But it was with An American Dream , published eight years later, that Mailer was able to give the idea of murder-as-freedom a perspective — and a voice. What has happened is that the killer is becoming a little more possible, a little bit more ready to love someone. But the braver efforts of culture are not always straightaway and simple.
Despite all the praise, there was at least one powerful dissenting voice who saw in these ideas not a braver effort of culture but something uniquely and disturbingly dark. In her classic work of feminist theory, Sexual Politics , Kate Millett offered a devastating criticism of An American Dream by locating the blackness at the heart of the book. Both Dostoyevsky and Dreiser, in An American Tragedy , gradually created in their murderers an acceptance of responsibility for the violation of life which their actions constituted, and both transcend their crimes through atonement.
With the advent of Stephen Rojack a new kind of American cultural antihero began to emerge. One of the many remarkable things about Norman Mailer was the skillfulness with which he was able to manipulate his own image. When he needed to don the cloak of madness, he could slip it on with relative ease. And when the image of a sober, serious thinker was called for he could simply shrug it off.
Mailer, who had just participated in the March on the Pentagon, agreed. But the thing about Norman was, by this time, he spoke — at least in public — in a kind of clipped English, as if he were trying to sound British and not Brooklyn. And it was a patently fraudulent accent, as if he were holding his lips and biting off his syllables. The bobbing and weaving was a way to supplement with body motion what he was really trying to say: Mailer is a macho guy.
Asked if he ever boxed with Mailer or saw him in the ring, Katz, who boxed throughout high school and wrestled for Harvard, says no, not once. Eliot who could effortlessly plumb the depths of poetry in a faux-English drawl. But to be any of these things Mailer had to be more than them. But with Mailer, transgression was largely an end in and of itself; the need to shock seemed to have shaped his views, which, on account of this, were frequently as regressive as they were repugnant.
It was neither the suspenseful action nor the moral confrontation that murder precipitates but the transcendence of the ego — the false ideal of the self made supreme above all things — which seemed to have motivated Mailer to embrace it. For more than 50 years, wherever there was a cultural moment brewing, Mailer could be found, usually at its center, often holding a lighted match.
His words had the power to draw the direct attention of sitting presidents and his ideas formed the spearhead of a rising counterculture that thrust through the conformity of the postwar United States. With his celebrity status, the brilliance and originality of his thinking, and his uncanny ability to stir controversy, what Mailer did, said, and — more than anything — what he wrote mattered.
Ashley Rindsberg is a writer who lives in Tel Aviv. The author of a book of short stories, Rindsberg is currently completing his first novel.
By Claire Phillips. Pretty big for that era. Everybody knew about [the essay]. So it was clearly a factor [in the election], but how much, no one can know.
This year marks the fiftie th anniversary of The Armies of the Night , which is often described as a nonfiction novel. But he was a part of the protest. He went there to get arrested, and he did. He used the fictional techniques of the novel — the scenes, the dialogues, the setting. America was divided, so he would divide himself, and in that division he would try to find the truth about the country. Personally, I think the book probably turned the tide more than any other written during that period.
It changed the country. He had the idea of having one Sunday a month when no one could drive a car in the city. He wanted to make New York City the 51 st state. Some of the ideas were crazy, some impossible, but they made people think about community in new ways. Over the course of time, I managed to put my hand on virtually every book in his personal library. People tend to remember him as a crazy wild man, because the media loved that stuff.
But he was actually a very bookish guy. Was he someone who actually liked to be challenged in public? Or was that all a performance? And so at dinner parties, cocktail parties, riding in the car with him, there was always a debate. I think that anyone who reads his work seriously will realize that he was quite a serious thinker and really wanted people to think about deep questions and especially about the fate of the United States as a democratic experiment.
Oh, yeah. Trump used to fly his friends down to Atlantic City to casinos and boxing matches. One of them was the idea that the white lower class has been forgotten. Mailer wrote about them a lot, about how they were being left out. Remember, Norman was always looking for a bridge between the left and right. He was good friends with William F. Buckley and Pat Buchanan. He admired Senator Dole. But Mailer was simply making apparent something that modern literature and, in particular, modern journalism preferred to disguise, which is that a book is written by a human being, someone with professional ambitions, financial needs, tastes and distastes, and this human being is part of the story whether he or she appears in the story or not.
It was not important for readers to like this person; it was important to know him. Mailer did not put the first person into journalism; he took it out of the closet. He did not pretend that those books did not exist.
He put himself, with all his talents and imperfections, before his audience. Not many writers have been so brave with themselves.
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