Norman Mailer
From Philosopedia
Mailer, Norman (31 January 1923 - 10 November 2007)
Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, but brought up in Brooklyn, New York, Mailer studied aeronautical engineering at Harvard in 1939 and was once a member of the Harvard Advocate. Drafted into the Army during World War II, he served in the South Pacific, after which he enrolled in the Sorbonne in Paris and became the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of The Naked and the Dead (1948). His work is known for its neurotic sexuality, and some believe it reveals its author’s complex feelings toward women and his own tendencies toward violence.
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Views on Religion
In 1951 he wrote Warren Allen Smith concerning his views concerning seven categories of humanism {WAS}:
- I find it rather astonishing that your categories fail to include Marxism, which is the only philosophical system whose end is truly man himself. I suppose that I would have to list myself under atheistic humanism with a demurrer at being bedded down with Sartre.
In Christians and Cannibals (1966), Mailer wrote from a different perspective:
- What characterizes the Cannibals is that most of them are born Christians, think of Jesus as Love, and get an erection from the thought of whippings, blood, burning crosses, burning bodies, and screams in mass graves. Whereas their counterpart, the Christians — the ones who are not Christian but whom we choose to call Christians — are utterly opposed to the destruction of human life and succeed within themselves in starting all the wars of our own time.
In one work, "The Gospel According to the Son," he tells the story of Jesus Christ, but not the Christ of Christian orthodoxy. “I’m one of the fifty or one hundred novelists in the world who could rewrite the New Testament,” Mailer told people. In doing so, he wrote the life of Christ as if the Christ is telling the story. And, like the Christ, he is half man and half something else, leading critic James Wood to observe that Mailer comes off as “a kind of celebrity-centaur. The work has the Second of the Trinity receiving messages from the First of the Trinity which come at quite low frequency. By fusing the four gospels, Mailer tries to resolve C. S. Lewis’s observation that either Christ was who he was or else he was a total madman.” Remarked critic Michiko Kakutani, “Indeed Mr. Mailer’s Father and Son have a lot in common: both are full of themselves, both are fond of self-dramatization, and both tend to feel put upon by their public responsibilities." Responded Mailer about his work,
- For those who would ask how my words have come to this page, I would tell them to look upon it as a small miracle. (My gospel, after all, will speak of miracles.)
Mailer’s ever-changing views are apparent, also, in his interview in Time (30 September 1991):
- I happen to believe in it [reincarnation]. . . . It just seems to me that if we lead our lives with all that goes wrong with them, and then we die and that’s the end of us, that doesn’t make much sense.
He may or may not still hold what he has written in the past. In fact, in Vanity Fair (January 2007) when asked "How would you like to die?", he responded to the effect he is no longer an atheist:
- Without undue fear - which is to say die with the same confidence I have now that there is another world one enters, and so the finest of all the clichés is that death is a great adventure.
Asked, "If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?", responded to Vanity Fair:
- What an idiocy! God, if He or She is paying any attention, would have a wittier notion of how to punish and reward the first stages of one's new existence."
Works
Fiction
- The Naked and the Dead (1948)
- Barbary Shore (1951)
- The Deer Park (1955)
- An American Dream (1965)
- The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (1967)
- Why are we in Vietnam? (1967)
- Ancient Evenings (1983)
- Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984)
- Harlot's Ghost (1991)
- The Castle In the Forest (2007)
Non-Fiction
- The White Negro (1957)
- Advertisements for Myself (1959)
- Cannibals and Christians (1966)
- Armies of the Nigh (1968)
- Miami and the Seige of Chicago (1968)
- Of Fire on the Moon (1970)
- The Prisoner of Sex (1971)
- Marilyn (1973)
- The Executioner's Song (1979)
- Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (1995) - utilizing KGB files in Belarus and concerning the person who assassinated President John F. Kennedy, was described as “a masterpiece” by The Economist.
"Why Are We At War?" (2003)
Personal
Mailer’s two Pulitzer Prizes were for An American Dream (1965) and The Executioner’s Song (1979).
Mailer was married six times: Beatrice Silverman; Adele Moraeles Mailer; Lady Jeanne Campbell; Beverly Bentley; actress Carol Stevens; and painter Norris Church. He had five daughters, three sons and a stepson. The second wife of the six, Adele whom he stabbed in 1960, wrote The Last Party: Scenes From My Life With Norman Mailer (1977). It describes how their marriage started as a “trip into the light fantastic with a nice Jewish boy genius, newly famous and rich, my fatal attraction.” In detail she then describes their sex life together, as well as with others (one four-way of which resulted in a stockbroker’s smashing his cigarette “on Norman’s mechanically gyrating rear”). She related how on 20 November 1962 he stabbed her two times but, lying to the grand jury, she claimed that she did not know who stabbed her. Her husband later pleaded guilty to third-degree assault, was given probation, and never went to jail.
Sometimes referred to “as one of the heftiest egos ever to hit the printed page,” Mailer was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
For decades he lived in a Brooklyn Heights townhouse with a view of New York harbor and lower Manhattan from the rooftop "crow's nest." He also had a beachside home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he spent increasing time in his later years.
Despite heart surgery, hearing loss, and arthritic knees that forced him to walk with canes, Mailer retained his enthusiasm for writing and in early 2007 released The Castle in the Forest, a novel about Hitler's early years, narrated by an underling of Satan. A book of conversations about the cosmos, On God (October 2007), was his last.
Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, who is also the author's official biographer.
Correspondence
Asked about humanism, Mailer responded:
(See entry for Michael Novak, who claims that Mailer in 1998, by writing “Religion to me is now the last frontier,” recognizes the importance of religion and has changed his former views. One of Mailer’s former friends, Norman Podhoretz in 1999, writes in Ex-Friends that Mailer is a coward.)
