Norman Mailer, RIP

» WaPo: Pulitzer Prize-Winner Norman Mailer Dies at 84 (Bart Barnes)

Norman Mailer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who wrote graphically and compellingly about sex and violence, conflict and politics, love and war, as the tempests of his personal life complemented the turbulence of his prose, died of kidney failure yesterday at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Mailer achieved literary fame at the age of 25 with his first novel, "The Naked and the Dead," which was based on his experiences in the Army in the Pacific during World War II. The book led the New York Times bestseller list for 19 weeks in 1948 and 1949 and was later made into a movie. He was 84.

I've read all of zero books by Norman Mailer - just a bit before my time. But there's just something compelling about his background and career that has kept me slightly more than a little interested. To wit ...

Mailer's reputation as a rowdy, unpredictable writer was confirmed during a bacchanal at his New York apartment in 1960, when he stabbed his second wife with a penknife. Another time, he punched author Gore Vidal in the mouth after tossing a drink in his face.

The confrontation, which Vidal would later call "the night of the tiny fist," had its origins in a bitter and very public verbal battle between Mailer and leaders of the feminist movement.

Over lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, Mailer asked Gloria Steinem what women had against him. "You might try reading your books," Steinem told him. Kate Millett, in her 1970 study, "Sexual Politics," described Mailer's prose as "blatantly and comically chauvinist."

Never one to retreat from a battlefield, Mailer went on a talk show hosted by Orson Welles and declared, "Women should be kept in cages." In a Harper's magazine essay titled "The Prisoner of Sex," he wrote: "The prime responsibility of a woman is to be on earth long enough to find the best mate for herself and conceive children who will improve the species."

Vidal then entered the fray with an article in the New York Review of Books, finding "a logical progression" from Henry Miller to Mailer to Charles Manson.

The two authors traded insults on ABC television's "Dick Cavett Show." Then at a 1977 Manhattan dinner party, Mailer threw his scotch whiskey in Vidal's face, butted him with his head and punched him in the mouth. When the hostess, journalist Lally Weymouth, begged other guests to pull the two apart, Clay Felker, then editor of Esquire, told her, "Shut up. This fight is making your party."

Um, minus the whole 'stabbing his wife' unpleasantness, I can relate to most of that. Sometimes it really is the fight that makes the party. Feel free to draw your own conclusions about that.

Mailer's latest book - "On God" - has been on my radar since its release. I don't think there's much risk of my taking Mailer's gospel to heart - hence my delay in purchasing - but there's something that does strike me as fascinating about reading through another person's journey of faith as long as it's written honestly, candidly, and removed from this sense that we have to scrub our ideas by some guidelines of political correctness in order for it to pass muster. In this case, Mailer doesn't merely adapt a given template as his own - again, something I can well appreciate. His characterization of God is one that most studied Christians would disavow. But it's hard to get beyond the honesty of his journey to arriving at the point he's at by the writing of this book.

New York magazine had this to say (among other things) regarding the book ...

Mailer's deity is much like Mailer. He or she is an artist--with the stipulation that God is the greatest artist--concerned most particularly with the human soul, but with much else besides. God takes great pleasure in his creations. God is constantly experimenting, and highly fallible. God is far from all-powerful, but is learning along with us. God is in constant struggle with his own fallibility, and also with evil--with the devil--and is not certain whether good will triumph in the end. We are God's creations, but we are not at all times part of his plan--God may not even be cognizant of all that we do. And if God needs our love, the question Mailer insists has to be answered is, Why?

I'm guessing Mailer is either finding out right now ... or looking for a good scotch whiskey to throw at St. Peter.