See this story in its original context on Page of 75 of Take the Handle's The Heroes Issue, July 2008
Norman Mailer belongs to the long tradition of towering cultural figures whose myth casts shadows larger than the summation of his well known work. That is not to say that Mailer’s work is insubstantial or overrated. In fact, the tales from his colorful life often unfairly dominate the undeniable force of his literary efforts. Yes, Mailer stabbed his second wife with a penknife, ran for mayor of New York City on a secessionist platform, once bit off part of the ear of an actor while making a film, and lobbied to parole an inmate who was released and soon after stabbed a waiter to death on the Lower East Side—his work and legend cannot be separated, nor should they be. Mailer was a Writer. That is, a Writer in the style of Byron or Hemingway—in which the reputation looms as large as the work. In this sense he was, if not the last of a dying breed, certainly a being of rare occurrence.
Consequently, when I was asked by the stern but gracious editors of Take The Handle to approach Mailer’s legacy I was a bit overwhelmed. It is no small feat to encapsulate a body of work as large and a life as vibrant as Mailer’s. He was a filmmaker, a self-ordained theologian, a cultural lightning rod and, most importantly, an author. He spent his life seeking out the boundaries of consciousness and morality with the genuine desire to elucidate some greater truth. Or perhaps to highlight the frailty of truth itself. In this endeavor he plunged into grandiose topics almost every time he wrote: War, Murder, Jesus, Hitler, God, Sex, Violence, the CIA. These were not the subtle themes of his work, buried within a tomb of words to be painstakingly excavated by the most adept of graduate students. Mailer dove into almost unapproachable concepts seemingly without concern for discretion or restraint. His is a legacy, among other things, of intense ambition.
There is in writing, of course, the desire for lasting communication—the hopeful grasp for some utterance that survives longer than the sound of the word, some lasting documentation of the uniqueness of the mind. In this endeavor Mailer, as a writer and as a man, was positioned in a perpetual boxing stance—crouched down with raised fists, as he was actually known to do when he encountered critics—defending himself with words against the strange oppressions of a great existentialist void. He was taking jabs at the immortal—producing 30 books along the way, several of which were over the thousand-page mark. And then there were the films and founding the Village Voice and the rambunctious public and television appearances. If great artists are the aesthetic guardians of the individual, Mailer did his part with a fortress of words. And if his legacy as a literary figure turns out to be one of bold accomplishments aside some epic, noble failures (as it is likely to be), his legacy as a man will be that of a heroic fighter, striving unwaveringly toward the farthest reaches of what it means to be human.
Norman Mailer died on November 10th of last year. After his death, I read The Executioner’s Song, the story of the 1976 execution of Gary Gilmore by a firing squad in the state of Utah. Gilmore was a killer who, when convicted, asked to be killed despite viable options for appeal and stay of execution. His proximity to death, in both thought and action, was about as close as one can get. I have driven through some of the Utah that Mailer describes: the flat dry land in the dark where the blue factory flame is a lone source of light and the ominous mountains ascend suddenly from beds of salt, nostalgic for the beautiful memory of the ocean. It is a landscape of wonder and mystery aside emptiness and dread. In Gilmore he found among the strangest and most fascinating paths that a human being can take—that of the killer.
Now Mailer is dead and these works are his ashes. Is there meaning in life? Are there evil men that deserve to die? Are there good men that deserve to live? How have I become myself and not you? Is there an unavoidable current of history upon which we all must drift? Life’s impossible questions were always present in his work. There is some solace in the thought that Norman Mailer, in whatever ethereal form one might suggest he does or does not take, still exists. That he lives on in the immortal form of the word that transcends the page. That the power of sentences extracted from his mind and set to print continues to propagate emotion and thought.
It is no wonder that his last published work in book form was On God, a rambling interview in which he elevates reincarnation, creativity and imperfection as the laws of the universe. He also puts these forth as the attributes of a God-Artist who is not omnipotent but instead seeks to construct an ideal creation and is plagued by the elusiveness of perfection. In many ways it seems that Mailer is painting his own face on the image of God. It is a final stab at immortality in which he posits the artistic endeavor that was his life’s work as directly analogous to the divine project of the creator.
And why not? What could be nobler than to aspire to the heights of divinity? Mailer’s shortcomings were well-known. But for all his human frailties, his work retained the ambition of heights far greater than artistic fashion. And he succeeded—writing with depth and beauty while living with a curious abandon. The true heroism, indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment