An Incorrigible Romantic

Book reviewed: Peter Manso’s Mailer: His Life and Times

I’d read a bit of fiction by Norman Mailer, as well as his essays and interviews, and so I bought Peter Manso’s Mailer: His Life and Times at a local bookstore thinking it would be an entertaining companion on a long-haul flight. I thought wrong. The physical copy proved to be too heavy to lug around, and whatever it was that I needed to consume at an altitude of 35,000 feet, it wasn’t 700 pages of Maileriana. Maybe it was a side effect of the airline’s plonk, but I just couldn’t see what Mailer’s life and times had to do with me. After several halfhearted attempts, I dispatched the book to an obscure corner of my carry-on bag, settling for a (literally) lighter read to get across all those time zones. Back on terra firma, though, the book was brought out of its purgatory — this time, to a much happier outcome.

If Manso’s work were a standard biography, one could say it was written prematurely, since the book came out in the 1980s and Mailer still had another twenty years to go. Manso may not have counted on Mailer’s living on for as long, or maybe Mailer himself had gotten impatient and pressed Manso to come out with an epic about him. But, contrary to what the dust jacket says and the title suggests, this is not a standard biography. A more accurate title would be Everyone Who’s Ever Met Mailer on Mailer, including, of course, Mailer himself — no conversation about Mailer could take place without his elbowing (or head-butting) his way into it. Mailer was a very public persona who happened to know a great many people, but getting some 150 contributors — friends, editors, lawyers, ex-wives, artists, boxers, amanuenses, politicians, criminals, and others — on the record to spill the beans about Mailer is still quite a feat. Manso cast the net so far and wide I am surprised Mailer’s dog Tibo didn’t get a few words in.

This is a very thorough work. Manso took Mailer as seriously as Mailer took himself, meaning Manso took Mailer very seriously. At the end of the book, there is even a Mailer Family Tree, as if we were dealing with the House of Bourbon, though it no doubt helps orient the reader around Mailer’s numerous failed marriages and copious offspring. The benefit of the format chosen by Manso is that, taken together, all those disparate voices yield a fairly accurate average. The result is a rich composite image of what, surprise, surprise, was a very complicated individual. This is another way of saying that Mailer was not particularly likeable. But, to quote Auden, we are not, any of us, very nice — mavericks such as Mailer especially. Still, even when the appropriate allowance is made, those who found themselves in Mailer’s orbit often got more than what they bargained for. While he could be extraordinarily generous, loyal, and solicitous, Mailer was not much fun on his bad days. Like Henry VIII, he had a total of six wives, and if he didn’t bump off any one of them, he came close, stabbing and nearly killing wife №2. Mailer could do evil even when he thought he was doing good, as when he advocated for the release of a convicted murderer who went on to commit another murder as soon as he was free.

The usual distinction between Mailer the man and Mailer the artist is harder to make in his case because, as one publisher says in the book, Mailer could only write about what he’d personally experienced. He felt he had to live close to the edge if his writing was to be any good. It is an uncompromising approach that can get people into serious trouble, of which Mailer obtained more than his fair share. Walking his dog one night in the 1950s, he picked a fight with two sailors because they had called his canine queer; he was beaten senseless and nearly lost an eye. Others might have learned their lesson; Mailer seemed to exult in it. Whether he genuinely enjoyed flirting with danger or did it to seek validation is hard to say. He had courage, but the pathological need to display it suggests at least some of it was for shock value. Mailer was a case study in megalomania — the literary equivalent of the guy who drops his pants in front of an audience and says, “Mine is biggest.” He constantly had to épater les bourgeois, shock the establishment and the Menckenian Boobus americanus, be in everybody’s face. Mailer craved the spotlight and felt like a fish in the water when he was in it; he must have been miserable without it. One is almost inclined to agree with one of the contributors who says that, for all his success, Mailer lived in a prison.

