More on Mailer

The appreciations, assessments, and, in at least one case, the posthumous takedowns of the late Mr. Mailer continue to come in (or I continue to discover them). Here's a further list of reading:

• Bob Thompson in the Washington Post: "If you want to understand the prodigious, prodigal talent we've just lost, you have to read 'The Armies of the Night.'"
• Jim Lewis ("He certainly wasn't fooling when he wrote The Executioner's Song, which is as close to perfect as a book gets and will remain one of the permanent American novels of the last century.") and Christopher Hitchens ("His masterpiece, at least in my opinion, is Harlot's Ghost (1991), a historic fictionalizing of the national-security state that came very near to realizing the Balzacian ambition that he had conceived for it.") on Slate.
• The Telegraph's thorough and unsentimental assessment: "He was a desperately earnest young man and not possessed of much humour – a fault which he never corrected." (I would argue that his ability to laugh at his own egoism was his saving grace.)
• David Ulin in the LA Times: "He was a major talent who could not keep himself from reminding you that he was a major talent, an astute observer of his moment, who tended to operate as if that moment were entirely his."
• Louis Menand in The New Yorker: "He put himself, with all his talents and imperfections, before his audience. Not many writers have been so brave with themselves."
• The New Yorker also unearthed a 1948 Talk of the Town piece after Mailer hit it big with The Naked and the Dead at age 25: "I think it's much better when people who read your book don't know anything about you, even what you look like. I have refused to let Life photograph me."
• The New Republic posts a scan of its original review of Armies of the Night: "By introducing his ego more directly into history than he ever has before, by taking events which were fast disappearing under the perversions and omissions of ordinary journalism as well as through the inertia we all feel in the face of what is over with, by taking these events and revivifying them, reinstating them in the present. Mailer has opened up new possibilities for the literary imagination and new room for us to breathe in the crush of actuality." (See more TNR Mailer pieces.)
• The Paris Review has a number of links, including both his 1964 ("God can write in the third person only so long as He understands His world. But if the world becomes contradictory or incomprehensible to him, then God begins to grow concerned with his own nature.") and 2007 ("My motives at the time of The Executioner's Song were not all that honorable. I'd been running into a lot of criticism of my baroque style, and it was getting to me. My whole thing became, you know—you asses out there, you think a baroque style is easy? It's not easy. It's something you really have to arrive at. It takes years of work. You guys keep talking about the virtues of simplicity—I'll show you.") interviews and video of their recent onstage tribute to him.
• New York magazine's Vulture blog: "where Warhol emptied his persona of any human agency, achieving a kind of shimmering weightlessness, Mailer always revealed the human mechanics that drove him. They were co-inventors of modern fame, two sides of a coin."
• At Esquire, Tom Junod's tribute and recent profile, and a reprint of his classic 1960 profile of JFK, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," his first great journalistic success: "Bob Wagner, the mayor of New York, a little man, plump, groomed, blank. He had the blank, pomaded, slightly worried look of the first barber in a good barbershop, the kind who would go to the track on his day off and wear a green transparent stone in a gold ring."
• New Criterion critic Roger Kimball published a lengthy evisceration of his legacy in his blog, which clearly had been waiting in the wings for his demise. Ron at GalleyCat found it "churlish," but it seems entirely appropriate (even though I don't agree with much of it) to keep battling against an eager fighter like Mailer: "Mailer was clearly the captive of a debased and self-aggrandizing Romanticism. He manufactured melodramas to ventilate the tedium of his comfortable, bourgeois existence. It is a familiar adolescent gambit. But Mailer managed to prolong his pubescent rage into his seventies."
• And finally, via GalleyCat, YouTube footage of Mailer's recent guest appearance on, of all places, Gilmore Girls:

Comments

[Martin on November 14, 2007 at 12:18 PM]

I write for a blog about The New Yorker magazine called Emdashes. We had a brief post about Mailer here: http://emdashes.com/2007/11/norman-mailer-19232007.php. James Wolcott commented illuminatingly on our post here: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott/2007/11/until-tina-brow.html.

[Martin on November 14, 2007 at 12:19 PM]

And those links aren't going to work because of the periods. Here they are again:

http://emdashes.com/2007/11/norman-mailer-19232007.php
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott/2007/11/until-tina-brow.html

[Tom Nissley on November 14, 2007 at 09:25 PM]

Thanks, Martin--I've enjoyed emdashes before (someone who loves the New Yorker even more than I do!). Great reminder of that Armies anecdote from Wolcott.