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| Posted By : nathan - 11/10/2007 12:15 PM | | NEW YORK (Nov. 10) - Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Executioner's Song" died Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84.
Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, who is also the author's biographer.
From his classic debut novel to such masterworks of literary journalism as "The Armies of the Night," the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality.
Some of his works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old "enfant terrible."
Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, street-wise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.
He had nine children, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New York, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women's liberation. But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, "In the end, it is the writing that will count." Mailer, he wrote, possessed "a superb natural style that does not crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and characters with real blood streams and nervous systems, a great openness and eagerness for experience, a sense of urgency about the need to test thought and character in the crucible of a difficult era." Norman Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, N.J. His father, Isaac, a South Africa-born accountant, and mother, Fanny, who ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, soon moved to Brooklyn - later described by Mailer as "the most secure Jewish environment in America."
VIEW IMAGE"Writing the wet dreams of teenage boys" - Lindsey Llyod, Tangent Reviews
Tarantino himself has been forward and unapologetic about his influences. In a 1994 interview with Empire magazine, he said, "I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages." |
| Posted By : nathan - 11/10/2007 12:20 PM | I'm wearing a black armband today. I read "Tough Guys Don't Dance" at WAY to young an age of 12--trying to wrap my mind around a) *what* a rimjob was and b) why it could serve as a motivation for murder was very, very difficult.
Read Naked and The Dead in the Army, etc etc. This guy was the bastard offspring of Hemmingway and Hunter S. Thompson. Though that description fits in the philosphical it doesn't do him justice in the reality.
I'd like to read a High Fantasy work as profane, violent and brilliant as anything written by Norman Mailer. Since he was born, not created I doubt I ever will.
VIEW IMAGE
"Writing the wet dreams of teenage boys" - Lindsey Llyod, Tangent Reviews
Tarantino himself has been forward and unapologetic about his influences. In a 1994 interview with Empire magazine, he said, "I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages." |
| Posted By : Daniel - 11/10/2007 3:53 PM | Noooooo!!! Ugh.
That spells an END to an entire literary era.
"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."
Daniel |
| Posted By : cussedness - 11/11/2007 8:05 AM | the man more than the fiction made a very big impact on me as a teenager. You could not read about books and writing and literature without running up against mentions of him. I read his books in my early twenties and was very impressed by the intensity of his work.
Janrae Frank
I have no skeletons in my closet, they are all hanging from the yardarm.
Once there were three brothers, Brandrahoon the vampire, Isranon called the Dawnhand, speaker to spirits, and Waejonan the Accursed, first of sa’necari. Isranon defied his brothers and was destroyed, his descendants forced into the darkness.
Blood Rites
www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook29989.htm
website
www.janraefrank.com
Darkzone
www.janraefrank.com/Vanilla.1.0.1/ |
| Posted By : nathan - 11/11/2007 5:00 PM | You know...
thank god there's at least two people on this board with a little sense of propriety.
Robert Jordan dies and the thread scrolls on forever. A man mentioned in the same breathes as Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and Hemmingway dies and---
Hey I realize this is genre board and god knows I've typed plenty 'o posts with a anti-literary pretension chip on my shoulder.
But it's NORMAN MAILER people. Come on.
Sigh. Nevermind.
VIEW IMAGE"Writing the wet dreams of teenage boys" - Lindsey Llyod, Tangent Reviews
Tarantino himself has been forward and unapologetic about his influences. In a 1994 interview with Empire magazine, he said, "I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages." |
| Posted By : Bill Ward - 11/11/2007 5:47 PM | Personally I found him pretentious and overrated, which I suppose is why I haven't chimed in. But, like Dan says, it is the end of an era. The 'novelist as culture-hero' no longer really exists anymore.
billwardwriter.com |
| Posted By : nathan - 11/11/2007 6:04 PM | The man or his writing?
I always put him in the Hunter S. Thompson category of "great writing but I wouldn't want to invite him to dinner."
Or did you mean the books and articles were pretension and overrated? Armies of the Night? Naked and the Dead?
You'll note I'm not arguing your personal taste just trying to figure out if you mean the man's barbaric crumogeon personality or the way he constructs a paragraph and his insights on the human condition.
VIEW IMAGE"Writing the wet dreams of teenage boys" - Lindsey Llyod, Tangent Reviews
Tarantino himself has been forward and unapologetic about his influences. In a 1994 interview with Empire magazine, he said, "I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages." |
| Posted By : Bill Ward - 11/11/2007 6:59 PM | Both basically, in his case you can't really separate them. Sure if Thompson came over your house you'd be mopping up vomit and spackling bullet holes for a week afterward, but he never argued it took moral courage to stab his wife, like Mailer did. I just think Mailer tried so hard to be Pappa Hemingway he overshot the mark and became Sid Vicious. I don't think he deserves to be mentioned in the company of the three you listed either for his craft or his philosophy, and compared to them he was a poseur that never got past the self-promotion and hype of his own persona. I think Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald combined an authentic voice and outlook with real skill, I think Mailer had none of the former and only some of the later.
