Mind of an Outlaw

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Authors: Norman Mailer

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Mind of an Outlaw
is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright © 2013 by the Estate of Norman Mailer
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Lethem
Editor’s Preface copyright © 2013 by Phillip Sipiora

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and the H
OUSE
colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

All of the essays in this collection except “Freud” have been previously published. Original Publication and Permission Credits are located on
this page
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mailer, Norman.
[Essays. Selections]
Mind of an outlaw: selected essays / Norman Mailer; edited by Phillip Sipiora ; introduction by Jonathan Lethem.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8129-9347-9
eBook ISBN: 978-0-679-64565-8
I. Sipiora, Phillip, editor of compilation.   II. Title.
PS3525.A4152A6 2013
814′.54—dc23
2013015716

www.atrandom.com

Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover photograph: Bernard Gotfryd/Premium Archive/Getty Images

v3.1

Contents

Introduction

Jonathan Lethem

LET US SUPPOSE
that a writer has sat down at his desk, aligned his fingers to familiar postures of readiness at the bare existential stage where wait QWERT and YUIOP—those unhelpful companions, mute as Beckett’s clowns—let us go and suppose the writer has offered himself here to a situation that is, on its face, impossible, a battle almost certainly lost before it begins.

Well, the odds are awfully good that the writer who has put himself in this position is Norman Mailer—unless it happens to be, as at this moment, another writer attempting to introduce Mailer’s
Selected Essays
and at the same time beguilingly ape Mailer’s typical strategy in arriving at a topic. Whether awarding
Waiting for Godot
a negative review without having seen it (as Mailer once did in his column in
The Village Voice
); or pegging his long consideration of the death penalty—in
Parade
magazine, no less!—on the defense of a flip provocation he’d made on
The Phil Donohue Show
, where he’d claimed “we need a little capital punishment”; or prefacing his skirmish with feminism with a digression on how he’d spent a day mistakenly believing he’d won the Nobel Prize; or insistently reminding his readers that he wrote a lot of his books hurriedly, to satisfy contracts or
make child-support payments—or, really, whenever frontloading nearly any stirring hypothesis with a prominent reminder of
who
it was that was doing the hypothesizing—Norman Mailer was a writer who never met a corner he didn’t wish to paint himself into. It is one thing to go looking for fights. Certainly this is our default image of Mailer: provocateur, bare-knuckle brawler. It is another thing to go into so many fights having artfully tied one hand behind one’s back. Sometimes both hands. If Mailer’s favorite quote, from André Gide, was “Please do not understand me too quickly,” it might often seem he baited his most significant forays into prose with a temptation to the reader to dismiss him almost
immediately
.

And here, tasked with giving a proper
envoi
to what I do believe is a great reader’s voyage of a book, I’ve gone and “done a Mailer”—I’m burying the man before I even begin to try to figure out how to praise him. My excuse is that he seems to demand it, by the logic of his own self-demolitions: Watch Mailer climb out of the hole once again, folks! I’ll commit another Mailer gesture, then, and quote myself. This, from the first and only other time I tried to write about the man:

In hindsight, Mailer looked in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of … the postmodern cultural condition generally—in his declared topics, his appetite to engulf every dissident impulse and the whole atmosphere of paranoia and revelation that saturated the sixties, though he delivered barely any fiction to reflect it, in his predictions in essays like “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”; in his self-annihilating advocacy of Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch;
in his desperate, dashed-off forays in
Why Are We in Vietnam?
and
An American Dream
, and so on. The reason Mailer couldn’t arrive at a satisfactory postmodern style (even as he saw his one firm achievement in
The Naked and the Dead
mummified by ironic treatments of his war by Heller, Vonnegut, and Pynchon) was because postmodernism as an art practice extended from modernism,
to which Mailer had never authentically responded in the first place. This might have been Mailer’s dirty secret: He was still back with James T. Farrell’s
Studs Lonigan
in the soul of his aesthetics, even as the rest of his intelligence raced madly downfield, sometimes sprinting decades past his contemporaries.…

So defend indefensible Mailer. [His best books are:]
Advertisements for Myself, The Armies of the Night
, the two campaign books, and, er, parts of
The Fight
, parts of
Of a Fire on the Moon
, parts of
Cannibals and Christians
 … parts of etc. Parts, always parts. The novelist Darin Strauss, confessing his Mailer-thing to me when I confessed mine, said, “Other writers are inconsistent book to book, but Mailer’s inconsistent within books, sometimes even within paragraphs.…” I wonder: Does anyone credit Mailer this postmodern way, as a purveyor of fragments, a centrifuge of sentences? Mailer’s false accents—Texas, Patrician, boxer-tough—are like Orson Welles’s false noses.

Reading that now, it seems to me that despite how I’d assumed a (rather Maileresque) posture as the lone voice in the wilderness, I really fell in with the rough consensus: that Mailer, self-appointed great novelist with no definitively great novels to his credit, found his greatness instead in his nonfiction voice—in the volcanic river of his “New Journalism,” from the
Village Voice
columns through to when, in the eighties, he (largely) recommitted himself to novels. A consensus that Mailer’s great subject was himself, not in the usual personal-essayist’s sense of “a private man revealed,” but as a public entity, an existential shadow-boxer and buffoonish slumming-patrician refusenik, moving through American history as a kind of disastrous recording angel, a lightning rod for exemplary controversies, a cautionary tale he alone couldn’t learn from. In the words of Harold Bloom, “he is his own supreme fiction.… the author of ‘Norman Mailer,’ a lengthy, discontinuous, and perhaps canonical fiction.”

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