His New York Jewish Public Self Was American Triumph
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The Observatory
The subject was old age. Norman Mailer said there was a grace in aging. He didn’t feel as angry or self-involved as he once did; he wasn’t wrapped up in his disappointments. He had set out to be a “major historical figure,” like the literary matinee idols of his youth, Steinbeck and Hemingway. That hadn’t happened. He accepted that he was a writer.
It was shortly after his 84th, and last, birthday, in January, and he was having dinner in the Upper East Side apartment of author-activist-patron Jean Stein. Even hobbling around on two steel canes, wearing high black Uggs that his skinny crooked legs vanished into, Mailer radiated a sense of fullness. His famous Brooklyn-British baritone was richer than ever, the eyes bluer. He spoke of his former friend Norman Podhoretz, how much he had enjoyed him in the 70’s, and someone said, “You’re 84, why don’t you reach out to Podhoretz now and rediscover that affection in one another?”
It was the one unpleasant moment. “No. No. It would be no use. Because I would have to bring up the Iraq war. I can’t forgive him for it.” And then in turn he would have to talk about Podhoretz’s attachment to Israel. The overture wouldn’t help anyone. …
Mailer’s Jewishness was a doorway to the world. He gave his talents to mankind and felt no special obligation to the people from whom he came. He wasn’t a self-denier, he knew the marvels of being Jewish—“My Jewishness was a great asset in my work, because it gave me a certain sensitivity to the world. It is not easy to be a Jew without thinking about the world a great deal of the time, given the classic situation of Jews in history,” he said in an interview I did for The Observer. But he was a universalist, and saw all people as having special qualities. That dinner at Ms. Stein’s, we had talked about the cabala and its insights into the unconscious, but Mailer had waved it away. He was impatient with cabalist obscurities. The same spiritual wisdom was possessed by “Christians … and Muhammeddans.”
Mailer’s Jewish life upsets some Jews. On jewlicious.com, they are already attacking him for never having visited Israel, and for straying away from his spiritual roots. Maybe someone will count up the Christian wives and the Jewish ones, and give us a bottom line.
But Jewish history is filled with assimilation, especially by literary stars from Spinoza to Heine to Nathanael West. Assimilation is older than any other Jewish social dream, older than Zionism, communism, or, today, neoconservatism. Mailer said once that being a bookish Brooklyn kid felt like a limitation to him (in very much the way that V.S. Naipaul once told the 92nd Street Y that staying in Trinidad felt like a curb on his imagination), and certainly he rebelled against it. Mailer wanted—like the Zionists—to be a man of action, and for a while, the writing was dwarfed by the extravagant life: the marriages, offspring and fights (on the Town Hall stage with feminists, and on the Hamptons turf with Rip Torn).
There was a lot that was Jewishy about the book that made him a celebrity: The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948. Mailer did not experience much combat in the South Pacific; but in one World War II reminiscence (sorry, no citation; my books are packed for a move), I read that Mailer the young reporter used to pop into other guys’ tents and ask questions, listen to the stories. In the novel, Mailer’s ego is parceled out, like cabalist shards of the godhead. Goldstein the Jew from Brooklyn is a smaller character than the book’s hero, Lieutenant Hearn, a gentile who went to Harvard.
The mixing of Jewish and gentile American personae took place again in the book described as a sequel to The Naked and the Dead, An American Dream. You remember, the one that begins with the violent, exploitative sex (all right: the rape scene) with the maid on the balcony, where Rojack, a half-Jew, goes back and forth between two holes.
Mailer wasn’t apologetic about this half-Jewness. He was granted tremendous freedom by his early success to speak to Americans, and could channel American voices. In The Spooky Art, he wrote that it is necessary for a writer to put on airs, but also to take them off. His accent seemed more 02138 and SW10 than Brooklyn Heights. The obits say he once married English nobility. That is also an American experience: He tried things on and saw what fit. He was ambitious and enlarged himself. In his last novel, The Castle in the Forest, he enlarged himself so much that he wrote about Hitler from a Black-Forest-lithographic-metaphysical perspective, Hitler the handiwork of centuries of efforts by the devil.
Charles McGrath wrote in The Times that Mailer never wrote the great American novel, and this must be conceded, though he died trying. He told Charlie Rose earlier this year that he waited three years to write the sequel to The Castle in the Forest. But “I know enough about being 84 to know that if you’re a ping-pong ball you can roll off the table at any second.” Maybe he felt that he had wasted some of his literary juice in all the pugilistic-action-figure stuff. And he rolled off the table before he could finish the Hitler’s-rise book. Next Page >
"But Jewish history is filled with assimilation, especially by literary stars from Spinoza to Heine to Nathanael West. Assimilation is older than any other Jewish social dream, older than Zionism, communism, or, today, neoconservatism."
Philip, we know that Zionism is you bete noir. Still, Spinoza never assimilated. Had he done so he would have converted to Christianity which was the only vehicle of assimilation open to him. Try to get your facts straight.
