Norman Mailer and His Intractable Ego (PART 1)

Selected Letters of Norman Mailer (edited by J. Michael Lennon)

*For more of my essays on authors and their books, check out the following (click each and it’ll take you to the essay):

1. Nabokov

2. Karl Marx

3. Henry Miller

4. Cormac McCarthy

5. Tara Westover (the memoir “Educated”)

6. Hunter S. Thompson

…and many more (click here)

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For a long time I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Norman Mailer. For those of you living under a rock—or for self-righteous third-wave feminists who ignore his art because of who they think he was and therefor won’t touch him with a 25-foot pole—I’ll give you the basics. Mailer lived a long life, from 1923 to 2007. He was in many ways a typical Jewish kid from Brooklyn. He spent a brief time in World War II (in the Philippines)—as did many of the men of his generation—around late 1944 and into 1945. Always an intelligent and driven young man—he attended Harvard and scored a 145 [highly gifted] IQ—he married young, wrote stories which were published in the Harvard Advocate, and suddenly became rich and famous at the tender age of 25 when his war novel, The Naked and the Dead came out in 1948.

The success of this thick tome both created the commercial and artistic foundation for his entire career, and also created—or maybe more accurately worsened—the man’s already incredibly inflated ego. Reading the letters one gets the sensation of a very bright, very vain and conceited—and immature—young man.

*(I’m only about 112 letters in, still in the mid-1950s, pre-Village Voice, when Mailer was in his early thirties.)

Mailer was suddenly shot to the highest of literary heights in 1948 and it seems that, instead of attaining any sense of deeper character, any sense of genuine maturity as an artist and a man, and instead of gaining any sort of essential humility, he chose another path: Judgmental, arrogant critic and polemicist. He reprimands his accountant-father for going into gambling debt. He shakes his finger at his mother (who he refers to as “dear” and “honey”) for being too soft about his own writing (“biased”). He is brutal with his sister Barbara, who in the early 1950s seems to have had her own ambitions to being a novelist, deconstructing her writing talent and breaking down why most “middle-class women” fail in the writing department.

He even goes so far as to make—circa 1950—one of the dumbest, most irrational statements I’ve ever heard a writer I respect make: He tells Barbara that she need not read Hemingway or [Henry] Miller—who he says offer “nothing” to literature—but should rather read (get ready for this), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Are you serious, Normie? The only consolation I received in this area was the fact that Mailer was only 26 or 27 at the time. Young, dumb and full of [literary] cum, I suppose. (But, wow: What a stupid statement.)

And yet, of course, there’s no question (in my mind at least) that Mailer was a genius of sorts, at least in the literary department. No one can read The Naked and the Dead or The Armies of the Night or Advertisements for Myself or An American Dream and not grapple with this feeling on some level.

But also: Reading his letters got me thinking about how different the literary world was in the late 1940s and early 1950s compared to today. In this respect Mailer just got damn lucky. Let me explain.

First off, the 1940s and 1950s were perhaps the final curtain call in America—and around the globe—for serious literature. I don’t mean to say that there haven’t been incredible books of serious literature since those times; there certainly have been. (And, rarely, still are today.) What I mean is: In 1950 the advent of the television was brand-new. There was no internet yet, no smart phone, no laptop computers. The only real competition for book reading back then was radio…and the very new development of TV, which would quite soon begin cutting into reading time.

In the Victorian age—the 19^th century—before even radio, books were the main form of solo entertainment. Books back then were the smart phones of their time. You could always go out and see the theatre, or see an opera, but when it came to entertaining oneself at home alone, books had the market cornered. That was a time when books not only mattered but they were read often by most literate people.

Then the radio came along and became ubiquitous in the 1920s, along with “talkies,” meaning black-and-white films with actors who spoke and could be heard audibly by viewers. This cut into the reading of books some. But reading books was still the main source of entertainment when you were alone at home in your room.

This remained largely the status quo…until roughly the mid-1950s when TV began to dominate more and more of people’s attention. In other words: In 1950 books—both novels and nonfiction—still mattered to the culture and were read voraciously. This was the time of giants like Gore Vidal, Hemingway, John Cheever, Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, John Updike, etc. People not only read but paid attention to the literary world. Art was still taken seriously. (Imagine that!) Literature mattered. People actually bought books in large quantities still.

