In Memory, Norman Mailer

In January of this year, The New York Times Book Review ran an article “Maestro of the Human Ego,” reviewing Norman Mailer’s last novel, The Castle in the Forest.

The reviewer took nearly four pages of tiny type to get to the book at hand; all that came before was big-picture analysis of the author’s beliefs and being, and how they evolved over 60 years to arrive at this grand work.

Readers wrote to complain. Who did the reviewer think he was, wasting their time on context?

But the reviewer knew this: The Castle in the Forest would be Mailer’s last major work. (His final book was already posthumous, prepared with the help of his literary executor.)

The review eulogized Mailer’s whole body of work, the only eulogy a writer needs. After a summer of near-homelessness, the article is still here in my briefcase, wrinkled and marked up and torn:

“Insofar as the forest represents natural goodness … ‘forest’ and ‘castle’ are, you might say, the two poles of Mailer’s work and life. The popular conception of Mailer sees only the former: unrestrained expression of impulses and instincts; sex as freedom; absolute candor as the ineluctable hint of God’s presence.

“But Mailer is also … a castle-builder, expert in the different paths along which people can wander and become lost in a forest without a castle, and yet trick themselves into thinking that they inhabit a resplendent fortress or chateau.”

* * *

Mailer is the next great American writer after Hemingway. You almost have to compare them.

Hemingway was a romantic. He fought in WWI, when the world still believed in regeneration through violence. He chronicled disillusioned romantics who were oriented always to what they had lost. In the end, he could not bear the disorientation, could not reorient himself to postmodernism. It’s no wonder he couldn’t survive the 1960s, a blessing he never survived to the ’70s.

Mailer fought in the war of Catch-22. The death of romanticism left a void. Mailer filled it with himself.

End of story? No. Only the beginning. Mailer’s tendency is to communion.

* * *

You shouldn’t reveal so much, Carleen tells me.

Why not? I ask.

She shrugs.

Mailer argues for me: You are never safer than in plain sight. Naked truth is power. Don’t let others usurp it. They are pretenders to your throne.

Own your ego. Reveal your Self. Say it all. Get naked in public, or don't go out in public at all.

* * *

The NYT reviewer says this:

“One way to take the measure of a writer is by considering the weight, quality and consistency of his obsessions. Mailer, from the beginning, has had a rage for what he calls ‘nakedness.’

“It is a passion for emptying his psyche onto the table in front of the reader, much as a person who has just been arrested will be ordered by the police to empty his pockets.”

And this:

“The overflowing force of Mailer’s egotism endows him with respect for the power and capacity of other people’s egos.”