History has seen very few authors affect the national fabric to such a great extent as Norman Mailer. At the time of the restless Sixties, Mailer was successful in developing a style of journalism which combined true events like political commentary and autobiography with a wide range of eloquent words which was a common feature of the literary novel. His works were deemed controversial due to their nonconformity to the traditional style as well as his debatable opinion on life in America. The impact that the Second World War had had on him was clearly indicated through the nature of his works. Mailer drew constant inspiration for his works from the time he spent as an army infantryman. He was feted by the famous poet, Robert Lowell, as America’s Best Journalist.
The life of Norman Mailer began on the 31st of January, 1923, at Long Branch in the state of New Jersey. His parents were Jewish immigrants with Lithuania. His father was an accountant, Isaac Barnett, while his mother, Fanny Schneider, was part of a trucking company. Another family member was his younger sister, Barbara, who was born four years after him, in 1927. During his childhood, Norman had to move along with his family to Brooklyn, New York. As Mailer grew older, he had to portray himself as a tough kid in order to survive a neighbourhood that was even tougher. The small Mailer had no option but to learn how to take care of himself. When he was only nine years old, he was able to pen a story called “Invasion from Mars”. Mailer used his notebooks to write this story of 250 pages.
Once he became a graduate in 1939 from Boys High School, he went to Harvard University to study aeronautical engineering from the year 1939 to 1943, following which he was awarded his BS science degree upon completion.
No experience in his childhood had prepared him for his time at Harvard. During his Harvard days, Mailer was able to include many elective literature courses in his schedule and was associated with The Harvard Advocate, the literary journal of his university. He responded well to toughness and was able to cope with difficulties quite easily. When he won Story’s annual contest held for college students due to his work, “The Greatest Thing in the World”, Mailer started considering the thought of transforming his passion into his occupation. Norman’s junior year was shaped by the outbreak of World War II. He did not have any idea about politics until that moment. But, this incident gave him an overview about war and life in the trenches.
Norman Mailer got married to Beatrice “Bea” Silverman, his first wife, in the year 1944, a short while before he joined the United States Army. During his period in training for the post of artilleryman, “A Calculus at Heaven”, a novella, was successfully published in the anthology, ‘Cross-Section: A Collection of American Writing’. Once the war broke out, Mailer held the position of gunnery sergeant. He met with disappointment when he came to know that he had not been selected among the first batch of European invasion troops. Instead, he was sent to the region of the South Pacific where he had to serve in Luzon, Leyte and Japan. Soon, the terrible reality of war had exercised considerable influence upon his psyche. Though he was not in any way directly involved in combat operations, the time he spent in the army laid the foundation for “The Naked and the Dead” which would become his bestselling novel. In the letters he sent regularly to his wife, Mailer described the different battles in such a passionate and vivid way, that Bea stated that she was practically able to hear the sound of shellfire.
Mailer faced discharge in 1946 and he took advantage of the contemporary G.I. Bill to enroll himself in many Sorbonne classes. This happened some time after he finished working on a manuscript, bearing the title “The Naked and the Dead”. At the young age of 25, Mailer had this work published as his first during the year 1948. The book met with a lot of success and raised him to the status of an international celebrity almost overnight. Regarding the publishing incident, Mailer exclaimed that “its success rips away my former identity”. The author had used his experiences gained during combat in the region of the Philippines where he was involved with a rifle company to write “The Naked and the Dead”. The work was soon touted as the definitive World War II novel. The work had at first met with rejection from different publishers due to the obscenity of the language.
Mailer met with an astounding amount of success for a period of three years. His very first work had made him an instant celebrity. Moreover, his innocent and boyish persona complemented his talent.
But, his follow-up novel, published in 1951, “Barbary Shore” was declared a flop and soon critics were spreading various rumours that Mailer had merely been a one-hit wonder, a flash-in-the-pan who had failed to live up to the expectations of the literary crowd. The plot of “Barbary Shore” was set in a boarding house in Brooklyn and depicted the ensuing conflict between a federal agent and an ex radical. The work was said to be “paceless, tasteless, and graceless” by Times Magazine.
