R.I.P. Norman Mailer

For much of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Norman Mailer was everywhere. In a period in which public intellectuals, from anthropologist Margaret Mead to journalist-philosopher Walter Lippmann, used the full range of public media--popular magazines and daily newspapers as well as specialized journals, television talk shows as well as university speeches--to offer insight and the play of intelligence, no one was more intelligent or playful than Norman Mailer.

He was an original, pugnacious in defiance and pushing his championing of ideas to their edge, and sometimes over it. He was infuriating to many. He risked being ridiculous, and he often enough was. But he had his moments--like his chaotic confrontation with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show, which ended with his moving, naked statement of the heights of writing to which he aspired.

He was perhaps the last great champion of the American novel, though his achievements now, especially in those years are measured in his polemics and nonfiction. Still, I can remember being riveted reading his now mostly forgotten late 60s novel, Why Are We in Vietnam?, a titanic riff on the American soul, as I recall it.

He was one of the clearest voices articulating the postwar change in America--he noted that a characteristic of plastic, and this society made of plastic, is that it shows no wear until it just breaks. I remember to this day something I heard him say on TV, and then read in one of his earlier books (he was stealing his own material): "Totalitarianism is the interruption of mood."

He remained a provocative, complex and subtle intelligence to the last, even as he mellowed and grew wiser. Life overcame his single dedication--life and his own energies and interests. He said and did a lot of crazy things, but for several decades at least, no one was more alive to the times.

For the last few decades his interests haven't much been mine, and I have read little of his later books. What I most learned from him in those earlier formative years was the courage to think large, and to care deeply about what few others care about in this society that fascinated him: the exact journey of words, the shape of sentences. His image to others may be of ego, violence and odd notions on sex, morality and the nature of reality, but to me he was one of the last to offer writing--especially the novel--- as a hard and holy occupation.

His New York Times obit is here, and an essay by Michiko Kakutani.