Mailer, his life and times Book

Composed almost entirely of interviews, this reads like The National Enquirer because, apparently, Mailer lived most of his life that way. What I learned is that Mailer was "empty" inside, and so he tried on numerous personas in an effort to find himself like a crab trying on shells. Alfred Kazin thinks this is because of the Holocaust, that Mailer wants to be tough so as to defend himself against anti-Semites by no longer being Jewish, by being a rebel even though "he's riding the waves exactly like a surfboard"(650). Diana Trilling implies his macho act hides a secret fear of women and states that the major confusion for Mailer is between metaphor and reality -- the artwork being more important than reality, overriding reality. For example, in The White Negro two hoodlums stomp an old man to death and "in that very act experience more love than they'd known in their entire lives. . . . That was bad writing because it was bad thinking because it was bad being" (285-286).

On page 520 Trilling wonderfully details Town Bloody Hall, a Theater of Ideas debate between Mailer and four feminists. As Trilling has written elsewhere, Germaine Greer "consented to be on the panel because she wished to meet Mailer and go to bed with him. . . . By being so overt in her desires, Miss Greer had scored a victory for our sex; transcending reticence, she had transcended traditional femininity and moved all of us up a notch in the scale of male-female equality." Watching it on youtube, I was shocked by how often Mailer played the persecuted victim. His bluster disguises his whining. He rightly tells a questioner she makes no sense, but 75% of the time, his charge applies to himself as well. Perhaps Mailer's obsession with dialectic forces him to juxtapose insight and incoherence.

Gloria Steinem, always so wise, states: "His idea of what a man should be . . . dictates that men should be aggressive, take chances and father many children. It's an exaggeration of a patriarchal ideal that is impossible to achieve and has enormous penalties, more so for women but also for men, who are under stress, have heart attacks, then go off to war, get killed, do a whole lot of destructive stuff to live up to this code. Norman is compelled to live up to his masculine image. He's in a prison"(588).

Norman's attraction to violence leads him to defend a hanger-on who had sadistically beaten up a homosexual. Mailer tells Steinem, "'I'll be devoted to this guy for the rest of my life because I once saw him in a fight, he was getting knocked down again and again, and he kept getting up.' I said, 'Norman, anybody who'd grown up in a poor neighborhood could tell you he should have stayed down.' He never forgave me for that because I had questioned his ethic of what was admirable" (502).

In my opinion, what makes Mailer a great writer despite everything is his determination to be honest by revealing all. He lays himself bare on the page. This book is gossipy and aimless, but worth seeking out for, if nothing else, Allen Ginsberg's quotes. I could listen to him forever.