Mailer was getting his start at a time when there were far fewer “writers” than there are today. There was no digital publishing landscape. Everything was about small and medium family publishers and the major houses. You didn’t need a literary agent back then. The competition was much less intense. Most Americans wanted a “real job” and to make serious money; writing made cash but it was an uncertain career choice. Still not considered serious in that respect. There were no MFA programs like there are today, charging exorbitant amounts of money to convince you you’re the next Gore Vidal. Basically, if you had a streak of respectable talent, and you possessed some ambition and had an ego, it was much more likely back then that you’d get published.

Mailer was a very talented, very bright thinker and writer who produced a book about the war right after the war ended. The timing was perfect. People wanted a book encapsulating the war experience. Readers were hungry. And he threw a slam-dunk, no net. So it was a mix of raw talent, timing, drive, ambition, the era he lived in, and blind luck.

This book—The Naked and the Dead—launched the young man’s career. He’d left Harvard for Hollywood, trying to write scripts, and the door to other famous, successful authors was opened to him. He made enough money from the book—that was the other thing: It was a time when you could actually garner big book advances and could accrue respectable royalties from sales—to buy property. He and his young wife had a kid, lived briefly in Paris, lived in Hollywood, lived in Provincetown, traveled, etc.

His second book—Barbary Shore—was a universally panned critical flop. I read it a decade ago; it was not a good book. But he made up for it with his third novel, The Deer Park. Mailer had an uncanny knack in his letters to sound profoundly intelligent (which he was), and also mature and wise beyond his years (as in when he’s scolding his father for his gambling problem). Yet at the same time, as I said earlier, these same moments make him sound, to my ear, out of line, highly judgmental, and arrogant. (Interestingly he also possessed a high level of self-awareness. He admitted in one letter to his ex-wife, circa 1954, that he was a narcissist and a bully and he wished he wasn’t, but that he also had good qualities, too.)

His lush use of language—as with most writers back then, he loved and overused his adjectives—was delicious for the most part, but sometimes I got the sense that he respected language and cadence over actual meaning and content. (Again, in many of the letters at this point he was in his mid-late twenties, so he can be [partially] forgiven here.)

It's strange thinking of both my maternal and paternal grandparents—all deceased now—when considering Mailer. They were born in the same era; the 1920s. (Ditto my former one-time hero, Jack Kerouac, born 1922. Ditto James Baldwin, born 1924.) I can’t imagine my grandparents—little that I ever actually “knew” them in any real lived sense—writing the way Mailer wrote, saying the things he said, criticizing his sister and parents the way he did. In this respect Mailer sounds like a more mature, wiser Gen Z kid, essentially telling his folks to fuck off.

Mailer in this era of his life is obsessed with Marxism, which I found humorous and interesting from a psychological complexity perspective. He fought in the war, of course, and had no qualms about doing so. In fact he wanted to fight for the country. (He saw very little actual battle, but certainly inhaled the soldier’s existence.) Lennon—the volume’s editor—commented before the 1950s-section of letters that Mailer considered himself to be a “left-Conservative independent” politically and noted that during the 1950s he slowly became more and more interested in and vocal about politics. But while he respected Marxism, he seems, at least at this point in his life, to be more curious about Marx’s ideology from the artist’s perspective than the [actual] political perspective. He identified himself as a “left-Socialist” of the “libertarian-equalitarian” vein. He was at once anti-Stalinist and anti-Capitalist, yet of course benefited massively from the latter. (Meaning he benefited greatly from capitalism.)

He felt one could learn more about the human condition, the psychological makeup of Man, by reading Capital, than by reading, say, D.H. Lawrence.

Here he was wrong.

Sensitive as Mailer may have been—and he was sensitive, as all brilliant artists and writers are—he was always open to criticism and feedback. He genuinely wanted to discuss the craft of writing. Again, this was a time when everything was much slower in the world. Everything wasn’t digital and instant like it is today, and the market wasn’t beyond overflowing with the bad white noise of millions of “writers” regurgitating their thoughts and ideas out into the world via self-publishing and a trillion small presses putting work out by both bad, mediocre and sometimes good writers. (Not to mention social media.)

One thing I noticed, also, was that Mailer might respond to a vitriolic critique of his writing with an equally bitter attack, and yet at the end of it he’d say, in all genuineness: I think we could be friends; we should get together and discuss this further. This is in stark contrast to today’s ghosting-culture, where when someone disagrees with someone else they attack each other in bad-faith making ad-hominems on Twitter (X) and then block and disappear each other because each feels the other is evil.

