How Do You Solve a Problem Like Norman Mailer?

The contemporary brief against Norman Mailer is long and sordid. He was a misogynist, a violent man who extolled violence. In his brawling and chest-thumping, he tried to out-Hemingway Hemingway and became a parody of Papa—a blowhard narcissist who provoked and offended like he breathed. For all his profuse writing (dozens of books, including two that won the Pulitzer, in a career that spanned six decades), what has lasted in the cultural memory is what he did with a penknife one night in 1960: He stabbed his second wife and the mother of two of his daughters, Adele Morales, just barely missing her heart. (She survived, and died in 2015 at 90 years old.)

To revive the Tasmanian devil that was Mailer at this historical moment, when much of the culture has correctly chosen to downgrade a writer who would engage in such violence and then years later still openly fantasize about keeping women in cages, demands two things: first, that we not turn away from the worst of him, that we run toward even his most deplorable acts and views; and second, that an active case be made that there is still something to gain from understanding how he lived his life and made his art.

A new documentary about Mailer, directed by Jeff Zimbalist, achieves both of these aims. The title itself captures the balancing act Zimbalist is attempting: How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer (A Cautionary Tale). What caution does a tour of Mailer’s explosive existence suggest? Is it a caution against being someone like Norman Mailer, a man who held onto lit matches as long as possible no matter how often he was burned, or is it Mailer’s own words of caution for us about the need to be unafraid, to offend freely, a posthumous bannerman in the fight against the censoriousness that has swept through the American left and right? Which is it? And can it be both?

Unless we are going to comb through the past thousand years or so and excise the work of any artist whose actions or words now seem monstrous to us—and to be clear, we should not do this—a need exists to find ways to productively depict the lives of deeply flawed and even morally repugnant artists. With this film, Zimbalist has done just that by embracing ambivalence. The documentary opens in medias res, on Mailer’s darkest moment, with a news broadcast about him attacking his wife at a party and being committed to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital. Before we are told anything else about the great writer, we learn what he is capable of doing with his hands. His own words follow, a gravelly crunch that accompanies much of the film: “I think I’m a tough guy, and I think I’m a coward. I think that I’m smart, and I think I’m dumb. I think that I’m good, and I think I’m evil.”

Though the film is structured as a series of answers to the title’s question (Mailer’s imagined tips for authentic living, such as “Don’t Be a Nice Jewish Boy” and “Never Let Life Get Too Safe” are used to introduce each section), the story unfolds in a straightforward chronological style. Born in 1923, Mailer grew up in Brooklyn’s middle-class Jewish ghetto of Crown Heights, son of a mother who bragged to the neighbors about his high IQ. He determined early on that he would be a great writer, even debating which front in World War II to fight in based on its potential as a setting for the war novel he intended to write. This ambition was realized with The Naked and the Dead, his best-selling brick of a book that is still considered among the most visceral depictions of how soldiers experienced that war. Fame followed, and then a transformation in the 1950s into a radical enemy of conformism. He pioneered the New Journalism of the late ’60s and ’70s, producing his most groundbreaking books by placing himself in the middle of the era’s political tumult. By the ’80s, he had settled into a long lion-in-winter phase, writing book after book, appearing on television, one of the last of a certain variety of celebrity author, as renowned for his fame as for his artistic output.

The film spares Mailer nothing. Besides the erratic, drunken behavior that culminated in the stabbing in 1960, there are the two self-indulgent attempts to become mayor of New York City. In the second, in 1969, he and his running mate, Jimmy Breslin, called for the city to secede from New York State; their slogan was “The Other Guys Are the Joke.” (I noticed something distinctly Trumpian in the footage of Mailer on the campaign trail—the shamelessness, the bombast, the glee at getting under the skin of others—which made me think that maybe Mailer’s political ambitions were just ahead of his time.) Mailer’s Maidstone, a bizarre work of cinema, is also well covered. This is the film he directed in which he plays an inflated version of himself in a captain’s hat and cast his ex-wives to watch as he made out with other young women; it ends, infamously, with the actor Rip Torn smashing a hammer into Mailer’s head in front of the author’s own terrified children. Mailer’s thick Popeye body, his boxer’s gait, his snarl—all of it is here.

