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.