Photograph by Christina Pabst
Everything is fiction
NORMAN MAILER (1923-2007)
By Jane Woodward Elioseff
My feeling is that there’s no such thing as nonfiction. Everything is fiction, because in the moment someone tries to relate an experience of what happened to them, it’s gone.—Norman Mailer, 2004 Academy of Achievement Interview
Norman Mailer’s first published novel, The Naked and the Dead, describes the ordeal of a platoon of American foot soldiers who, early in the Second World War, have been ordered to patrol the summit of an island held by the Japanese. The book was a runaway best-seller in 1948—there was a copy in our house, on a high shelf, from the time I learned to read. Mailer had served in the Pacific and briefly experienced combat; this gave him a fund of physical and character detail he later put to extraordinary imaginative use.
The 50th Anniversary edition of The Naked and the Dead includes a new introduction in which Mailer tells us that he was 23 years old and “passionate about writing” when he began the book, and that he “burned with excitement” as he wrote. Speaking of himself in the third person, he says:
He had the good luck to be influenced profoundly by Tolstoy during the fifteen months he was writing this opus . . . He read from Anna Karenina most mornings before he commenced his own work. Thereby, his pages . . . reflect what he learned about compassion from Tolstoy. For that is the genius of the old man—Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe.
Compassion is severe and not sentimental, in Mailer’s view, when we perceive “everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful.”
Becoming a best-selling author catapulted Mailer into the ranks of professional writers. A professional, as Mailer defined the term, is someone who can do good work on a bad day.
And there were bad days aplenty.
Now that it is time to say goodbye to that gravelly voice, it is easy to ignore his many wives and mistresses, his drinking and drugging, his sometimes bad-boy public behavior, his silly debate with Germaine Greer in 1971, his serious misjudgment in 1980 of the murderer Jack Abbott’s real-life character, and what The New York Times last November termed his “political excursions.” We can also ignore Mailer’s career-long theme of anal rape—made explicit in his short story “The Time of Her Time” (1959) and again in Ancient Evenings (1983)—and his 1970s remark that he had tried but was unable to read novels written by women.
In Advertisements for Myself (1959), Mailer tells us that he was married and living modestly while he was writing and rewriting The Naked and the Dead. Whatever feelings of self-worth and entitlement he had achieved in four years at Harvard were immediately superseded by humility once he was in the Army. The success of The Naked and the Dead, he says, and the money that came with success, blasted him “a considerable distance away from dead center.”
Mailer outlived most of his generation. He published fourteen novels and fifteen works of nonfiction, a handful of screenplays and plays for the stage, and many, many articles and reviews. Along the way, he collaborated in founding The Village Voice, which became a beacon for its times. He also published a book of short poems, Deaths for the Ladies and Other Disasters (1962) and wrote the brief but genuinely frightening “old prison rhyme” that begins and ends The Executioner’s Song (1979).
We tend to think of Mailer as an author in the line of Hemingway, concerned with how men test their various strengths against each other and manage the challenges of the natural world. But there are European ideas in his work that derive from Dostoyevsky and not Hemingway, among them a view of man as God’s holy fool and a conviction that the Devil influences human thought and action.
The Holy Fool
Part personal experience, part historical narrative, The Armies of the Night (1968) records a few critical days in October 1967 in which the ’50s and the ’60s confronted each other with fear and determination. Culturally, the ’60s won and have kept on winning, but the war in Vietnam lasted for another eight years.
The Armies of the Night garnered both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and is many people’s favorite among Mailer’s books. It is certainly his funniest. The author himself plays the fool in that historic moment, drinking steadily on the first evening in Washington, making a display of himself, and becoming more and more unrealistic in his thinking, which he later anatomizes with wonderful precision.
Here the fool’s counterpoise is a “natural aristocrat,” New England poet Robert Lowell: reticent, soft-spoken to the point of being inaudible and yet, even not heard, commanding the respect of an auditorium of young people while he reads from “Waking Early Sunday Morning.” Lowell, like Mailer, has come to Washington in support of a peace coalition of unprecedented size that intends, on the morrow, to turn in draft cards in a demonstration in front of the Justice Department and then, the following day, march to Virginia, where an exorcism and possibly even a levitation of the Pentagon will take place.