I don’t know what, if anything, that did for his craft. As far as his fiction goes, I read the novel The Castle in the Forest some years ago and thought it no great shakes — it was interesting mostly for Mailer’s take on metaphysics. I have tried dipping into Deer Park and never got far; I don’t think I’ll ever try again. I can’t see myself recommending a Mailer novel to anyone looking for advice on what literary fiction to read. I will admit to never having picked up The Naked and the Dead, the novel that made Mailer’s name, which, given my undertaking here, no doubt puts me at a disadvantage. But war novels have never been my thing, and I have struggled through such classics as Catch-22; I doubt Mailer’s debut novel is superior. Jean Malaquais, a longtime friend of Mailer’s (and a generous contributor to Manso’s book), believed Mailer was the most talented and versatile writer of his generation. In one fragment, he quotes the following line from Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance: “She was as insatiable as good old America, and I wanted my country on my cock.” In Malaquais’s analysis, this is a “pot of gold” that epitomizes Mailer’s “gargantuan literary ambition.” A pot of gold? One man’s trash is another man’s treasure; this is just trash.

My unlearned but far from isolated opinion is that Mailer, like many other writers who have to stand their ground against the pernicious sands of time, is at his best in nonfiction. Mailer bristled at this kind of assessment; he needn’t have. He himself said the relationship between fact and fiction was peculiar and facts could be written about in a way that made them fiction; something that was true could also be fiction. Mailer was as much a character as he was a writer, and characters really come to life in nonfiction. It is there that Mailer best deploys his raw energy. It’s not just the essays; interviews with him can be equally fascinating — see Pieces and Pontifications (if you can get it — the book is hopelessly out of print). The truth is that, despite Mailer’s locker-room braggadocio, he lived an intense intellectual life. To call him an intellectual is a stretch — the thrust of his thought was less cerebral than intuitive — but unlike other writers, who are not always original thinkers, he tried to form a coherent philosophical view of the world. His lack of discipline got in the way and trivialized much of what he had to say — the idea that the human condition is a battle between good and evil, or that many people lead their lives by the quality of their orgasms, does not rate as a significant contribution to the history of thought — but it didn’t, and doesn’t, make Mailer or his ideas any less interesting.

Mailer was not religious (with his lifestyle, he could have hardly been), but he was not an atheist, either. His outlook was more or less deistic; he believed that God had got the process in motion but then lost control. He was therefore no stranger to metaphysics — what Malaquais called his “Manichean ideas.” These ideas found their way into The Castle in the Forest, Mailer’s attempt to grapple with Hitler. The book, Mailer’s last, was written when he was in his eighties, so even if Mailer was no longer in his prime, it represented the beliefs of a lifetime. If the novel was generally well received, the central premise — that the devil midwifed Hitler’s birth — was not universally cheered to the echo. It went against Hannah Arendt’s sacrosanct notions of the banality of evil, and there was a feeling among the detractors that bringing metaphysics to the topic of Hitler somehow gave him a pass (I also suspect that some of the critical voices could not stomach the idea that a man like Mailer could have anything serious to say). That is to misunderstand Mailer’s point entirely. When, in an interview with The Paris Review, Mailer defended the novel’s argument by claiming Hitler could not be explained without the devil, he was on to something. Unlike other ghouls who came to power in the 20th century, Hitler was a riddle. As many have noted, it is simply impossible to reconcile the first half of his life with the second. How could an uncouth failed painter who patronized flophouses while down and out in pre-war Vienna have become leader of Germany two decades later? Some of the biographical details are downright bewildering. There is, for instance, the little-known fact that while Hitler was active in German politics since the early 1920s, he did not become a German citizen until 1932. During his trial following the Munich Putsch, Hitler had a judge with Nazi sympathies. Et cetera. It was as if a certain force had propelled him all along. Footage and photos of the wildly gesticulating star of the Munich beer halls strongly hint at mental abnormalities that ought to have given the public pause. This is not just hindsight vision. Catching sight of Hitler in a tea room in Munich, Klaus Mann told himself that the future Führer, who reminded Mann of a notorious sex murderer, would never lead Germany. When Hitler proved him spectacularly wrong, Mann decided he had not underrated Hitler but overrated the Germans. Could he have so misread his countrymen? Historians’ attempts to read Hitler have been dogged, incessant, and fruitless. Three titles from a cursory look at my bookshelves: The Hitler of History by John Lukacs, The Meaning of Hitler by Sebastian Haffner, and — the least subtle title of them all — Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum, in which the writer predictably fails to explain Hitler. This is not Rosenbaum’s fault; at some level, Hitler really is inexplicable. Unless, of course, you are prepared to bring in the devil.

