[Crilosajsamq]

Norman Mailer dies aged 84.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Mailer

[MpbY5dkR]

November 10, 2007
Appraisal

Mailer Made America His Subject

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Norman Mailer was nothing if not ambitious. He once declared he wanted to write “a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read.” He wanted to “alter the nerves and marrow” of the nation with his work, to “change the consciousness” of his times. He wanted to write the Big Book, the Great American Novel. He wanted to hit the longest long ball of them all.

Though his first book, “The Naked and the Dead,” was an estimable war novel that won him enormous celebrity at the age of 25, and he would go on to write many more novels over the decades, it was nonfiction, not fiction, that would prove his most lasting contribution. “The Armies of the Night,” his noisy, self-dramatizing account of his own experiences in the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon, became a founding document of what Tom Wolfe would call “the new journalism”: nonfiction that possessed all the ardor, attitude and body language of a novel but remained grounded in old-fashioned legwork and observation.

It was a genre particularly suited to covering the tumult and cacophonous change abroad in the 60s, a decade so surreal, so stupefying, so confounding, in the view of some, that it surpassed anything a novelist might plausibly imagine. And Mr. Mailer used his copious talents — a quick, skewering eye; a gift for the cameo portrait; bat-quality radar for atmosphere and mood; and blustering, bellicose prose — to capture the American spirit as the country lurched from the civil rights and antiwar demonstrations of the 60s into the Watergate era of the 70s.

In his best work Mr. Mailer made America his subject, and in tackling everything from politics to boxing to Hollywood, from astronauts to actresses to art, he depicted — or tried to depict — the country’s contradictions: its moralistic prudery and grasping fascination with celebrity and sex and power; the outsize, outlaw past of its frontier and its current descent into “corporation land,” filled with cheap, consumer blandishments and the siren call of fame.

If hyperbole and pugilistic provocation became the tools of his trade, then they were also useful instruments for recording the growing pains of a protean nation, confused and conflicted at midcentury.

Reporting seemed to ground Mr. Mailer’s obsessive flights of fancy in something real, and its constrictions often forced him to do his best work: case in point, his 1979 masterpiece “The Executioner’s Song,” an American epic that turned the real life story of Gary Gilmore into a potent ballad about love and violence and death.

Written in simple, stripped-down prose that captures the voices of people in Mr. Gilmore’s life, “The Executioner’s Song” signified a departure in style for Mr. Mailer, who had created in “The Armies of the Night” and other works a series of hectoring alter-egos: Aquarius, the “psychic outlaw,” the “criminally egomaniacal” writer, the “warrior, presumptive general, champion of obscenity, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world.”

These willfully provocative narrators would remind readers of the author’s public shenanigans — running for mayor of New York, stabbing his wife at a party with a penknife and butting heads with or unleashing fusillades against literary rivals and critics (including this one). They also provided Mr. Mailer with a means of filtering the chaotic events of the ’60s through the prism of his own combative, Whitmanesque ego. They enabled him to mythologize himself even as he used his own personality as an index to chart how the world had changed. And they anticipated the narcissistic “advertisements for myself” that would become de rigueur, years later, in the “Me Generation” with its confessional talk shows and tell-all memoirs.

This deliberate focus on himself, Mr. Mailer once observed, was partly a response to the fame he achieved with “The Naked and the Dead”: Having gone from being an observer to one of the observed, he said, he learned to “live in the sarcophagus of his image.”

“For anyone who’s become an author early,” he said, “and has had a good deal of success, as Capote did and Vidal did and Styron did and I did, it’s not automatic or easy afterward to look upon other people with a simple interest, because generally speaking they’re more interested in us than we are in them. This has nothing to do with character, but with the social situation — I am more interested in Marlon Brando than he is interested in me — and it has an immense impact when you’re young. You become a mirror and the only way you can perceive events is through the mirror of your self.”

No doubt this focus on himself played a role in the increasingly solipsistic nature of Mr. Mailer’s fiction. Instead of writing a great Tolstoyan novel about America that would “speak to one’s time” and capture the social and political pulse of the nation, he increasingly produced tendentious novels that were scaffolds for his eccentric, sometimes perverse ideas about violence and sex and power, what he once called “the mysteries of murder, suicide, incest, orgy, orgasm and Time.”

Plotting in these books often seemed beside the point, and the characters frequently emerged as walking, talking embodiments of Mr. Mailer’s own theories. Indeed the Mailer hero — Stephen Rojack in “An American Dream,” say — tended to be a carnivorous variation on “the hipster” identified by Mailer in his controversial 1957 essay “The White Negro”: an existential gunslinger who defines himself in opposition to the conformity he sees around him; a nihilistic individual, willing, even eager to embrace violence as a liberating force; a “philosophical psychopath” who lives for himself alone.
In later works historical personages were also reinvented, sometimes inappropriately, as oddly Maileresque heroes. Picasso, despite his repeated betrayals of family and friends, is celebrated as a heroic artist, who made life-risking dares in his work (“Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man”). Lee Harvey Oswald is depicted as a visionary malcontent (“Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery”). Jesus is given the author’s own obsessions with odors and the dissipation of spiritual energy (“The Gospel According to the Son”). And Hitler, no less, is depicted by the narrator of “The Castle in the Forest” (a narrator who is a satanic emissary) as an abused child who develops “a will of iron” and embraces the Nietzschean knowledge of power that murder affords a murderer.

As early as the 1980s Mr. Mailer observed that most of his ideas — about God and art and violence, as well as his view of America as a kind of spiritually impoverished Cancer Gulch — developed during the 1950s, when he found himself opposing the country’s repressive mores. Increasingly, he said, he was engaged in “less of an exploration and more of an occupation of territories I reconnoitered years ago.”

“What happens is you become the hat on your own head,” he said. “You’re not having the pleasure of enjoying your own mind the way you used to when you were young, but you have the product of your mind to work with. You know, I ran into Henry Kissinger years ago, and I asked him if he enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of the work, and he said in effect: ‘I am working with the ideas that I formed at Harvard years ago. I haven’t had a real idea since I’ve been on this; I just work with the old ideas.’ I certainly know what he means now — I think there are just so many ideas you can have in your life, and once you have them, you have to develop them.”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[Reocourgigiot]

Right now they're playing interviews with Norman Mailer on Charlie Rose,
channel 13. What a brilliant man he was.

[Cofeeman]

Hmmm...typical of the media, he was answering a question about Iraq and then started to say something like, 'let me tell you what makes a terrorist...' when that is the precise point they cut him off and switched to another clip. How typical. Don't want people to hear him say something other than "they hate our freedom".