Norman Mailer: Brawler, bruiser, writer

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Norman Mailer, who died this week at the age of 84, was probably one of the world's greatest bad writers. Three phrases crop up most often in his obituaries "" "a doyen of American letters", "a great novelist", "an iconic writer"""and none of them is strictly true.

Mailer was the first of these chiefly by dint of surviving: as he often pointed out, very few practising writers make it to their eighties. It would take a very generous reader to call him a great novelist "" only The Naked and the Dead comes even close, and that early war novel was easily surpassed by the likes of Joseph Heller and Erich Maria Remarque. He was an icon, definitely, though more for being Norman Mailer than for being a writer. What he fulfilled, however, was a more important role: literature needs its bad boys, and he brawled, blustered and bragged his way through his long life.

It is something of a shock to see how trivial or insistently self-involved many of his works were ""books almost forgotten, like Fire on the Moon, or remembered with a wince, like Ancient Evenings. Only Mailer would have worked in a deeply egotistic exploration of himself into Fire on the Moon, ostensibly an account of the Apollo moon landings. The risible Ancient Evenings took ten hard-drinking years in the making, was chiefly about buggery and ancient Egypt, and featured women who expressed their enthusiasm in bed in this fashion: "''I am the Keel ... My Secret Name is Thigh of Isis ... I am the Rudder ... In My Name is Leg of the Nile.''

Far more of Mailer's work was of these dubious standards than his fans are willing to admit. He redeemed himself with a few books that stand if not with the greats, then at least alongside them. Perhaps his most chilling work was The Executioner's Song, about Gary Gilmore, the first murderer to be executed in the US after the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Mailer saw Gilmore as an outsider, a grand outlaw figure, and his obvious fascination with the murderer makes this book a gripping if uncomfortable read.

Harlot's Ghost and Oswald's Tale made up for the mawkishness of his exploration of the Marilyn Monroe myth in Marilyn, but both in their dense prolixity revealed the chief characteristic of Mailer's writing: there was never a love affair to rival the one between Norman Mailer and Norman Mailer.

If you didn't turn to Norman Mailer to read him, what purpose did he serve? His early writing had energy and a passionate integrity. Then there was the man himself: no critic could write a negative review without risking direct physical retribution. He head-butted Gore Vidal; lying on the floor, winded, Vidal commented, "Words fail Norman Mailer yet again." Truman Capote once said of Mailer, "He has no talent. None, none, none." When Mailer met him next, he sat on Capote. His letters to reviewers were legendary: there was one in which he referred to himself in the third person throughout ("Mailer was annoyed"), there was the one to William Styron where he offered to stomp the "fat and treacherous" s**t out of his fellow novelist.

Feminists hated his guts, chiefly because he reciprocated the sentiment. His statement that all women should be locked in cages has been quoted, often out of context, though it was equally offensive in context. Kate Millet skewered his sexual politics in her iconic work, and Mailer lobbed back with a clumsy attack on her, Germaine Greer and other feminists. It didn't help that he stabbed his wife, Adele, in a drunken haze in 1960, or that the chief protagonist in American Dream (1965) was Stephen Rojack, a man who gets away with killing his wife. (Nor did it change the fact that American Dream is among Mailer's best works "" unpleasantly savage, unpleasantly honest.)

Over the years, readers grew to accept Mailer's fascination with the third person. He often referred to himself as "Mailer" in letters; appeared variously as "The Ruminant", "The Beast" and "Mailer" in The Armies of the Night, as "Norman" in The Fight, and as "the Prisoner" in The Prisoner of Sex, to name just a few books where he couldn't bear to leave himself out.

And so now Mailer is dead, and little as some of us liked his work, I have to admit that the world is a greyer, quieter and less entertaining place without him. Today's savage battles are fought between agents and publishers, editors and reviewers: the writers are expected to sit quietly at the back and behave themselves. An hour of Mailer in today's publishing conglomerates might not be such a bad thing.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com  

The author is chief editor, Westland and EastWest Books; the views expressed here are her private opinion