Outside Counsel

Norman Mailer is a writer everyone has an opinion about, but I have never had any difficulty persuading anyone who has ever read him of his greatness. In a way the fact that he was so prolific may have been part of the problem; he was outsized in both his output and his personality, and it often seemed as if people formed their opinion of this nuanced, meticulous mind by measuring the quantity of output, rather than by evaluating its subtle qualities. He didn't make it easy, of course, and he wasn't interested in making it easy. "Do not understand me too quickly" was not his remark-- he borrowed the epigraph from Andre Gide and put it at the front of one of his most interesting (and challenging) works of fiction, "The Deer Park". Thinking about how it is that Mailer may actually have become under-appreciated this morning it occurred to me that although he wrote about American culture, he was not principally concerned with pop culture as such. Sports and entertainment had deeper significance for him, and so his novel about Hollywood was a complicated depiction about the ways power is obtained, and social manipulation, rather than, say, a character study along the lines of a novel like Bud Schulberg's "What Makes Sammy Run?", or a broad social parody like Evelyn Waugh's "The Loved One". (Different too from Nathanial West's "Day of the Locust", although I think what West was after was closer to what Mailer managed to accomplish.) One of the reasons Mailer may not be all that accessible to audiences these days may be that there no longer seems to be a distiction between high and low culture in America. No doubt the notion of Britteny Spears, for example would have been something he grasped immediately-- there are Britteny Spears types throughout"The Deer Park"-- but the fact that we now find Britteny Spears interesting would not have been interesting to Mailer, nor would the arc of her story. He needed bigger icons, because Mailer's America was bigger than the place we have become.

My friend Kelly Kramer was the one who put me on the right path with Mailer. I was mocking him once, and she quietly suggested that I read a story called "The Language of Men". It's found in "Advertisements for Myself", a volume of miscellany that is another form he invented, although I'll be surprised if anyone mentions that. To this day it is one of my favorite things of his. Mailer didn't go in much for short stories-- or brevity at all, really-- but he was certainly capable of working in the form if he felt it would make his point. I just re-read "The Language of Men" as a form of private personal memorial before sitting down to write this post, and it hit me just the way it did when I first read it, a different sort of blow than the feeling that struck me when the radio snapped on this morning and I heard that Mailer had died, but almost physical, just as the news announcement had been. He remained relevant to the end, and I am sorry that we don't have a Norman Mailer to describe for us what the loss of Norman Mailer means to American culture. It means, to me, that we really don't have anyone who is prepared to say, "I want to be a great American Writer because that is an important thing." I wonder if it also means that it is no longer an important thing.