Mind of an Outlaw (2 page)

So, do I agree with Bloom, and with myself? Yes and yes, there’s
no doubt; it’s for this reason I’ll go on thinking
Advertisements for Myself
is Mailer’s greatest book, simply because it frames the drama of the construction of this voice, the thrilling resurrection of his personality as his greatest asset after the public pratfalls accompanying his second and third novels. That book sails aloft on Mailer’s delighted discovery of the voice’s elasticity and reach. (Then again,
Armies of the Night
is
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’s equal, for it is in the march on the Pentagon that the voice discovers its greatest subject and fiercest power of implication.) Everywhere, Mailer negotiates with imagined persecutors and pursuers, those who’d keep him from feeling all he feels, suspecting all he suspects, attempting all he’d attempt (as well as what he wouldn’t ever get around to attempting), yet never in despair. Never hounded. Always with an exhilaration more magnanimous than nose-thumbing, as though to say: There you go! You’re pushing me and I’m pushing back, and don’t you see how it brings out the best in us both! To turn on Mailer his own praise of Marlon Brando, he’s “our greatest actor … and he is also our National Lout.” For, though his chosen emblem was the boxer (a Hemingwayesque overcompensation for the apparent passivity of the writer’s craft), Mailer’s is really a method actor’s style—and Brando’s career is as near to the impossible space Mailer’s gestures carved for himself in postwar American culture: always promising more than he could deliver, always inserting his own brooding self-consciousness between his audience and his ostensible creative task—and then providing captivating evidence of how, at its best, that obtrusive presence could be as much an artistic opportunity as it was a disaster area.

So, yes, Mailer as stylist, yes, Mailer as essayist, yes, but also
no
, because it could never be so simple: Mailer’s essays are those of a novelist, and they would be even if he quit reminding us it was so. It’s not merely how the essays gain energy from the theatricality of the novelist turning almost in irritation from his main task—will he
ever
be allowed to reel in that big fish?—but that where these essays explode most into greatness is in their capacities for portraiture, scene-making, fictional conjecture, passages of free indirect style worthy of any Flaubertian master.
“Norman Mailer” may demand the ironic title as this novelist’s greatest character, but he has other great ones: “Dick Nixon,” “Pat Nixon,” “Barbara Bush,” “Bob Dole” (I’m tempted just to say “the Republican Party”), “Ernest Hemingway,” “Henry Miller,” “Robert Lowell,” “Jack Henry Abbott,” and so on. These characters are, by definition, floated into a realm somewhere between fiction and non-, full of Mailer’s projections and yearnings (in at least one case with disastrous results: In a brilliant intuition, Mailer compares his prison pen pal Abbott to Chauncey Gardiner, the lead character from Jerzy Kosinski’s
Being There
, without grasping the deadly implications of his own insight). In any event, on the page, they become indelibly vivid, persuasive players on crucial stages of Mailer’s devising, in dramas in which he never fails to persuade us of the stakes. The very best instances have all Mailer’s seemingly guileless gestures coming together to form thought-experiments of stunning impact. Take, for example, that
Parade
essay on the death penalty. As we groan our way into Mailer’s unsavory defense of his passing remark in favor of execution, the novelist sneaks up on us with a haunting evocation of the meaning of an execution
within
prison walls, in the minds of the guards and the prisoners. From there he widens the horizon, invoking a complicity that forces readers both to challenge easy—“liberal”—assumptions, and to dabble at least momentarily in Mailer’s take on the American twentieth century, which he views (if you’ll pardon a feeble paraphrase—he wouldn’t) as reassuring itself with an uneasy delusory layer of science, law, and reason, one covering a cauldron full of uncanny forces, of outrageous stirrings of hatred and desire.

I’ll stop there—to isolate Mailer’s “ideas” from the context of a style at once aphoristic, discursive, and performative is to hang them out to dry as much as would be the case with those of Nietzsche and G. K. Chesterton, his companion talents in dialectics, provocation, and paradox. As in the case of Nietzsche and Chesterton, you’ll be forced to argue with Mailer’s thinking, and it is certain that in many cases you’ll want to reject it—but to do so, you must enter the ground of his thinking as it is enacted here: with genius.