Zimbalist struggles with how to process this ugliness and sometimes just throws up his hands, taking a too-romantic and somewhat mystical approach to Mailer’s behavior, intercutting at certain moments—in the documentary’s most heavy-handed move—stock video of a bull fight, of a man wrestling a lion, of storm clouds raging. This is meant, I suppose, to signal Mailer’s animalistic urges, an uncontrollable, primal quality to his nature. But Mailer was not a bull or a lion or a thunderbolt. He was just, very often, an enormous and unrelenting jerk.

Mailer’s volatility and aggressiveness and self-aggrandizement are all freely acknowledged, so much so that a viewer can actually relax and take a fresh look at him, knowing that his significant blemishes are still within sight. This is what the film did for me, anyway, and I found that it allowed me to see qualities I could admire, ones that moreover feel lacking today—Mailer’s intellectual risk-taking, his passion for ideas that pushed against the status quo, and his naked creative ambition; this was a writer who strove to be the Muhammad Ali of books. I could appreciate his embrace of reinvention. Mailer didn’t go in for the trauma plot. One’s origins were to be transcended. In order to be tough, you just needed to start acting tough, and soon you would be tough. All you had to do was witness his walk as he made his way onto Johnny Carson or Dick Cavett—fists balled, arms swinging as if about to punch, barrel chest pushed out like a rooster’s. This was not how Jewish boys with high IQs raised in Brooklyn normally walked.

This confidence gave him the nerve to talk about American society in ways, it seems, only a prophet might dare. Mailer was a master of the jeremiad in an era in which a number of writers—notably Mailer’s great frenemy, James Baldwin—reached for this register. Mailer’s  voice, its supreme knowingness, is woven through the film: “The frightening aspect of modern life is that the opportunity to have existential experience—in other words, the opportunity to have experiences where we don’t know if it’s going to turn out well or badly—is getting more and more limited all the time. And to the degree we’re not having an existential life, I believe we’re extinguishing ourselves.” Mailer looked at America and said, straight-faced, that what he wanted was no less than to make “a revolution in the consciousness of our time.”

What American writer expresses himself or herself like this anymore? Starting in the 1950s, Mailer became a public figure who would poke and prod at the status quo. He would be the contrarian—as Gay Talese puts in the documentary, a figure who was “deliciously reckless, romantically reckless.” Mailer’s fundamental point: Americans needed to throw up all that was repressed, to confront one another, to fight it out. Rereading one of his most infamous essays, “The White Negro,” from 1957, I was shocked by its racist essentialism—the argument that Black people have the sort of sexual freedom and release from civilizational hang-ups that white people should emulate (“the same old primitivism crap in a new package,” surmised Ralph Ellison, accurately)—but there is also a muscularity and boldness to the prose itself that is hard to turn away from. It is inciting. “If the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence,” he writes, “why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”

He genuinely believed in confrontation as redemptive, and the only way to “come alive.” This is an existence that would be exhausting for most of us, but Mailer seems to have taken it upon himself to become a kind of sacrificial offering, willing to put himself forward to suffer society’s hatred and annoyance if it could bring all the necessary muck to the surface.

This tendency is also narcissism, and it could overwhelm his art, as he sought subjects who might mirror the greatness he saw in himself—see for example his lackluster books on Marilyn Monroe and Picasso. But narcissism was also at the source of his greatest literary accomplishments. In The Armies of the Night, he ingeniously wrote about himself in the third person, as a “Mailer” who helped lead the charge of anti-war activists on the Pentagon. And in The Executioner’s Song, his greatest book, he explored his own obsession with violence by telling the true story of Gary Gilmore, a man who had murdered two people and was sentenced to be executed. In the documentary, Mailer is seen in candid footage at a kitchen table in 1979 with two of his sons and his last wife, Norris Church, explaining the premise of The Executioner’s Song and trying to engage the wide-eyed boys in its themes. “There’s a lot of violence in the world,” he says. “How do you meet violence? Do you meet violence with your own violence, or do you try to avoid it?” Mailer himself sat back and offered no answer. The narcissism becomes a kind of courage to put himself on the front line of these big questions. As he said about himself, “I became a species of combat soldier in life rather than in war.”