Goebbels, Hitler’s dwarfish propaganda minister, wrote in his diary about a woman he’d dated back in the 1920s. Everything went well until he discovered the young woman was partially Jewish, at which point all of her charms evaporated for him. Reading this, I wondered if there wasn’t something particular about the nature of anti-Semitism as a form of hatred. Ethnic and racial bigotry is usually based on external traits; it is a visceral response to clear differences (physical, linguistic, etc.). But with Goebbels’s girlfriend, there had been no perceptible differences. He wouldn’t have realized the girl was of partially Jewish stock if she hadn’t told him. This is a hatred with a purely intellectual, almost metaphysical dimension. It is a hatred unlike any other. I cannot think of a form of prejudice that has been so ready to evolve with the times and accommodate the needs of the day. In the Middle Ages, the Jews were blamed for killing Christ. During the Enlightenment, the Jews were blamed for introducing religion, including Christ. In the age of nationalism, the Jews were blamed for being in other people’s homelands. For much of the 20th century, the Jews were blamed for having a homeland. In the age of globalization and neoliberalism, the Jews have been blamed for spearheading both. On and on it goes. I am not aware of any other kind of hatred so durable, so entrenched, and so amenable to mutations. There is something quite literally diabolical about it, and whenever I recall the story of Goebbels and his ex-flame, I am tempted to think that anti-Semitism is the devil’s revenge. Why the devil should hate the Jews is obvious: the Son of God, after all, was born to a Jewish mother. In the age of reason, this sounds like bunkum. But the age of reason doesn’t know what to make of such phenomena as Hitler or anti-Semitism either, and Mailer’s argument — that if people believe Christ was God’s child, they might entertain the idea that Hitler was the devil’s — is less outlandish than it might seem. You don’t have to accept it, but you can at least consider it.

In the interview with The Paris Review, Mailer was asked about the degree to which he identified with the villains he wrote about. With Hitler, he replied, Mailer needed only five percent of the character in him. But what about the others? There is a fascination with violence that permeates Mailer’s oeuvre the way it does his life, and it doesn’t make for pleasant reading. In his classic essay “The White Negro” (1957), Mailer argued that two eighteen-year-old hoodlums who bashed in the brains of a candy store keeper were engaging in an act of bravery: “Still, courage of a sort is necessary for one murders not only a weak fifty-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relationship with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act it is not altogether cowardly.” When asked whether he still endorsed this rubbish decades later, Mailer did not quite repudiate it. To repudiate it would have been to repudiate his nature.

To understand Mailer you need to understand he was an incorrigible romantic. Romanticism is an elastic and value-neutral term; Eric Hobsbawm, the historian, defined it best when he called it a movement against the middle. The position of the romantic — hero worship, the cult of the self, lofty ideals — is therefore always extreme. A romantic personality can be a force for good as well as a force for destruction. Byron was a romantic; so was Hitler. The middle against which romanticism revolts represents stasis: bourgeois complacency and rancid conformism, Biedermeier gentility and suburban philistinism. Rebelling against these things means moving away towards the extremes, hence the appeal of radicalism. Life can only be experienced in action. The importance is not in the quality of the act but in the act itself, and for deformed personalities the distinction between good and evil loses its significance. Two eighteen-year-old hoodlums thus become valiant and interesting; the fifty-year-old victim, a nonentity to be written off.

