Norman Mailer

Nov 13 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

HE COULD never quite decide whether he should have been punching faces or typewriter keys, so he devoted considerable energy to both.

The result was a great American writer of the 20th century, whose work was nearly always considered in the context of his rumbustuous sex life and frequent bar-room brawls.

He particularly disliked Gore Vidal, the silvery homosexual and rival novelist, who was about as close as the Americans can get to aristocracy.

At a party, Norman Mailer hurled a glass at Vidal who then saw “this tiny fist coming at me”. But on hitting the deck, the elegant Vidal, scored the knock-out blow. “Words fail Norman Mailer yet again,” he said, nursing his jaw.

In common with his hero, Ernest Hemingway, Mailer believed that in the roll of his words, sometimes tender, often poetic and occasionally jagged, lay his hair-chested masculinity.

At 5ft 8in tall, but broad of shoulder, with his large, leonine head haloed in curls, Mailer seemed to speak for the street. To generations of young journalists, he was the model – the man who wrote about presidents and movie queens, boxers and pimps, and idealised what he called “the white negro hipster”.

For today’s readers such an image was dated, even politically incorrect (an expression Mailer hated), but it had more resonance in the days of Jack Kerouac and the American Beats.

Mailer’s claim to proletarian roots really came from the Wall Street crash, which ruined his accountant father, Isaac, and led to the family moving to Brooklyn from a New Jersey suburb.

A brilliant young man, Mailer took odd-jobs to help him through Harvard. Service with the Army in the Philippines produced the Naked and Dead, a searing account of the war in the Pacific, hailed a great novel. He followed that with the Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955).

But many felt that his style was better suited to extended journalism and this led to his Pulitzer-winning masterpieces, The Armies of the Night (1968), an examination of an anti-Vietnam war march, and The Executioner’s Song (1979) about double-killer Gary Gilmore.

Mailer, six times married with nine children, later lamented his failure to inspire others as much as Heminway or Scott Fitzgerald. But he was the revered master of what became known as “new journalism”.

Norman Mailer, writer, born January 31, 1923, died November 10, 2007.