Both men manage to work their way to the head of the throng of marchers in order to improve their chances of being the first to be arrested by the MPs guarding the building, but only Mailer, dehydrated and colossally hung over after a second evening of drinking, spends a night in jail.
Calling himself Aquarius, Mailer shows up as a different kind of fool in Of a Fire on the Moon (1969). He is now Everyman listening to the Apollo 11 astronauts reluctantly talking to the press in technospeak about the possibility of dying. This is not as funny or as pointed a book about the high cost of flying high as Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (1979), yet in setting down reports of Aquarius’s rapidly changing moods and interior forebodings, side by side with descriptions of the sterile NASA facilities in Clear Lake, Texas, and the launch site installed “on a twenty-mile stretch” between Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic, Mailer spins straw into gold.
Alas, Of a Fire on the Moon is out of print, with used copies of the 1985 paperback selling on the Internet for up to $200.
God and the Devil
The religious views of major figures in Mailer’s novels are as important as their physical appearance. For most of his characters God is present as hope and experience, the Devil as a spur to action.
In Harlot’s Ghost, Mailer’s 1991 novel about Cold War spooks, Hugh Montague, the narrator’s godfather and future CIA mentor, has taken the teenaged Cal rock climbing for the first time in order to test his mettle and gauge his talent for the sport. Over drinks afterward, the man whom Cal will eventually know as “Mother” tells him,
God is not a St. Bernard dog to rescue us at every pass . . . You experience God when you’re extended a long way out beyond yourself and are still trying to lift up from your fears. Get caught under a rock and of course you want to howl like a dog. Surmount that terror and you rise to a higher fear . . . If we succeed, we can, perhaps, share some of God’s fear . . . of the great power he has given the Devil. There is no free will for man unless the Devil’s powers were made equal on this embattled planet to the Lord’s.
By the close of the novel, Montague the spymaster—having reached an apex of suspicion after years as a high-level CIA officer—is granted a Dantean vision of the depth of fear God must experience: Montague sees that sophisticated creationists are essentially correct and that God, in order to hide from our desire to know his nature, has created “a majestic cover story”: the geological, biological, archeological, historical, and astronomical evidence that convinces us vast eons have preceded our present day.
Like the Hubble telescope penetrating further and further into space, decade by decade we see further and further into a nonexistent past.
The Devil shows up early in Mailer’s novels, beginning with The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore (1951), and continues to grow as a presence until we reach his last novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007), in which a devil of only middling importance narrates the story of Hitler’s youth. This poisonous creature, who talks to the boy Adolf in his sleep, tells the reader that devils “require two natures. In part, we are civilized. What may be less apparent on most occasions is that our ultimate aim is to destroy civilization as a first step to obviating God.”
When Hitler is grown, his childhood devil is “installed corporally” in an SS officer named Dieter, serving directly under Heinrich Himmler. The only castle in the book is in its title, which Dieter says is Das Waldschloss in German, the ironic name some Jewish prisoners gave a concentration camp.
On the evening that he commits the first of what will be three murders in two days, Gary Gilmore, the central figure in The Executioner’s Song, is driving around Oren, Utah, looking for a store to rob. Beside him in his truck, his girlfriend’s fifteen-year-old sister is experiencing an acid flashback. Her distress reaches a point “where her personal motor turned on again as if Satan was running her body, and pulling in all the people who usually floated around as personalities from Mars and Venus.” So she asks Gary, an expert shoplifter, to get her some Motrin.
Gary, too, off and on believes he is possessed by the Devil, but he also has special sensitivities:
It was crucial to put it across to people that you didn’t go to a store and pull things from a counter, but took a good look at the object you were going to buy and inquired of it. There were all sorts of answers: the object could say, “Go away,” or “Please steal me.” The objects had as much concern about themselves as anyone else.
Many of Mailer’s characters are telepathic to one degree or another. This is especially true in Ancient Evenings, a historical novel set in the Egypt of the 20th and 19th dynasties. Mailer told PBS’s Charlie Rose that this was his favorite among his books; later, he said it was his best book. In addition to mental telepathy, Ancient Evenings touches on reincarnation, the occult arts, simultaneous multiple identities, unusual erotic practices, slavery, animism, and possession by the gods. People who like this book, really like it. Me? For all its craft, the novel brings me much too close to alien flesh.