Also, some people think of Spinoza as the first secular Jew who was also something of a proto-Zionist. He wrote about the possibility of a revived Jewish national home in his Political treatise.
Moreover, as Heine's experience shows (and you left out Marx) assimilation wasn't always successful The man convered but it was an open secret that he remained a Jew. He was more Jewish than either Norman Mailer or Nathanael West who did not convert.
As for your lame comparison of Zionism with communism and neo conservatism (why not Americanism, or even vegetarianism?) it makes no sense.
"Mailer said once that being a bookish Brooklyn kid felt like a limitation to him (in very much the way that V.S. Naipaul once told the 92nd Street Y that staying in Trinidad felt like a curb on his imagination), and certainly he rebelled against it."
Hey there are all kinds of limitations in life. The greatest writers were limited by the very profession they chose. Still they managed to transcend it. Think of Henry James. That Norman Mailer saw Judaism as a limitation says more about his lack of imagination than about Judaism.
The great poet Paul Celan who survived a death camp wasn't limited by his very narrow experience so why would Mailer be limited by his?
" Mailer wanted—like the Zionists—to be a man of action, and for a while, the writing was dwarfed by the extravagant life: the marriages, offspring and fights (on the Town Hall stage with feminists, and on the Hamptons turf with Rip Torn)."
I agree that Zionist were and are men and women of action, but their action was and is focused on building a Jewish polity so that Jews could live full lives and imaginatively engage the world.
Look at all the great poets and novelists and cinema directors Israel has produced in just a few decades.
This is what Mailer and his ilk should be measured against and not just Nathanael West, and Malamud.
Weiss is just collecting anti Jewish anecdotes by Mailer:
"He told The Conservative that Israel should have been accepted by the Arabs, but after it wasn’t, Israel’s response had diminished Jewish character."
Says who? Mailer really didn't know much about Israeli society did he? Did he bother to learn Hebrew? What an arrogant thing to say.
"He told Nextbook that the great Jewish tradition of thinking had been crunched down to one question, Is it good for the Jews:
“If the Jews brought anything to human nature, it’s that they developed the mind more than other people did. It was extremely important for them to develop that mind. And [now] to deaden it and stultify it, to flood it with cheap religious patriotism, I consider that part of the disaster that Hitler visited upon us.”"
The Jews development of the mind is not that different than the Western development of mind during the Enlightenment.
And Jew pre and post Hitler are not that different. Mailer as usual gets it wrong. He thinks that he is somehow more Jewish than the Jews and yet that he is being limited by being a Jews. He contradicts himself.
"Mailer was more American than Jewish."
This says it all, Weiss. Why then do you call him a "Jewish writer?"
Hardy, har, har... The Observer let Weiss back in the door. I guess Kaplan and Kushner really do take it up the ass (not that there's anything wrong with that)... Weiss , who tags himself "a self-hating Jew" twists everything to conform to his own assimilated life.
"If the Jews brought anything to human nature, it’s that they developed the mind more than other people did." This ridiculous observation demonstrates that Mailer knows as little about Judaism as Weiss.
Mailer was more important as a personality than as a writer and I suspect that he will be forgotten in six months to a year.
The Forward has an article on Mailer as a Jewish writer which contradicts most of what Mr. Weiss says here:
"Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book"
Ezra Cappell
http://www.forward.com/articles/12032/
THIS MIDGET WROTE SOME WORTHWHILE BOOKS, BUT AS A PERSON, HE WAS A DISGRACE TO AMERICA. HE WAS A HATER OF THE COUNTRY THAT BROUGHT HIM FAME AND FORTUNE.
TO MEMORALISE HIM AS ANYTHING OTHER THAN A LEFTWING LUNATIC WITH WRITING SKILLS WOULD BE A JOKE. HE WAS AN EMBARASSMENT TO ANY PERSON, JEWISH OR OTHERWISE THAT HAS ANY RESPECT FOR THE UNITED STATES.
HE WILL SOON BE RELEGATED TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY WITH OTHER DIRTBAG LEFTIES.
I am a proud American Jew who was offended by Philip Weiss' simple minded article about Norman Mailer.
I served in the US army did you Philip?
For some reason I doubt it. Like all those conservative flag waving jingoist like your idol Patrick Buchanan and his ilk you were probably hiding under you bad when it came time to register for the draft.
Yes, Philip one can be both a Jew and an American and thank God I live in a country in which I don't have to choose.
You and Buchanan would like to force people like me to choose between being Jewish and being an American. If you guys ever came to power I and millions like me would leave the country in a heart beat.
Even Norman Mailer had he been forced to choose would have declined to live here.
Think about that, Philip, next time you shoot off you mouth and attack Jews.
