Strangely Strange But Oddly Norman

Read Norman Mailer or get a new tailor. Lloyd Cole, Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken

IN HIS 1996 novel Desperation, Stephen King saw fit to mould one of the main characters, Johnny Marinville, as a thinly-veiled younger version of Norman Mailer. Marinville, a white-haired, cantankerous, ageing, hellraising writer, is riding across America on a motorbike in order to write a book called Travels With Harley. He finds himself kidnapped by a maniac policeman and taken to a town where all the inhabitants have been murdered. Marinville is involved in shootouts, demonic possession, exorcisms and other occult-related mayhem before making it out alive at the end of the book.
It says everything about Mailer that, were the aforesaid events to befall him, he would surely regard the circumstances as merely another potential source of 5,000 words of diamond copy. Or, knowing Mailer, 12,000.
The Time Of Our Time is surely one of the books of the decade. A huge retrospective of the work of the greatest literary shit-stirrer of, well, our time, it originally appeared late last year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his first book, 1948 s Pacific WWII fable The Naked And The Dead, and has just been published in paperback.
As anyone familiar with his work will know, Mailer has always had his eye on the bigger picture, a man obsessed as much with posterity as plaudits. There is always a sense in his writing that he is desperate to be the one to get it all down in print, the one entrusted with chronicling the Major Happenings. Hence the title of a work painted on the vastest canvas imaginable, obviously intended as Mailer s final, all-encompassing word on the American century. His desire to be the self-appointed Scribe General of our age would be by turns touching and hilarious if he was not so damn good at what he does.
There are lengthy excerpts from his three biggest books: The Executioner s Song (the story of Death Row inmate Gary Gilmore, who murdered two men and subsequently confounded the authorities by insisting that he had a right to be executed); Of A Fire On The Moon (Mailer s account of the first lunar landing in 1969, an astonishing piece of writing which towers over Tom Wolfe s The Right Stuff its nearest contemporary by a mile); and The Naked And The Dead itself (of which the portion quoted is a breathtakingly descriptive account of a night-time gun battle between US and Japanese forces in a jungle delta).
In his pieces about Marilyn Monroe, particularly the outsider s account of her marriage to playwright Arthur Miller, it is Mailer s keen eye for particularities which dominates his writing. The devil is in the detail: of what Marilyn bought on her shopping trips, of the innumerable tiny agonies she goes through while working with a disdainful Laurence Olivier in England, of the way she and her new husband perform for the camera in their wedding pictures . . .
How beautiful they look . . . Like Hindu sculpture, their hands go over one another s torsos, limbs, and outright privates in next to full view of company, a questionable activity to perform in front of cynics, but it is as if the hero and heroine will each declare to the world that no matter the extent of her sexual scholarship and his meagre schooling, they meet as equals in the godly art. They are lovers, and that is the only law of balance in sexual thermodynamics. They will immolate the past with the heat of the present.
In a work of this size it is inevitable that there will be plenty of detritus, since the sheer law of averages dictates that a writer as prolific as Mailer will not get through a 50-year career without producing a decent-sized amount of rubbish. The crap quotient here is characterised by the unnecessary, score-settling transcription of Mailer s appearance on The Cavett Show in 1971. Mailer appears with his great rival Gore Vidal, with whom he has had a longstanding mutual enmity for years (Vidal has Mailer down as a misogynist; Mailer views Vidal as a jealous old queen). Yet, instead of the juicy, no-holds barred slugfest which threatens to materialise, the two of them sit around preening themselves, each intellectually jerking the other off.
There is also a pointless extract from 1984 s Tough Guys Don t Dance, too many selections from the interesting-but-self-indulgent Harlot s Ghost, and a reproduction of perhaps Mailer s most overrated work, his 1957 essay The White Negro, in its entirety. Here, his intellectual manoeuvre is to hold up the most loaded stereotype of black machismo as a lifestyle-ideal for the white hipsters of the time, in an amoral, rule-free world where gratification is all.
Mailer s idea is that by the use of intoxicants and the cultivation of the conscience-free psychopath within one s soul, man can be set free. Whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, he writes. This stuff is as close as he ever got to Beat poetry, for which we can all be grateful.
It s hugely apparent that some of this material could have done with more stringent self-editing, but Mailer s first rule appears to be no blue pencil . Which is a shame, as work like Harlot s Ghost, in particular, could have benefitted immensely from a more ruthless approach to wordage and paragraph-length.
Happily, that isn t something you could say about the political sections of the book, which showcase Mailer at his best: wired, subduedly angry, prowling around the press conferences and voting centres, lusting for ever more telling detail. His account of the 1992 Republican convention in Houston is a minor classic, resisting the temptation to indulge in easy caricature of the corn-fed, rosy-cheeked delegates and their families, and instead honing in on the grotesqueries of the event, the battle for the soul of the GOP, between the near-fanatical lobby of pro-lifers and Christians on one wing and the opportunist, irresolutely hand-wringing moderates on the other.
Attempting to decipher exactly why the hapless Dan Quayle was so reviled by the liberal American media, Mailer muses: A young, rich, good-looking man does well not to be pious piety, we sense, is not convincing unless it is based on tragedy and dread. Even as he threw down the gauntlet, he lacked dimension, a mediocre actor reciting a line more powerful than the true register of his experience. Besides, he lacked taste. He mashed tuna salad onto blueberry muffins.
Elsewhere, much of Mailer s later writing is characterised by his willingness to engage in stunts of liberal derring-do and shock tactics to blow up in the face of conservatives, a position perfectly encapsulated by his response to the 1989 fatwa placed on Salman Rushdie by Iran. In a speech about the fatwa, he posits the theory that the Ayatollah Khomeini, in ordering that Rushdie be assassinated, did the literary world a great favour in reawakening the idea that writers might become martyrs for their art.
I would suggest, writes Mailer, that it is our duty to form ranks behind him, and our duty to state . . . that if he is ever assassinated, it will then become our obligation to stand in his place. If he is ever killed for a folly, we must be killed for the same folly, and we may indeed be, since we will then vow to do our best to open all literary meetings with a reading of the critical pages in The Satanic Verses.
His famous 1994 interview with Madonna oscillates between perversely obsequious fawning ( That will be the theme of this piece, that what we have among us is our greatest living female artist, Mailer says to her at one point) and genuinely insightful interrogation. Mailer appears not to understand the dynamics of pop music, and so sees Madonna purely as a visual and polemical figure, not as a singer. He spends more time discussing her largely atrocious acting career than her records, and volunteers the baffling theory that the style of her promo videos was proof positive of her high artistic intelligence (by which criteria Puff Daddy is the greatest musical totem of modern times). Certainly, what he would have made of Madonna s efficient rebranding of herself as an organic earth-mother on last year s Ray Of Light is anyone s guess.
For most of its 1290 pages, The Time Of Our Time is a boisterous, rabid, riotous, raucous attempt to take a huge bite out of the American century and spit out the pips. Mailer may not have written a decent book in years, but by the time the reader is finished with this massive, maddening, marvellous, moronic, magnificent volume, it ceases to matter. His work is already done. n
The Time Of Our Time is out now in Abacus (paperback), priced #15.99.