NORMAN MAILER WAS
arguably the foremost public intellectual of the second half of the twentieth century. With the publication of his first novel in 1948,
The Naked and the Dead
, he emerged as one of America’s most important creative writers and soon thereafter established himself as a potent and provocative essayist, filmmaker, playwright, short-fiction writer, poet, biographer, journalist, cultural and political commentator, and media star. His ubiquitous presence over the decades in print and on the airwaves—William F. Buckley Jr.’s
Firing Line, The Dick Cavett Show, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
, and
Charlie Rose
—is proof that he possessed a mind and personality that immensely engaged the public. While the span between his first novel and his last,
The Castle in the Forest
, was a remarkable fifty-nine years, the complexity and heterogeneity of his vast, deep interests are best represented in his essays. For Mailer the essay, even more than his fiction, provided a forum in which he could unrelentingly confront the social, political, and cultural crises of the day. In his essays, Mailer’s persistent curiosity—coupled with his discursive prose—engages, opposes, clarifies, complicates, and rigorously challenges whatever subjects he takes on.

As the founding editor of
The Mailer Review
and a member of the Norman Mailer Society board of directors, I have worked closely with Mailer’s oeuvre for more than ten years. I knew Mailer personally; I teach his works and write about him frequently. Yet shaping this collection was a daunting process because I could include only a small fraction of his most powerful work. Mailer had written so much that the excluded essays ended up far exceeding in number those ultimately selected. I began the compilation of this volume by separating the essays into thematic categories: Prisms of the Self, Arts and Letters, the Political Arena, Race, Gender, Culture and Counterculture, American Sexuality, the Metaphor of Sport, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, the Art of Writing, and Cosmology. These were useful for narrowing down the most interesting, relevant, and representative essays from six decades. However, the categories ultimately felt limiting, reductive, and exclusive. How does one confidently assign a “sexual” essay to either Gender or American Sexuality? Therefore, to avoid issues of overlap and confusion, the essays appear here chronologically. Although I consulted with a number of Mailer scholars, editors, other writers, librarians, archivists, and members of Mailer’s family in choosing these essays, this table of contents is not meant to be hierarchical, exhaustive, or by any means definitive. It is a beginning in arranging the work of a most complex writer.

Early on, I employed a simple principle of inclusion: Select only the very best essays in the Mailer canon. Two critical criteria were influence and staying power. Classic essays like “The White Negro” and “Mind of an Outlaw” were mandatory inclusions because of their continued importance over the years and their roles in establishing and representing the Mailer persona. I unearthed more obscure gems by combing through old issues of
Esquire, The Village Voice, Saturday Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The New Yorker
, and
Parade
, as well as
Playboy, Architectural Forum, The Harvard Advocate
, and
Dissent
. This sort of research highlighted not only the striking range and complexity of his essays (as illustrated by the original categories) but also the exceptionally diverse nature of the vehicles for his work,
something that distinguishes him from many of his contemporaries. From the 1940s into the new millennium he published essays next to advertisements for typewriter repair, Fruit-Fresh anti-browning preservative, and special-edition Playmates’ books. Looking through these decades of American journalism, I was reminded of how adaptable Mailer was to new times and new challenges and of how he was able to engage so effectively with diverse audiences. He demonstrated an unparalleled intellectual flexibility while never losing his edge and his sense of urgency.

Through the essay form, readers gain the closest access to Mailer because there are fewer veils separating the expositor from his listeners. In the very first sentence of 1948’s “A Credo for the Living,” twenty-five-year-old Mailer declares, “I must admit that I enjoy this opportunity to write a word or two about my own politics.” The full-throated vitality of young Mailer’s personality thus announces itself, carrying the same self-confidence and intellectual bravery that the mature Mailer would demonstrate time after time. With these early lines, readers enter a transaction that allows—and requires—them to meet Mailer personally. While reading Mailer’s essays, we become intimate with his inimitable intellect and forms of expression. We are taken into the depths of critical issues that Mailer has plumbed more profoundly than we ever could. But we are also forced to reexamine our beliefs, whether casual or deeply held. When Mailer proffers a position, he demands that we engage with him, that we become active participants or stop reading. Both writer and reader are tested in this exchange.

