R.I.P. Norman Mailer

Posted 11 November, 2007 in Obituaries |

Pugilist, egomaniac, anti-war crusader, and anti-feminist scold, dead of renal failure at eighty-four.

Mailer was driven by an outsized ego, but he was also one of the most nakedly ambitious writers of his time, and his ambition yielded him the National Book Award for Armies of the Night, and the Pulitzer Prize, twice, for Armies and again for The Executioner’s Song. Those two books — along with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and the new journalism of Tom Wolfe — helped spearhead a revolution in nonfiction writing by creating a kind of hybrid genre that employed novelistic techniques to treat journalistic subjects, paving the way for what is today known, rather unfortunately, as “creative nonfiction.” His grand ambition to write the Great American Novel was arguably never realized, and his prodigious output was spotty at best, but he constantly strove for greatness, and left behind a body of work — The Naked and the Dead, Armies of the Night, The Fight, The Executioner’s Song, Harlot’s Ghost — that, love it or hate it, made an indelible mark on American letters.

There was something at loose now in American life, the poet’s beast slinking to the marketplace. The country had always been wild. It had always been harsh and hard, it had always had a fever — when life in one American town grew insupportable, one could travel, the fever to travel was in the American blood, so said all, but now the fever had left the blood, it was in the cells, the cells traveled, and the cells were as insane as Grandma with orange hair. The small towns were disappearing in the bypasses and the supermarkets and the shopping centers, the small town in America was losing its sense of the knuckle, the herb, and the root, the walking sticks were no longer cut from trees, nor were they cured, the schools did not have crazy old teachers now but teaching aids, and in the libraries, National Geographic gave way to TV Guide.

– from Armies of the Night

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