The extreme position of romantics explains why so many are drawn to violence, evil, and Manichean views of the world. This attraction must satisfy their need for action — anything to avoid the dreaded torpor of the middle. The protagonist of Charles Bukowski’s Factotum, a ne’er-do-well by the name of Henry Chinaski, describes his daily bus ride on the way to Miami Beach. The bus runs along a very narrow strip of cement and has no guard rail to protect it against the water surrounding the strip. Sometimes the bus has a new driver, and Chinaski ruminates on the employment criteria for the job. “It was ridiculous,” the narrator says. “Suppose he had an argument with his wife that morning? Or cancer? Or visions of God? Bad teeth?” It would take very little for the driver to plunge the bus into the sea — and take all the passengers with him. This is projection; the narrator quickly tells us that if he were the driver, he would certainly consider swerving off the road and killing everyone. “For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter. The old story of good and evil.” But there is no “Hitler” driving the bus to Miami Beach, the one ranting inside Chinaski notwithstanding, and the passengers get to their destination safe and sound. The bus drivers must have been thinking of “car payments, baseball scores, haircuts, vacations, enemas, family visits.” Chinaski concludes: “There wasn’t a real man in the whole shitload.” The real man is not the driver who does his job and goes home to his family, but one who kills himself and everyone else. I don’t know whether that was how Bukowski, literary America’s one-trick pony, viewed life, though I suspect he did, but it is a very romantic take on things.

I have already written about the destructive tendency in some romantics in a piece about the Russian writer Eduard Limonov, “Whither the Romantics?” The deeper I got into Manso’s book, the more Mailer reminded me of Limonov, who lived in New York in the 1970s and saw the same skyline Mailer did. Mailer, I am sure, was unaware of Limonov’s existence, but Limonov had certainly heard about Mailer, though he probably felt little kinship. Unlike the Soviet-born Limonov, whose story of life in America was that of penury and loneliness, Mailer was a bright star in the US cultural firmament, famous and financially secure. He was also old enough to be Limonov’s father. But the two men belonged to the same species — both were diehard romantics, men who chafed under an ordinary existence, felt drawn to violence, and longed to live a life of action. Both Mailer and Limonov gravitated to radical politics and dreamed of a political upheaval that would sweep away the existing order, whichever order it was. Neither one of them would have admitted it, but what counted for both was the rebellion and not the cause. Limonov was a dissident wherever he went; Mailer would have been one too, had he also experienced several political systems. This is from a letter Mailer wrote to a friend about a forum he had attended: “I was tempted to invite the audience to storm the town hall with me, and start the revolution.” Limonov would have gladly lent him a hand. Limonov’s alter ego Eduard Limonov says in his classic autobiographical novel It’s Me, Eddie, “We need to steal, loot, and murder . . . Organize a Russian mafia.” It’s not that Limonov, real or fictional, needed to organize a Russian or any other kind of mafia; he needed to set the world on fire. Whether he was a bank robber or a political revolutionary storming town halls was less important than asserting his individuality and waging war on the middle.

Much in their biographies rhymed — much more than you’d expect, considering the differences in their backgrounds. Both were intuitive thinkers. Both had messy private lives and a succession of failed marriages (though Limonov was more gallant with his women; instead of stabbing his first wife, who had caused him much grief, Limonov immortalized her in It’s Me, Eddie). Both dabbled unsuccessfully in politics (Mailer ran for NYC mayor; Limonov founded his own nationalist-Bolshevik party in the Russia of the 1990s). Both had serious brushes with the law: Mailer served a three-year probation for stabbing his wife, while Limonov was convicted and sent to a Russian prison for seditious activities. Even some of their antics were remarkably similar. Mailer refused to leave a press conference and was forcibly ejected; Limonov handcuffed himself to the New York Times Building. Both got into fights; Limonov was attacked in the 1990s and, like Mailer, nearly lost an eye. In their own ways, both were prepared to do anything to avoid getting sucked into the middle.