When I first opened The Gospel According to the Son (1997), it was hard to understand why Mailer would choose to compete against the deep imprinting of those of us who grew up with the language of the King James Bible. Or why, having chosen to retell the greatest story ever told, he did not bring every skill he had to the task.
The Jesus who narrates Mailer’s gospel is not kind but “pale with rage.” He has been raised as an Essene Jew, “strict in our worship of the one God” and “full of scorn for Roman religions with their many deities.” Apprenticed as a boy to Joseph the carpenter, Jesus knew from early on that “even a crude plank could act with knowledge of good and evil (and much desire to do the latter),” yet he could hardly talk to his family of a spirit in the wood. “That was pagan.”
The Devil is almost palpable in The Executioner’s Song, and Mailer’s retelling of the life of Jesus allows Satan to appear in person. He comes to Jesus in the desert as a humanly beautiful figure “dressed in robes of velvet that were as purple as the late evening” and wearing a crown “as golden as the sun.” His eyes were “black marble, but there were lights within.” As Satan approaches more closely and tempts Jesus to eat, Jesus catches “even the smell of the Devil himself, which penetrated a small cloud of perfume rising from the folds of his robes.” Jesus also perceives “how greed came from his body. For that was kin to the odor that lives between the buttocks.”
There are intended ironies in The Gospel According to the Son, but this is not a humorous book. So no smiles, please, when I tell you that here the prince of darkness is a proto-feminist who quotes Isaiah and Ezekiel to demonstrate God’s misogyny.
When, later, Jesus has prevented the stoning of the woman taken in adultery, he sees that she is vain, strong, and “wed to the seven powers of the Devil’s wrath and to their offspring: the seven demons.” Only when each of these has been drawn out of her, can Jesus say, “Go and sin no more.”
America
In Of a Fire on the Moon, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun—“sound, sensible, and quick as mercury”—helicopters in to make a brief appearance at a gathering in Texas. When Von Braun has flown away, Aquarius (Mailer) begins to brood on the German’s remarks: Von Braun had declared that “reaching the moon would be the greatest event in history since aquatic life had moved up onto land, and that was a remark! for it passed without pause over the birth and death of Christ.”
Mailer’s love of this country ran deep, as did his faith in the power of Christian virtue to keep us righting ourselves. In The Armies of the Night, after he has been released from jail, he feels “a sense of nice expectation and shining conception of his wife” and determines that “oh, he must be salient now, and deliver the best of himself to these microphones and reporters . . . Some message from the Marchers at the Pentagon had to reach America and Americans.”
So, he gives a short speech that begins, “Today is Sunday, and while I am not a Christian, I happen to be married to one.” And concludes, “You see, dear fellow Americans, it is Sunday, and we are burning the body and blood of Christ in Vietnam . . . and as we do, we destroy the foundation of this Republic, which is its love and trust in Christ.”
When a newspaper quotes him verbatim but shuffles his sentences so that his message is lost, he decides that there is still something to learn about salience and the press.
Using his intuition and his sense of smell, Mailer has described America in greater depth than even his rival Gore Vidal. Mailer annoys us, he goes on and on, he flabbergasts, and then we open Harlot’s Ghost and find two pages about the beauty of the coast of Maine—a passage so imbued with synesthetic magic I could feel the rocks and smell the sea.
Domestic happiness did not much interest Mailer as a subject. This means that his novels ultimately disappoint those of us who once rooted with all our hearts for Pierre and Natasha, and for Levin and Kitty. But at least one of Mailer’s books has a happy ending.
The last pages of The Naked and the Dead are devoted to the pleasurable ruminations of Major Dalleson, an operations and training officer who “obtained a simple childish joy from seeing the troops march past in clean uniforms.” It occurs to him that he could “jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a coordinate grid system laid over it.” He hesitates to make a fool of himself by requisitioning such an item from the quartermaster. He decides instead to send a letter to the War Department Training Aids Section.
They were out for improvements like that. The major could see every unit in the Army using his idea . . . He clenched his fists with excitement. Hot dog!
For Mailer the nation was a woman to be rescued. On occasion, he conceived of the world as a woman. Talking with Charlie Rose, he said, “Writing a novel is like being married to a woman you’re not too happy with. You want this book to be better! Any man who thinks he can improve his wife is a fool.”
Jane Woodward Elioseff is fiction editor of
The Internet Review of Books. She lives in Houston.
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