Thanks for publishing this thoughtful and insightful piece. I don't know what all the other commentators here are so upset about - perhaps it's difficult for some people to digest the beautiful complexities of an American (and in particular, New York) identity? All I can say is that I'm surrounded by Jews (and others) who, like Mailer in some ways, have complex ways of relating to their ethnic/religious and national/regional identities, for whom all this business about Israel and Zionism is pretty tiresome prattle, and who experiment and select different ways of "being" -- some may call this assimilation, I think of it as taking the opportunity America presents to absorb and reflect all of one's influences and to exceed the limitations of one's perceived heritage. Here's to the continuation of this kind of experimentation -- for Jews, Muslims and any others who want to. And all the ethnic nationalists can jump off a pier, cause they're the ones who hate what America represents.
Any writer who has to work as hard as Norman Mailer did at proving his "Americaness" means that he is at bottom not one.
His mediocre books bear the stamp of an American wanna be rather than a "real American" as Cray (aka--Weiss) would have it.
And Cray stop Crowing you may live around NY Jews, but I is one and I have no problem calling myself an American-Jew and if you or anyone else doesn't like it tough.
You should be posting on Patrick Buchanan's or some other nativist web site buster.
Oh yes, thanks Reiss for the link to the (Jewish peper) The Forward's article on Norman Mailer. It was pretty good.
Here is an interview with Mailer on his book on Hitler.
Any writer who wanted to write a multi volume biography of Hitler for most of his life is as Jewish as a Hassid.
Weiss and his nativist friends are as wrong as they can be on this issue.
In any case listen to the interview and make up your own mind:
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=532
Mailer not Jewish?
You gotta be kidding.
Read this.
The Jewish Mailer by Reuven Goldfarb
"I must take issue with Richard Pyle's assertion, in his Associated Press dispatch on Norman Mailer's death, that "unlike many of his literary peers, such as Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth, Mailer never wrote on explicitly Jewish subjects" (Jerusalem Post, November 11, 2007).
Two of the main characters in The Naked and the Dead are Goldstein and Roth, Jewish (of course) members of the 14-man platoon whose fortunes Mailer describes in realistic detail. In Barbary Shore, the main female protagonist, Lanny Madison, has vivid flashbacks of Nazi round-ups of Jews, and in An American Dream, his half-Jewish hero, Rojack, responds to a hardly veiled anti-Semitic crack by noting that his ancestors "never hurt anyone particularly."
In Advertisements for Myself, Mailer quotes verbatim a hasidic story he gleaned from Martin Buber's Tales of the Hasidim, and Denise Gondelman, the female protagonist of one of his most intriguing stories, "The Time of Her Time," is most assuredly Jewish, as are two prominent characters in The Deer Park, Charlie Eitel and Herman Teppis, the archetypically noble and the ignoble Jew, even as their slightly altered roman a clef identities (Elia Kazan and Sam Goldwyn) hover in the background. Their Jewishness is not at the forefront, but their Jewish names and positions in the film industry offer a silent commentary on assimilated Jewish life.
Finally, one cannot help but note that The Gospels According to the Son, a rather late novel, portrays an exceptionally well-known and still quite controversial Jew of two millennia past, and The Castle in the Forest, a massive penultimate tome on which Mailer lavished 10 years and most of his remaining literary strength, delves into the psychic formation of the world's foremost Jew-hater.
THUS, PYLE'S remark that Norman Mailer never wrote on explicitly Jewish subjects strikes me as somewhat disingenuous. It's likely that Pyle has in mind a narrower definition of what constitute a Jewish theme than mine.
At any rate, had Mailer not written at all about Jews, he certainly possessed a Jewish sensibility, with a special feel for dialectic and self-inquiry. As he was often the subject of his own writing, that adds up to one thoroughly examined Jewish character; but as I have shown, there were many more.
Some of them, whether identifiably Jewish or not, are stand-ins for Mailer, representing damaged or undeveloped aspects of himself, which he attempts to exorcise. One is Sanford Carter, the put-upon army cook in The Language of Men, who salvages his honor by standing up to the soldiers who taunt him; another is Sam Slovoda, the disappointed intellectual and writer manqué in The Man Who Studied Yoga, whose struggle to live up to his self-image ennobles him, no matter how short of his goal it falls.
AS FOR Mailer never having visited Israel, in contrast to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, his contemporaries and rivals, and even to James T. Farrell, an elder, non-Jewish mentor, I think his own words on the matter reflect an accurate anticipation of what such a visit would have meant: "Being Jewish is such a deep matter that I have the feeling that if I go to Israel, I'll be diverted from the books I want to write for several years. I'll get obsessed with it."
Coming to terms with modern Israel would undoubtedly have diverted his attention from the work he planned to do and perhaps have permanently displaced those plans from his agenda. It was a risk he chose not to take, feeling, I suppose, that he had too much unprocessed material to work through first. I don't judge him for that. Another famous Jewish Brooklynite, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, never visited Israel either...."
Read the rest of the long article:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1195127544138&pagename=JPost%...
Who the hell appointed the white boy Philip Weiss commissar of Jewish culture in America? Whos is he to tell me who is and who is not a Jewish or an American writer.