Born in Brooklyn in 1923, the son of Lithuanian Jews, Norman Mailer was a child prodigy with an IQ of 170. His teachers reckoned he was ready for Harvard at the age of 15, and aged 16 he duly enrolled to study aeronautical engineering and English literature. Until her dying day, in 1985, Fanny, or Fan, Mailer’s mother, “praised Norman as possessed of genius beyond compare”.
Nevertheless, despite his gifts, Mailer was spectacularly stupid in every way. He thought fascism was a more “natural state than democracy”. Had Adolf Eichmann “killed 500,000 victims with his bare hands, he would have been a monster . . . [and gained] our unconscious respect”. He wrote of rape that “a hipster knows that the act of rape is a part of life too, and that even in the most brutal and unforgivable rape, there is artistry” and that “a little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul”.
When Mailer ran on an “existentialist ticket” to be mayor of New York in 1961 he wrote an “Open Letter to Fidel Castro” in which he advocated forming an alliance with Cuba. He also wanted there to be “gangland tournaments” in Central Park, like the gladiatorial games in ancient Rome. Mailer applauded the 9/11 terrorists for bringing down the “architectural monstrosity” of the twin towers. He loved to see graffiti disfiguring the streets and subways — he saw them as instances of the unfettered creative spirit, and for the same reason he opposed taking knives away from teenage hoodlums. He feared the moon landings would disturb “extra-terrestrial presences”.
Evelyn Waugh once encountered Mailer and called him “a swarthy gangster straight out of a madhouse”. This is the Mailer found throughout Richard Bradford’s biography, a spoilt mummy’s boy, puffed up with pride, arrogance and egocentricity, who went out of his way to appear impulsive and daring — who was always concerned to shock and impress with his creed of unrestrained hedonism.
At Harvard, in his earliest compositions, Mailer aped Hemingway, and was fatally drawn to the old big-game hunter’s “cruelty disguised as macho exhibitionism”, as Bradford puts it. Mailer wanted to write about things that would upset people and hence was drawn to descriptions of mangled bodies, perverse sexual desires, cannibalism, mass murder, incest, coprophilia and sodomy. Although Mailer in the 1940s and 1950s maintained the gays were evil and pernicious — he wrote a magazine article in 1953 called “The Homosexual Villain” — his homophobia, Bradford argues, was “based on a fear that he might be what he despised”.
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There was a lot of macho bluster to the man. Bradford recounts how in the early 1960s Mailer had acquired two poodles, and that one night after walking them in Central Park he returned home “in ecstasy”, his left eye almost out of its socket. He told his wife — the fourth, out of six — that he taken on two sailors who had “accused my dogs of being queer”.
● Norman Mailer’s daughter: ‘I felt liberated by my father’s death’
Unfortunately, Mailer’s aggression wasn’t buffoonish; his violence wasn’t mock-violence. He really did want to hurt people (his stitches and scars were badges of honour) — and to such a person the Second World War was a boon. Mailer served as an infantryman in the Pacific. Although the bulk of his time in the military was spent typing and filing documents, or working as a cook, he was at least shot at and his unit was shelled, and he once stepped on the rotting corpse of a Japanese soldier. Mailer gathered enough material for his debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, which was published in 1948 to acclaim. Fifty thousand copies were sold in three weeks.
Fame was ruinous, as far as Mailer’s behaviour went. He drank whisky heavily, swallowed Seconal and Benzedrine in large doses, and smoked marijuana continuously. Everybody was subjected to his abuse or else made to listen to descriptions of his orgasm-giving penis. At parties he went in for head-butting and throwing punches, by way of sealing arguments. Gore Vidal was more than once upended over a buffet. Mailer habitually back-handed spouses and kicked them in the belly. “I like to marry women whom I can beat once in a while, and who fight back,” he said unapologetically, indeed to laughter. His justification was a hatred of bourgeois domesticity, when “life was getting too safe”. What a card he was.
Mailer was everything we have learnt to despise in the 21st century. As Bradford makes plain throughout his book, Mailer did not wish to be answerable for his actions and opinions; he never treated anyone with respect; he made things up about himself shamelessly — and expected everyone to subscribe to the myths. Mailer wanted to exist without responsibility, his bad behaviour a sign of countercultural vivacity. Criminals and drug addicts, he believed, ought to be armed “to depose the establishment” of conformist America: “We require a death now and again, we need to stir that foul pot.” Mailer’s ideal person — his Heathcliff — was the psychopathic murderer Gary Gilmore, as eulogised in his 1979 true crime novel, The Executioner’s Song.
Not to be outdone, in 1960, Mailer had stabbed Adele, his second wife. The blade had come within less than a quarter of an inch of her heart. He was given a three-year suspended sentence — astonishingly lenient, especially as witnesses had heard him say: “Don’t touch her. Let the bitch die.” Mailer remained unrepentant. “I can explore areas of experience that other men are afraid of,” he boasted — he was always on talk shows or addressing campuses. The actor Rip Torn, playing opposite Mailer in a violent, improvised play, hit him with a hammer; Mailer retaliated by pushing him to the ground and biting part of his ear off. This was the sort of spectacle everyone expected, took delight in.
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The intelligentsia lapped him up, encouraging Mailer in his own certain belief that “there are days when I think of myself as being the best writer in America” — a writer who believed it admirable to “encourage the psychopath in oneself”; who believed murder, like rape, was a permissible creative gesture; who thought women couldn’t be trusted to drive cars because menstruation made them unhinged; and that contemporary female writers were “dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid . . . ”
Where readers today, faced with Pieces and Pontifications or The Prisoner of Sex, might stumble over the slabs of plague-cloud prose — page after page of clotted gibberish, which Bradford considers “hilariously terrible” — critics at the time showered Mailer with praise. Anthony Burgess considered Ancient Evenings James Joycean. “Mailer’s book about Gilmore is a work of genius,” Christopher Ricks opined. Mailer’s incoherence was interpreted as a guarantee of his postmodernistic credentials, the incomprehensibility of his writing somehow its Pulitzer prize-winning point.
Publishers, too, rewarded Mailer with whopping advances, serialisation deals and paperback rights. In the 1990s his agent brokered a deal that Random House would pay him $30,000 a month for life, provided that he committed all book-length projects to them. Magazine fees were vast — $400,000 from Playboy for an account of the Foreman-Ali Rumble in the Jungle, which was an opportunity for appalling racism. According to Bradford, Mailer believed the African-American male was “an animalistic sub-species of humanity”, at odds with boringly civilised white folks. (His 1957 essay, The White Negro, was grounded in his belief that black Americans were more lawless, vital and sexually driven.) Mailer’s pop biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Picasso, Christ and Hitler — a curious gallery — are worthlessly derivative.
Mailer died in 2007. Fifty years previously he had wondered whether “I had burned out my talent”. It’s true The Naked and the Dead was followed by endless bombast and swagger. Colourful and voluble in ways we can now see are the reverse of admirable, Mailer in his centenary year is now exposed as imbecilic and ludicrous.
Tough Guy encompasses all other serious biographies such as those by Peter Manso, J Michael Lennon and Carl Rollyson, and Bradford is careful to cite all his references. It is smoothly done. But if this lively biography ends up being a damning speech for the prosecution, well, pugilistic old Norman is simply receiving a dose of his own medicine. You can imagine Mailer’s ghost becoming suitably energised to rise from his sulphurous grave to box Bradford’s lights out.
Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer by Richard Bradford, Bloomsbury, 294pp; £20
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