in wait after the sensational success of The Naked And The Dead, set upon it like scavengers cheated of their last kill.
It would have benefited from editing. But there’s no better intro to the sense of psychic disenchantment which descended on some as the intensity of war gave way to the dourness of a peace that seemed an inadequate return on the investment of pain their generation had made.
Two big books under his belt and not yet 30, he seemed to have written non-stop for the next half century, and published too much. In the 1970s, he was to launch ridiculous assaults on women’s liberation, while drooling over Marilyn Monroe. He had an endless need to demonstrate his masculinity. “Writing is fighting,” he said. Generally speaking, his prose was more muscular than his pugilism.
He did produce one other great sort-of-novel, The Executioner’s Song, the true story of Gary Gilmore, shot by firing squad in 1977 for the casual killing of a gas-station attendant, a steadily-observed, coolly-detached, perfectly-wrought chronicle of a man for whom the meanness of the world was the whole of his life. Read it alongside Capote’s In Cold Blood for the difference between a brilliant craftsman and a brawling genius.
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