November 11, 2007
Norman Mailer Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:15 PM EST Charles McGrath’s obituary of Norman Mailer in The New York Times notes that “Mr. Mailer saw little combat in the war and finished his military career as a cook in occupied Japan. But his wartime experience, and in particular a single patrol he made on the island of Leyte, became the raw material for The Naked and the Dead.” I am trying to decide if this is a slightly malicious sentence; it certainly risks bad taste to refer, apparently slightingly, to how “little” combat Mailer saw. Is the bit about winding up a cook in occupied Japan intended to diminish any moral authority that might otherwise flow from “a single patrol” on Leyte? My father fought in the Ardennes and subsequently commanded a company of laundrymen during the occupation of Germany. Had he subsequently become one of the most famous of American writers, would Mr. McGrath note that he’d seen only a few months of combat, and wound up commanding a laundry company? My guess is that Mr. McGrath’s motives, if they are hostile, include irritation at Mailer’s lifelong interest in violence and possibly at his particular self-assumed role in confidently explaining violent men—Americans from Texas and other rustic places—to allegedly more epicene Americans from Brooklyn and Harvard, two places Mailer lived before he made that combat patrol on Leyte. One of the books where Mailer does that, in the context of an imagined hunting trip in Alaska—Why Are We In Vietnam?—is a book I have taught. It is in some respects dated, frequently grossly obscene, at times hilarious, contains many of the things that enrage Mailer-phobes, and vexes some students while fascinating others. People who dislike Mailer are prone to say that he glamorized violence and rustics for people who knew nothing about either, since people who did know were said to have no desperate interest in those subjects. So it may be relevant that the last time I taught Why Are We In Vietnam? the student who was most impressed by the book hailed from Texas, knew soldiers, and had himself hunted bear in Alaska. My father, who did not admire The Naked and the Dead, nonetheless gave little evidence of being deeply bored by all depictions of war, despite having seen for those few months a fair share of it. I once taught Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, which also comes in for some abuse in one of the obituaries. Rereading it for the first time since 1970, I was at first appalled by what looked like preening, screeching narcissism; I had loved the book when it came out, as had all of my friends. It was being taught to one of them (at Amherst) within a year or two of its publication, and I recall my friend quoting his teacher rhapsodizing about it. Having assigned it before rereading it, I plowed on through, and, happily, my opinion changed by the time the book itself altered its pitch and register. In the 1970s and ’80s I read through a lot of Mailer, at which time he seemed to combine startling strengths and glaring weaknesses. In the early 1970s one of my teachers regretfully remarked that Mailer’s writing was marred by his decision to become a whore to what both men called the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age; it tended to make Mailer’s writing and thinking breathless and frantic. From this distance, it may also make him an invaluable guide to the style and imagination of an age that is suddenly very far from us and not too easy to know from his epigones. It seems as easy to carelessly sneer Mailer into clownish insignificance as to breathlessly overvalue him. He did some odious things, was capable of appalling misjudgments, and said a lot of silly things. What fascinates is his ability to fascinate, despite an unseemly compulsion to do so. So determined to dazzle, he ought by all rights to have failed, and he didn’t. The country suddenly seems smaller with Mailer under it rather than strutting on the surface of things.
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