Mailer took the negative reviews quite personally and, coupled with the fact of his recent separation from Bea Silverman, it left him very distraught. He spent most of the 1950s worried about his position in the eyes of the public. A constant feeling of failure gnawed at him and so, as a result, he opted to take a break from the world of writing. He tried to overcome this feeling with his rebellious and attention-grabbing gestures.
He soon moved out of Hollywood, where he had taken up a job as a screenwriter since the year 1949. He set up house at Greenwich Village in New York and it was here that he became acquainted with and soon married Adele Morales, an artist while simultaneously working on the third book of his career, entitled “Deer Park”. This new book dealt with the corruption of different values in Hollywood. The story was veiled very thinly and Mailer spared no details while describing his tempestuous relationship with his second spouse.
The book was rejected directly by several publishers and this only served to deepen Mailer’s growing depression. He now passed the day time listening to jazz music while his nights were spent in drinking and smoking marijuana. Upon publication of the book in the end, it was also panned severely.
Mailer’s life became increasingly more chaotic during the subsequent years. His nature had slowly become more prone to violence instead of concentrating on production. In 1960, Mailer hit rock bottom when, after coming home from an all-night party in Manhattan, he stabbed his spouse with “a dirty three-inch penknife”. When his wife refused to press any kind of charges against him, he was offered a suspended sentence.
With the publication of “Advertisements for Myself” in the year 1959, Mailer managed to redeem his literary self to some extent. It was considered to be one of the most poignant and shocking self-confessional works ever published in the English language. The story dealt primarily with his own fears and ambitions, a thorough analysis of the hysteria, violence, confusion and crimes in the society of America, as portrayed within the stylized framework of the trend of existentialism.
As soon as the divorce with Adele, his second wife, was finalized in 1962, Mailer got engaged to and soon married Lady Jeanne Campbell. The affair, however, was rather short-lived but it gave Mailer a single daughter, Kate. During the following year, Mailer, along with his third wife, mutually agreed to divorce. Mailer quickly became a husband to Beverly Bentley and she gave him healthy children, two sons by the name of Stephen MacLeod and Michael Burks.
Mailer had become increasingly worried about the pathetic condition of politics in America by the time the mid-1960s rolled in. He was instrumental in naming and was even the co-founder of the Village Voice which happened to be one of the first underground newspapers in America. This served as an alternative source of views compared to conservative commentary.
Mailer then served as a columnist at Commentary and Esquire from 1962 to 1963. He was named as a member of the PEN American Center executive board from the period between 1968 to 73 and even held the office of president from 1984 to 1986. He ran as an independent candidate for the office of New York City mayor in the year 1969 but was unsuccessful.
His work on The Presidential Papers during 1963 established Mailer as one of the most influential and vociferous essayists in the nation of the United States. “The Armies of the Night”, published in 1968, was unique since Mailer made great use of fiction techniques in order to study contemporary events. He even won the Pulitzer Prize in the non-fiction category for his work on the same.
On a common note, he penned Miami and the Siege of Chicago in the year 1968 which revolved around the riots held on convention day and soon published another of his famous works, “Of a Fire on the Moon” in the year 1970. Published in 1966, “Cannibals and Christians” was a controversial book in which Mailer directly accused writers in America of being incapable of producing works that were able to “clarify a nation’s vision of itself”.
Mailer’s next works in 1960 dealt with the topic of Republican and Democratic presidential conventions. Mailer placed himself at the exact centre of the American cultural and political life through reports of his views on the political assassinations, civil rights movements along with changes in contemporary society. Several of Mailer’s essays have been published in popular men’s magazines, including Playboy and Esquire, along with more intellectual publications and journals like Commentary, the New York Review of Books and Dissent.