I don't want to deride the impact he had on you, his work is visceral and shocking and I won't claim that I haven't enjoyed some of it myself, but I think its ultimately to be judged much less good than the swirl of celebrity around Mailer has heretofore allowed. Just my opinion on the quality of his work, not the importance he's had in the middle decades of the last century.
billwardwriter.com |
| Posted By : John M. Whalen - 11/11/2007 7:40 PM | | Just to chime in here. As Daniel said it is the end of an era. The writer as a personality. Someone who could go on the Tonight Show or in the old days on Dick Cavett and have at it. He was a man of letters with an abrasive personality who didn't mind taking on feminists or anyone else for that matter. I dare say he would today be berated publicly by the likes of Dr. Phil and Oprah. His passing really does mark the end of a period of intellectual fortitude and challenge. He was one of the giants who sprung up from that fantastic period of 1950s Greenwich Village. Kerouac, the Beat Poets, humorists Jean Shephered and Shel Silverstein. Well, you could go on forever, and not leave out Mingus and Monk. You may not like the things Mailer said or the way he said them. Indeed part of Mailer's problem as a writer was that he fell in love with his own celebrity and I think that became his undoing. He became his own greatest fictional character. But the man could write. He could weave a spell with words--- he had the magic gift that is given to few. He may have squandered a lot of that magic, but man when he got it going he could cast a spell. To the passing of a man like that, to paraphrase Arthur Miller, "Attention must be paid." |
| Posted By : Thirdy Lopez - 11/12/2007 12:09 AM | | I haven't read any of his work, sadly. We've lost a lot of great writers this year.
I lost my grandmother to acute renal failure too. She passed away last month. 
Aurelio Rico Lopez III aka "Thirdy" has had fiction featured in COLD FLESH (Hellbound Books), THE BLACKEST DEATH I, II, and III (Black Death Books), STAR-SPANGLED ZOMBIE (Maniac Press), RAW MEAT (Sideshow Press), SHADOW BOX (Brimstone Press), TRIP THE LIGHT HORRIFIC (RAGE machine Books), DEAD MEN (AND WOMEN) WALKING (Bards and Sages), and THE BOOK OF SHADOWS VOL. I (Brimstone Press). His poems have appeared in Mythic Delirium, Star*Line, Dark Animus, Goblin Fruit, Scifaikuest, Electric Velocipede, Sybil's Garage, The Horror Express, Down In the Cellar, and elsewhere. |
| Posted By : nathan - 11/12/2007 1:00 AM | T, very sorry to hear this. Feel awkward expressing my sentiment on a chatboard as its a rather flat forum but thoughts and prayers to you and yours.
VIEW IMAGE
"Writing the wet dreams of teenage boys" - Lindsey Llyod, Tangent Reviews
Tarantino himself has been forward and unapologetic about his influences. In a 1994 interview with Empire magazine, he said, "I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages." |
| Posted By : Daniel - 11/12/2007 4:53 PM |
Bill Ward said...Both basically, in his case you can't really separate them. Sure if Thompson came over your house you'd be mopping up vomit and spackling bullet holes for a week afterward, but he never argued it took moral courage to stab his wife, like Mailer did. I just think Mailer tried so hard to be Pappa Hemingway he overshot the mark and became Sid Vicious. I don't think he deserves to be mentioned in the company of the three you listed either for his craft or his philosophy, and compared to them he was a poseur that never got past the self-promotion and hype of his own persona. I think Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald combined an authentic voice and outlook with real skill, I think Mailer had none of the former and only some of the later. I don't want to deride the impact he had on you, his work is visceral and shocking and I won't claim that I haven't enjoyed some of it myself, but I think its ultimately to be judged much less good than the swirl of celebrity around Mailer has heretofore allowed. Just my opinion on the quality of his work, not the importance he's had in the middle decades of the last century.
Nicely turned post, Bill. I'm not sure if I can agree with everything you say -- and I'm not *that* familiar with Mailer's work -- but your post is very funny and offers a lot of food for thought.
If nothing else, Mailer *tried* really, really hard to make lit meaningful and alive for his age. Like you said, maybe he tried too hard.
Robert Lowell was similarly decadent and hard-boiled and an enfant terrible -- they called him "Caligula" after-all ("Cal," that is) and "Cal" deliberately destroyed his talent and performed with sporadic brilliance -- by *design* -- it is an artistic statement in itself. Like Hendrix burning his guitar; only these great talents opted for self-immolation.
We all watched 'em burn, though. Some of us more than others. It's hard to say whether it is a cop-out or a genuine act of artistic expression to ruin oneself and one's talent by design. Hemingway did it. He wrote about it and chronicled his descent. Then he blew out his brains.
If Mailer had suicided, even at the age of sixty, there'd be no debate about his stature as an American icon. His mistake, relative to American literary criticism (which is driven by biography), was that he put on the "brakes" or simply "grew up" something Hunter Thompson never did, or Robert Lowell, either.