Mailer has been taking on America in this way since the 1940s. His ongoing confrontation with the country he loved (and did not love) was always in the spirit of productive intellectual engagement that would, ideally, lead to a further freeing of the American spirit. Mailer wrote, “Our noble idea of democracy was forever being traduced, sullied, exploited, and downgraded.” Every fiber in Mailer’s being fought the onslaught of assaults against the country that he served throughout his life, as in his lifelong critique of government and governmental abuse of authority.
From his criticism of the devastating failure of the Vietnam War to his late essays attacking America’s war acts in Iraq, Mailer tried to live a life of affirmative rebellion.

Mailer’s acute political consciousness is explicitly connected to his view of art and the artist. In his mid-1950s essay “What I Think of Artistic Freedom,” Mailer describes the social responsibilities of the artist: “It is the artist, embodying the most noble faculty of man—his urge to rebel—who is forever enlarging the walls.” A cornerstone of Mailer’s approach to restructuring the political and social landscapes was the strategic use of productive conflict. A politically sensitive artist cannot be aloof and uninvolved. Mailer followed this prescription his entire adult life. Never was a public intellectual so intimately interconnected with his audience through constant appearances in print and electronic media, especially television. There were other celebrated novelists who commented publicly on events (James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, for example), and there were other public intellectuals, like William F. Buckley, Jr., who were consistently in the fray of controversy, but no single person rose to Mailer’s stature, and certainly no one has filled the void left by his death. Mailer established a complex persona that, I would argue, performed public service at its very best.

In these pages, a previously unpublished essay on Sigmund Freud gives sharp insight into Mailer’s conception of public responsibility. Freud is described less as a pioneering theoretical psychiatrist than as a public doctor, one who administers to the generic ills that plague twentieth-century society. According to Mailer, Freud, more than his findings, was the antidote to the vast range of threats to contemporary living. Society, with its wars and poverty and hypocrisies, was sick and barbaric and threatening to become even worse without Freud’s ameliorating contributions, especially his emphasis on the importance of a civilizing culture. Mailer obviously felt a strong kinship with Freud, whom he describes as “a lower-middle-class middle-European Jew who rose in bourgeois society.” His description of Freud’s mental acuity could easily be a description of himself: “[H]e was capable of the finest intellectual distinctions.” Freud and Mailer were interlocutors,
mediating the tense, ongoing negotiation between cultural values and their representatives. Mailer often spoke for (and of) himself, of course, but he also felt a responsibility to speak for us all in his investigation into the collective remembrance of time and change.

This characterization is not to say that Mailer was a narrow ideologue. He was, first and foremost, an interrogative intellectual for whom the cast of a question was even more important than the reach of its answer. Foremost among his identities is that of a probing, hectoring teacher—the very best kind of educator. Mailer never fully lets go of either his reader-student or his topic. A common mode in his writing-teaching included an unrelenting questioning of his subject matter, infused with an unceasing challenge to the status quo, as we see in his probing analysis of the existential minority as part of his theory of violence in “The White Negro.” In Mailer’s view, the existential minority comprises individuals who are neither inherently good nor bad but who represent a series of divergent perspectives (such as feeling superior while also doubting this sense of superiority). In other words, individuals might
appear
to exhibit contradictory thinking or actions when in actuality they are reflecting different views that they hold at different times because they are deeply conflicted—a tension that reveals itself as existential angst. Mailer was keenly aware of the rich texture of contradictions that make up human beliefs but believed that these contradictions offer considerable flexibility in one’s choices throughout life. In posing these possibilities, Mailer promotes a sensibility that recognizes the importance of divergent thought and behavior.