The later years of Mailer naming and co-founding The Village Voice, of Mailer vs Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show, of the fights between first-wave feminists vs Mailer, the run for local politics, the explosions of 1960s cultural fame and ill repute, the notion of being the Next Hemingway, etc: That was all in the then-unknown future. (*Mailer, by the way, refers to Hemingway as “Ernie Ham-and-Shit.”) Mailer became both a cultural circus icon as well as a serious, brilliant writer. He wanted to be a legend. In many ways he achieved that goal.

The ability of Mailer to describe both his inner and outer experience on the page—in his novels and in his letters—is truly something to behold. One particularly long letter comes to my mind. It was a letter from the war, 1945. He was in the Philippines. He and a regiment of men had to hike with heavy packs and machine guns along a valley and then up into a very steep mountain. At the time Mailer was sick from some disease he’d gotten. He was extra exhausted. He describes the mountain as being incredibly steep, with waist-high natural “steps” wherein you had to set your machine gun down each time and climb up the step, grab your gun, pause for a minute, and then go to the next step.

He describes the inner horror, the total agony of being sick and exhausted and how he just wanted to give up. The only thing preventing this giving-up was the tiny sliver of his willpower. His ugly, ruthless, needy manhood, one might call it. (My language, not his.) With Mailer’s lovely, candid description I could envision the mountain, the thick, high dirt steps, the terrain, the brush, could see and feel the heavy army packs, the machine guns, could smell the torrid stench of the unwashed, dirty men, could feel the spiritual exhaustion mixed with adrenaline. On the way up the mountain someone accidently steps on a beehive on the ground. Bees zoom up and attack everyone. People are now in even more agony, madly swiping at the attacking, flying insects, being stung left and right.

Torture.

They finally make it up to the top of the mountain. They lay down and rest. Two men—not Mailer—are picked to do recon up ahead down the trail. The rest wait. We feel grateful, as readers, feeling as if we’re living in Mailer’s body on the page. No one writes about this kind of corporeal experience like Mailer. This is his strong suit.

One can also tell how much Mailer cherishes the physical act of writing. He loves language; words. He enjoys explaining his inner experience, and the outer physical landscape around him. If he tells Barbara—his sister—that writing is hard work, he also [clearly] intrinsically grasps that he himself got very lucky and, genetically, did not start as a writer from zero. He was a natural, writing stories and even working on a novel as young as eight years old himself. Because no true writer ever starts at zero. You have to possess that innate talent. Yes, that talent needs to be worked on over time, stretched out and built upon like an artist’s canvas. It requires long, slow, hard work. Discipline. Ambition. Drive. Need. But certainly it all begins with that organic talent a true writer is born with.

Mailer, I think, basically understands this. If you have “it,” then you can work your ass off—and pray for luck—and maybe you’ll get “there.” (Success in the eyes of society, and of yourself.) Mailer had class privilege, for sure. And IQ. And EQ, to a degree. He also had that massive, dangerous ego, the drive and ambition, and the self-belief that few but the best ever have. And he had the timing of his first novel, a war novel when America needed a war novel. Just like Sartre’s success after the war in Paris at a time when existentialism was exactly what the West needed to move on, licking their collective [spiritual] wounds from Hitler’s mad mania.

Read Mailer. He’s absolutely worth it, whether his novels, his nonfiction, his journalism, his essays or his letters. He had so much to say. So much of what he did say has much relevance still today. Sadly, we live in a time now when I think Mailer would never be published, due to his ideas, his latent sexism, his self-righteousness, and the fact that he’d be competing against so many other “white noise” voices in our time now. That’s sad, I think.

I guess one could more or less accurately say that “Art,” in the grand sense, is dead. It’s been replaced with class elitism, ideology and commercialism. There is no more room for a Mailer because Truth isn’t what most people are interested in anymore, whether that be in the form of fiction or politics. People want pure, immediate entertainment, and they want to feel good. They don’t want to be challenged or pushed; they want their own myopic views to be validated, whether objectively accurate or not. It’s all about emotion and tribalism in modernity, not realism and capital-T Truth.

So it’s with a withering sadness and a smiling joy that I read Norman Mailer today. A man, a thinker, a writer of a very different era. We can always pick up his work and read it, as we can with any other author of any era in the past. When I read Mailer’s writing, I feel connected to a time when Art did matter, when facts were still important, when every little need wasn’t validated, when criticism was still allowed, and when the sense of “safety” wasn’t considered God.

And when you could disagree respectfully.

*More on Mailer’s letters as I get deeper into the collection.