A decade, following the publication of “Deer Park”, in 1965, Mailer returned to novel writing, starting with “An American Dream”. The work successfully explained the obsessions of the author than his previous material and was a clear indicator of his innate skills. Mailer separated from his fourth wife in 1969. In 1971, upon the publication of “The Prisoner of Sex”. Mailer once again became a constant topic for controversy in public conversations. In this particular publication, Mailer had suggested that gender had a strong role to play in the way an individual perceives and manipulates the reality around him. His proposals in the work made him come across as the ideal male chauvinist pig. Kate Millett, the author, went as far as to proclaim him so in “Sexual Politics”.
Mailer soon wrote the famous novel “The Executioner’s Song” and it was published in 1979 to great fanfare. Based on real life events, the novel was a highly detailed and meandering exploration of the mind of life of convicted killer and career criminal, Gary Gilmore. It was considered by some critics to be his masterwork.
In his follow-up novel, “The Fight”, which came out in 1975, Mailer described the legendary match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. The work was coolly received by critics. Mailer received a request from Sergio Leone, the Italian director, to help with the movie screenplay for his next film; a gangster movie entitled “Once Upon a Time in America” which was released in 1984. Based on the Harry Grey novel, The Hoods, published in 1953, the film’s script was developed by Mailer who shut himself in a hotel room in Rome with numerous whisky bottles. He finished writing the entire script in three weeks. Grey, a former inmate of Sing-Song prison, was able to meet with Mailer in the city of New York but was not happy with his book adaptation. As soon as he and his wife, Beverly, were divorced in 1980, Norman Mailer married his fifth wife, Carol Stevens. The marriage was terminated in less than twelve months, during which the couple had a daughter, Maggie Alexander.
It was during the same year that Mailer, who was a self-proclaimed and unabashed lover of the female form and the surrounding mystique, took the publishing world by storm when he released a huge cloth-bound fictional picture biography book of femme fatale, Marilyn Monroe. The coffee table book was basically a host of thinly framed personal interviews with the movie legend, written apparently by Monroe in her own voice. Most critics attacked Mailer for his audacity.
At the end of the year 1980, Mailer married for the final sixth time Norris Church. Among all his relationships, this endured the most and gave him a son by the name of John Buffalo. Released in the year 1983, Mailer’s next ambitious novel, “Ancient Evenings” was based on the period between 1290 and 1100 B.C. in ancient Egypt. It was a culmination of 11 years of research and studies. Anthony Burgess considered it to be “one of the great works of contemporary mythopoesis”.
Mailer’s work and life was characterized by conflict. No matter what topic he handled – boxing, murder or warfare – Mailer appeared to be fascinated by the very theme of violence. This might have stemmed directly from his experiences during the war which had a profound impact on his nature. But, even if critics sometimes found this sort of fascination to border on excessiveness, Mailer was never apologetic for pursuing life with an ardent vengeance. According to him, each and every subject was perfect fodder for writing.
The condition of politics in America unsettled Mailer during the middle half of the 1980s and he visited the Soviet Union, where he came to realize that instead of “the evil empire” that it was portrayed by Americans to be, the Soviet Union was just a “poor, third-world country”. Mailer made a comeback to films in 1984 with the thriller, “Tough Guys Don’t Dance”.
He became a commentator on the topic of WASPs as well as their weakening grip on American culture and the nation during the period after World War II. He viewed the space project as well as the moon landing as a culmination of WASP culture. Touted as one of the greatest literary minds of all time, criticized as a blatant opportunist, Mailer spent his entire life developing a career that was not only productive but controversial. Mixed reviews and criticisms were a part and parcel of Mailer’s extensive career. However, in an interview with Terry Gross for Fresh Air in 1991, he commented that he was careful never to let critics get the best of him. He was a recipient of the National Book Medal in 2005 for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He breathed his last in 2007 at the age of 84.
Works Cited
DEARBORN, Mary. Mailer: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001.
imdB. Biography for Norman Mailer. 07 May 2013
NEARY, LYNN. "Norman Mailer, Author and Social Critic, Dies at 84." 2007.
Norman Mailer. 07 May 2013
Norman Mailer. 07 May 2013