"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction." Daniel |
| Posted By : Bill Ward - 11/12/2007 11:41 PM | I think there's a definite tragedy in getting caught up in your own persona and being consumed by it, Thompson is probably an even more extreme example of a man that spent his whole life chasing a self-constructed cartoon image of himself and piddling away an immense talent -- for my money he's a better writer than Mailer, he really could have been a Fitzgerald. Where I have a problem with Mailer is his gross self-promotion and his cosmic immorality--like when he worked to get some knucklehead whose writing he admired released from prison, and said knucklehead stabs and kills someone within a day of his release, and Mailer then says some crap in an interview that he was willing to see some people sacrificed for the sake of talent. He wrote articles espousing hooliganism and violence, essentially suggesting that any sort of behavior was justified because of our monstrous society and government, and he openly admired violent criminality. I just think he was basically a selfish, shallow, and immature man with a lot of bad ideas, a few good books, and more than his deserved share of the spotlight.
As you say though, he was one of the last of an old breed of larger than life writers and his death, and life, are important; but I think in the panoply of 'writer as culture hero' he figures more as a sinister clown if not an outright villain. I'm still willing to pick up a book by him though, and give it its day in court, because a person's art can be and often is bigger than that person--so maybe one day he'll surprise me.
billwardwriter.com |
| Posted By : Daniel - 11/13/2007 3:35 PM | Bill,
Have you considered the possibility that Mailer was "pulling a Rimbaud" with his "espousing" of "hooliganism?"
I think he was. But I'm no expert, certainly. If you live in a society which is obsessed more with biography than art itself, then you must -- to be an expressive artist -- make *use* of this particular eccentricity in American culture. Celebs who aren't artists do it routinely for capitalist ambition, but *artists* do this sometimes as well for *artistic* purposes. I'm convinced this was the case with Mailer as it was for others such as Warhol, Plath, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sexton, Lowell, and many, many others.
PLath wrote lovingly about suicide and hatred, Hemingway glorified big-game hunting and infidelity and alcoholism. That's just for starters.
I think sometimes these acts are extensions of the artists work. I'm on the fence as to whether or not I think, as I mentioned upstream, it's a form of "cop-out." Sure, maybe artists who are dissatisfied with their culture should work to create art which changes the culture through positivistic example rather than sordid satire and meta-art. But we are only human and "beauty is so hard;" I think when the mega-talented succumb to their anger and disappointment in society they start mocking it by acting out, just like children, I s'pose. But there is something childish about all artistic expression, the idea that one's imagination is more powerful than objective reality.
"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."
Daniel |
| Posted By : Bill Ward - 11/13/2007 6:16 PM | I can see that, it sort of explains the extremes of this sort of artistic personality. Doesn't make him any more appealing to me though.
billwardwriter.com |
| Posted By : Daniel - 11/13/2007 8:31 PM | Dammit, Bill -- you are evasive when I try to bait you into these discussions. Believe it or not, I'd rather hear your (and others') thoughts despite my propensity for lecturing.
<sigh>
What happens when the manna personality gets tired of hearing itself go?
LOL
At least we got the thread rolling..... Although Mailer would have probably rpeferred to see a fistfight over his rep.
"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."
Daniel |
| Posted By : Scott M. Sandridge - 11/13/2007 10:30 PM | Never heard of the guy. suddenly, I feel dumb. 
Which lich fell in the ditch? |
| Posted By : erazmus - 11/25/2007 8:48 PM | Well, despite living into an age where the man on the street either won't know who he was now that he's gone or will confuse him with the creator of "All in the Family", he must have been important, his work must have said something to somebody for, as my twenty-something kids observed, his death was reported on television.
That being the epitome of achievement is this post-literate culture, Norman Mailer was a great success by the standards of the age he died in. His work I'll not speak too, for though I read several of his books, long ago, they failed to make a lasting impression on me at the time.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com
"Dutchman Rescue"in Continuum SF #6
www.continuumsciencefiction.com/orders.htm
"An Incident at Black Tongue Tavern" in _Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy_ from Fantasist Enterprises:
www.fantasistent.com/books/anthologies/BASH.php
"Stains" in Tales of the Talisman 3-1 www.zianet.com/hadrosaur/index.html
"Slushpiles" in Between the Kisses
www.samsdotpublishing.com/betweenkisses/TurnerSlushPileS.htm |
| Posted By : Bill Ward - 11/25/2007 10:34 PM | Daniel said...
At least we got the thread rolling..... Although Mailer would have probably preferred to see a fistfight over his rep.
lol, I missed your reply and you're right, some liquor-fueled fisticuffs would have been a fitting memorial ;)
Good observation Michael, it seems Mailer's celebrity outlived his relevance.
billwardwriter.com |
| Posted By : Daniel - 11/26/2007 9:06 PM | Back in the 80's I remember seeing cartons of Philip Morris brand (I think) cigarettes with Norman Mailer audio-books strapped to them as a giveaway bonus! Seriously, these things were in convienence stores, but not for long, as I recall.
Now that's the epitome of success in American letters!
Just remembered that reading this thread...
"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."
Daniel |
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