Thoughts on the Passing of Norman Mailer

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for. - Norman Mailer, 1923-2007

Norman Mailer is dead. That’s hard to write. Mailer, though not a particularly large man, always seemed larger than life to me. I’ll be honest and say I haven’t read most of his work. I read The Executioner’s Song and just couldn’t put it down. And I read Ancient Evenings which was something of a bizarre effort. On the one hand I had to make myself pick it up every time I sat down to read but I also had to make myself put it down. I don’t understand that --- it was almost as though the scope of it and the intensity was something I had to brace myself for.

Ironically I had recently ordered two more of his books from Amazon, The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing and The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker. I love books on writing by writers and, lately, I have been fascinated by essays. That is a thing I blame on blogging. It takes a lot of nerve to believe you have something worth saying day after day after day. I love to read what other writers feel compelled to write about.

But anyway, Mailer is gone and that is sad because he was someone who took a bite out of life and contributed greatly to the landscape of American literature. Whether or not you liked him you have to admit he was formidable. In fact, it is the fact that he was formidable that made a lot of people dislike him which is sort of what I want to talk about.

In the few days since his passing I have read a tremendous amount of Mailer-bashing and I personally find it pathetic. Mailer had a reputation as being pugnacious and difficult as a person. He went through a lot of wives, was a hard-drinker and was known to throw a punch. He was probably a womanizer, I don’t know. But none of that can diminish even for a minute the fact that he had a remarkable brain, a towering intellect, and was a literary genius. The problem is that we live in an era when people have lost all site of the magic and are only interested in the personal behaviors of the magician. This is a commentary on our current Society of Resentment.

I’ve been watching this for a long time. It started out in politics. President Clinton coined the phrase “the politics of personal destruction” and who better to do that than he? He was publicly eviscerated by a sensationalist press and a resentful Republican party because he was a popular and effective president who had a weakness for women --- not something unique in the White House by any means but suddenly that is everyone’s business.

Since then people have become obsessed with ferreting out personal flaws and failings in virtually every public figure, celebrity, artists, politician and more and holding them up to the world as proof that, “yeah, he might be a great (fill in the blank) but he sure is an asshole.” What a sad and telling commentary on the people who feel the need to do that.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that there is an increasing need among many people not just to succeed, which is an admirable ambition, but to be better-than, which is pitiful. There seems to be a massive core of resentment that lives inside too many people and, strangely, it seems to be most prominent in those who have a lot rather than those who do not. That’s the thing I don’t understand. It is somewhat understandable that those who have had a hard struggle and failures might feel resentment but the resentment of the privileged is hard to comprehend. Is it a need to feel smugly superior? Is it a need to believe that they could be as accomplished as the person they resent if only they were willing to stoop to bad behavior? It mystifies me.

So Mailer is dead and many of us mourn and some sorry folks will bash and say the world is better off without him. Mailer once said, “In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.” He heard the detractors and saw them for what they are.

Thanks for reading.