To stay true to his entelechy, the romantic needs to explore and exhaust as many of life’s potentialities as possible. This means the romantic will probably have an adventurous life, or at least try to have one. Neither Mailer’s nor Limonov’s life was boring or ordinary in any sense of the word. Both actively courted danger: Mailer served in the army in the Far East theater; Limonov ran around with a machine gun in former Yugoslavia. At various periods of their lives, both men needed to reinvent themselves (Mailer-cum-writer-cum-boxer-cum-mayoral candidate, Limonov-cum-writer-cum-revolutionary-cum party leader). But in one important way, they differed. Unlike Limonov, Mailer had the good sense (and the talent) to stick to his mettle. He marshaled his high-octane experiences to help him write masterpieces; Limonov used his experiences to try and make a masterpiece of his life. Neither was a success. I am not sure whether Mailer ever wrote a true masterpiece, and I am not at all sure whether one’s life can be a masterpiece in light of its perishability. But getting your entelechy all wrong is the bigger failure. This is a point that was lost on Limonov; blithely heedless of his own mortality, he poured scorn on anyone who decided to sow his wild oats.

Anyone including Mailer, who received a brief but characteristically tart mention in an essay on Edward Albee. In the essay, Limonov writes that while Mailer had a stellar start as the author of The Naked and the Dead, he was eventually tamed by the US capitalist system and became a “stub of a large piece of salami,” so much that “his death went unnoticed.” To be fair, Mailer did have a bourgeois side to him; one reads with amusement that, for all his political radicalism, he had a consigliere manage his stock market investments. For Limonov, a radical with a stock market portfolio was unthinkable. What Limonov failed to realize is that life does not offer limitless opportunities for reinvention. Limonov remained untamed, but that was not necessarily a good thing. He spent the last decade of his life strutting around in a leather jacket in the company of thuggish men with crew cuts, posting conspiratorial typo-riddled entries on his LiveJournal blog — a pitiful spectacle for a man in his seventies. Limonov spoke of his quintessentially romantic desire to die in a violent manner — suddenly but heroically. He expired in a hospital bed after a long illness in March 2020, just as the world was busy locking itself down. For Limonov, nothing could be more anticlimactic, but such is the fate of any romantic who does not outgrow his penchant for reinventions and outstays his welcome on the stage. Eclipsed entirely by the pandemic, Limonov’s own death went unnoticed.

Limonov was a provincial phenomenon in the sense that he only mattered in Russia. Mailer was an American star, which made him an international star. But being a star did not make Mailer a genius or the author of the Great American Novel that he dreamed of writing. Among some literati, there has always been the nagging question of whether Mailer was a serious writer; reading Manso’s book, I certainly had the thought that all that effort was a tad disproportionate to the significance of its subject. Yet Mailer was a towering figure in American letters, a larger-than-life character, and the passing of men like him is to be mourned, at least at this anti-romantic time of asphyxiating uniformity and virtualization of human society. Mailer anticipated it and hated what he saw. He understood the dangers of mechanization. For him, life was a basically existential experience, not a phone app. He would have deplored the delegation of human affairs to machines, the shift from the real world to a digital one, and the zombification of people. I cannot imagine him “social distancing” or swiping on Tinder. He refused to have his children vaccinated, got angry when one of his wives had bought a dishwashing machine, and believed the ultimate tendency of masturbation was insanity. It sounds zany, but so are aspects of modern life he criticized. Whatever Mailer’s personal and literary shortcomings, the vitality inherent in Mailer’s writing — the brio of his ideas, the verve of his style, the panache of his personality — can be an exhilarating experience. Alberto Moravia explained it best. One of the contributors in Manso’s book met the Italian writer in Rome and told him he’d attended a party where everybody wanted to come up to Mailer and physically touch him. Moravia suggested it was because Mailer was more real than they were; they wanted to touch him to “hang onto reality.” That’s not something you can say about most people.