Stormin’ Norman
There’s no way that a column called “Punch Lines” could fail to note the passing of Norman Mailer, the two-fisted tornado of American literature, who flung in the towel on 10 November at the age of eighty-four. The author of The Naked and the Dead, The Armies of the Night, The Executioner’s Song and this year’s The Castle in the Forest, he won the Pulitzer Prize twice and was also given the US National Book Award.
Charles McGrath’s obituary in The New York Times sums him up like this: “Mr Mailer belonged to the old literary school that regarded novel writing as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic characters with egos to match. He was the most transparently ambitious writer of his era, seeing himself in competition not just with his contemporaries but with the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
”But Mailer didn’t restrict himself to punching typewriter keys over the full fifteen rounds of his professional career. He loved boxing, famously covering the Ali–Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire, and was an inveterate scrapper himself. The combative writer once threw a haymaker at Gore Vidal, only to hear his rival ask, “Lost for words again, Norman?”
Maybe the macho man had issues: he once picked a fight in a bar because he decided someone had questioned his dog’s sexuality. “Nobody calls my dog a faggot,” stands as one of his great lines, although Mailer almost lost an eye in the ensuing brawl.
He liked to travel and visited Scotland several times. In fact, his final public appearance was at the 2000 Edinburgh International Book Festival, although Andrew O’Hagan interviewed him by live satellite link-up this year.
But Mailer’s first outing in the Capital was way back in 1962 at the legendary Writers’ Conference, organized by none other than ONE Project associates John Calder and Jim Haynes. Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs describes the symposium in some detail, including the aftermath…
Some of Edinburgh’s rowdier youths had taken to harassing Festival-goers in ways which would earn their grandchildren ASBOs today. Burroughs recounted how one poor soul had to dodge and weave his way through the mean streets of the city to get to a literary party. The unfortunate would-be reveller did manage to get to his destination unscathed—only to be met by Mailer’s fist as he reached the door of the flat.
Burroughs was sanguine about the debacle he’d witnessed, but then Mailer had described him as “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius”.
Latterly, Mailer did seem to have made peace with himself and those around him. He lived in Provincetown, a former whaling port at the tip of Cape Cod which has become the most popular gay resort on the east coast of the USA. What’s more, as Philip Hoare reported in The Independent, the old slugger became friends with John Waters, of all people, and attended the film director’s summer parties.
In 2003, while speaking out against the Iraq War in Provincetown, he called for the political acceptance of “an existential God, as opposed to a fundamentalist one”. And only this year he talked more about his religious ideas in New York Magazine, saying: “God is an artist. And like an artist, God has successes, God has failures.”
And Mailer made it clear that he knew people would think he was talking about himself.
Andrew J. Wilson
