The Courage to Be Wrong
Several years ago I wrote a snotty essay, “The Smiley Face at the End of the Tunnel,” which posited that very good but not great writers of secular disposition often produce an uncommonly “spiritual” novel at the end of their lives. It’s not that they’ve been diagnosed with a fatal illness or have a mysterious intuition that they’re going to be hit by a car. It’s just that mortality looms, so they engage in a late-term bet-hedging that contradicts their earlier, stronger work. The resulting novels are often slight in both length and content, fit only for graduate students. Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace and John Cheever’s Oh What a Paradise It Seems were my two best American examples. But it was too easy to cherry-pick from the ranks of the already deceased, and the essay required a currently spooling proof text. Norman Mailer had just written The Gospel According to the Son, a first-person narrative of the life of Jesus, so I morbidly predicted that he’d never write another book. Bless him, he proved me wrong—as he did so many people throughout his fabulously abundant life and career.
Not only did he live for another decade, but in 2007 the octogenarian published The Castle in the Forest, a story of the young Adolf Hitler told by Dieter, the demon in charge of sweetly nicknamed Adi’s development. The novel is literally rank with feces as well as the loathsome scent of genocidal mania. Spiritual it isn’t, unless one’s definition of the word includes a Manichaean capacity for evil as vast as that which the banal, white-robed deity supposedly exercises for good. Rather than deny Mailer’s earlier books, The Castle in the Forest stunningly affirmed the six decades of work that preceded it—along with the mental and literary vigor of its author.
In an age when the prevailing notion of plot gradually diminished from Crime and Punishment to “me and my problem,” Mailer felt like a throwback to the Russians of the previous century against whom he measured himself. From the beginning, he took on the most significant subjects he could find. As a recent college graduate drafted into the military at the end of the World War II, Mailer was determined to chronicle that war in its immediate wake. The Naked and the Dead follows a single platoon of American G.I.’s into the Pacific theater. In addition to the fighting and the terrifying tedium between battles, the book contains a remarkable meditation on time and the power of language. It involves one soldier who receives daily letters from his wife that take weeks to arrive from the States. They’re mundane “Little Johnny went to the dentist today” stuff, but they keep him sane. Unfortunately, his wife dies suddenly, and the army sends him a telegram to relay the awful news. The soldier suffers, and then suffers again in a different way when a letter his wife wrote weeks earlier arrives. The next day, he receives another a letter from her—and so on each day, until he allows himself to forget the telegram and find psychic refuge in a fantasy that she still exists. The soldier’s wife gains a second life through her letters. Of course, she’ll also die a second death that he’ll mourn the day the letters cease.
This was Mailer in a nutshell. He thrust himself, in life and via the imagination, into extreme situations that he wrote about with visceral power. Yet he was also an intellectual probing for the existential and metaphysical ramifications of his material. Indeed, it’s difficult to write of him purely as a novelist because of the way that action and ideas, fiction and nonfiction, braid throughout his many books. Advertisements for Myself was a mélange of narrative fragments, personal recollections and polemics. Arguably Mailer’s best book, The Armies of the Night, about the 1967 march on the Pentagon, was subtitled, “History as a Novel, the Novel as History.”
The real and the imaginary were never quite distinguishable in Mailer. Fifteen years after he delivered Harlot’s Ghost, a 1,400-page doorstopper of a novel about the inner workings of the C.I.A., he brought forth a putatively nonfictional quasi-sequel, Oswald’s Tale, which consisted of 800 more pages of J.F.K. assassination conspiracy theory. Which is weirder, which truer?
Relishing scope, Mailer would go anywhere there was personal and political passion, be it the bowels of Langley or the catacombs of Giza in Ancient Evenings, a genuine baggy monster of a novel set in Pharaonic Egypt. To my knowledge, nobody has ever actually finished reading Ancient Evenings, though Mailer claimed (seriously? mischievously?) that it was his favorite book.
Mailer received half a dozen lesser writers’ worth of pans. Most of the time, the consequence was no worse than a bruised ego, and he had ego to spare. The man suffered nothing quietly, from the idiocies of a half-century’s politics to the idiocies of the reviewing class to other authors’ whining. “Writer’s block,” he wonderfully declared, “is only a failure of the ego.” Wherever he went, whatever he wrote, he was always in the game.
Was he as good as the Russians? Will he be read a century after his death? Norman Mailer helped transform journalism—and more so journalists—by placing the reporter at the center of the story and using the techniques of fiction to enhance reportage. He painted the big picture of his era, and just as surely he made big blundering mistakes. But the great thing about Mailer is that he was never afraid to be wrong. That’s why he was right more often than nearly anyone else.
Melvin Jules Bukiet is the author of seven books of fiction and the editor of three anthologies. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and has been working on a novel of Maileresque proportions for several years.