By the end, as his hair whitened and his paunch grew, Mailer’s persona softened. He put down his fists and began to express more humility, even some deep regrets. The documentary includes most of his children, and they speak of him as a positive force in their lives, even though, as he apparently told one of his daughters, “I’m a writer first and a father second.” The footage of Mailer in his dotage, sitting in an undershirt by the sea, presents a man struggling to the end to understand the contradictory forces within him. But the children all surrounded him on his deathbed, which perhaps says something. And their love for him seems genuine, if complicated.

Watching the documentary, I had my own moment of reassessment about just how nasty Mailer actually was. The film includes one of my favorite Mailer moments, from an extraordinary 1971 debate about the goals of the then-surging feminist movement. The event gathered together a who’s who of icons—including Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer. Mailer had goaded the event into being like a pro-wrestling match. It’s impossible to imagine something like it today, a culture war in which the combatants joyfully engage with one another in person, not just tweet from their corners. And Mailer serves himself up as the villain. At one point, the writer Cynthia Ozick stands up to ask a question from the audience that brings down the house: “Mr. Mailer, in Advertisements for Myself, you said, ‘A good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.’ For years and years, I’ve been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?” It’s a thrilling instance of an idol being smashed. But I’d forgotten what followed after all the laughter. Mailer says, humbly, “I will cede the round to you. I don’t pretend that I’ve never written an idiotic or stupid sentence in my life, and that’s one of them.” A similar turnaround happens with Susan Sontag when she asks Mailer to stop using the term lady writer (“It seems like gallantry to you. It doesn’t feel right to us”). Mailer immediately says he will cease.

[Read: It’s okay to like good art by bad people]

He wanted to confront his feminist detractors head-on, and he was willing to admit his mistakes, to change. The violence he inflicted is something he regarded eventually with heartbreak. “What I’ve come to realize is that when I stabbed my wife with a penknife, it changed everything in my life,” he said in an interview decades laters. “It is the one act I can look back on and regret for the rest of my life.” He faced his own guilt: “I can’t pretend that hadn’t cost nothing. It caused huge damage.” He had let down his children, he said, and he had let down God. As for Adele Morales, the film reveals little about what happened to her after the incident in which she nearly lost her life, besides that she became an alcoholic; one of her daughters said the stabbing was a “trauma” her mother “never got over.”

It’s a shame we can’t hear directly from her. One wonders if she would have been able to see Mailer the way the documentary does—as someone who was deeply flawed but who seemed to redeem himself through an intimate awareness of those flaws.

When it came to his creative life, Mailer wanted to continuously make himself vulnerable, which is its own kind of pathology, stepping up to the brink of disaster as if he enjoyed the thrill of possible self-destruction only to see whether he could survive. The boxers who fascinated him were those who kept getting knocked out and got back up, overcoming humiliation after humiliation. This is how he saw himself. And in a literary landscape today in which careerism drives the impulses of so many writers , in which authors never raise the stakes for themselves in a serious way or take big swings that might cost them in social capital, Mailer presents an important provocation. “He embraced the idea that to start thinking for ourselves, we would have to be less afraid of the response,” says the writer Daphne Merkin, another of the film’s talking heads.

Martin Amis once described Mailer as “the most turbulent writer in America.” And when I heard this word, it seemed exactly right. Turbulence spills your drink and makes you slam your head, but it also jolts you, widens your eyes, straightens your spine, and forces you to brace yourself. I wouldn’t mind if we had a few writers who could do that.

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