When American writers had grit

For decades, Norman Kingsley Mailer ruled the literary world. No writer did a better job of describing the Sixties than the pugilistic Mailer—a colossus on the New York literary scene, author of bestselling novels, a frequent guest on TV talk shows and a high-profile reporter for glossy magazines. At a moment of similar social dislocation and tumult, no current American writer comes close.

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These days Mailer’s macho bluster, sexist gibes, and ferocious ego offend the woke sensibility. May his name be blotted out! But Mailer amply deserved his stardom. He could be crude, silly, or even brutal, but more often he hit his targets. Mailer told hard truths about male violence, fought against conformity, and denounced the nightmare reign of technology. By embracing the twinned ideas of God and unreason that constitute the nuclear core of humanity, he drew upon a mighty source of energy that was simply not available to his more modern, right-thinking, constipated peers.

Mailer hung out with the Beats in the ‘50s, took his place among the New York Intellectuals in the ‘60s, and cavorted with celebrities. He spearheaded the New Journalism, where the reporter’s ego strides into the limelight. No one but Mailer could have given us such diamond-hard portraits of American politicians. He knew their faces, their manners, and their inner tensions like no one else. He reported on political conventions, moon landings and heavyweight boxing, and wrote about Picasso, Marilyn Monroe, and graffiti artists. His portrait of JFK, “Superman comes to the Supermarket,” helped Kennedy win the 1960 election, or so Mailer thought.

By the end of his life Mailer had been married six times and had nine children. He was a family man who was also a very busy writer and a highly practiced adulterer. In his brazen way, he could be unusually self-reflective, putting his shortcomings on display in a way that is foreign to today’s self-righteous polemicists.

Those who visit Mailer’s attic study in his Provincetown home ascend a flight of rickety stairs to the small desk where he did his writing. Even in his final days, when he used two canes, Mailer climbed the stairs to sit down to work. (Michael Lennon, Mailer’s biographer and friend, movingly evokes this period in his recent book Mailer’s Last Days.) On the wall by the staircase hangs a sign: Bellevue, the psychiatric hospital where Mailer spent seventeen days after stabbing his wife, Adele, after a drunken party in 1960. He never forgot the results of his reckless violence.

Mailer saw into the deep fissures of Sixties America. Some of these divisions are still here today, like the one between a progressive college-educated elite and an underclass that cares far more about bread-and-butter issues than about the involuted theorizing of elites. He saw how ferociously white working-class America hated the hippies who opposed the Vietnam War. There was a huge gulf in experience between the working class and the protesters, who, university-bred as they were, had never fired a gun, fixed a car, or gotten into a fight over a girl. Mailer would have hated today’s wokists and woke terminology for the way it forces human complexity into ready-made pigeonholes, mimicking the corporate bureaucracy that Mailer disliked so much.

Mailer explained the late Sixties better than anyone, because he knew the actions of the radicals were both foolish and profound. He wrote two books on the clash between the antiwar youth and middle America: The Armies of the Night (1968), which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his report on the 1968 political conventions.

Even as he griped about Women’s Liberation, Mailer admitted he had been schooled by the women. The Prisoner of Sex, which sparked a sensation when it appeared in the pages of Harper’s in 1971, displays an unexpected regard for feminist insight. The male conceit that men were tough and women weak and sentimental, Mailer knew, was a total fraud. Women walking down the street, Mailer realized, were starkly exposed to the eyes of men, and, he confessed, “any man feeling so stripped of his skin would be suffering an unholy mix of narcissism and paranoia.”

In The Executioner’s Song, his greatest book, Mailer honed in on the dance of sex and death through the stormy relationship between a killer and his girlfriend. Here he measured the damage done by the rebel stance he had earlier touted and fantasized about. Gary Gilmore’s rebelliousness is dismal and doomed, and leads to two senseless murders. But when sent back to prison he deepens. Gilmore’s letters to his girlfriend Nicole Baker, which Mailer quotes at length, astonish us with—it must be said—their wisdom. Nicole, a tough, fascinating woman, is just as fully drawn as Gary.

Gilmore’s demand to be executed makes him a figure of some nobility, and the night before he faces the firing squad is not unlike the Last Supper. Yet we never forget Gilmore’s evil, whose roots seem obscure both to him and to the reader.

Mailer’s courage was intellectual and moral. Testing others and himself, and frequently picking fights, Mailer struggled honestly. He stuck to his ideas about America and the world, about men and women, in the face of counterarguments from the left and the right, without ever losing his will or abandoning the fight. He was of nobody’s party but his own—and ours.

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