Norman Mailer (1923-2007)
November 11, 2007
WITH AN EGO the size of a planet, Norman Mailer, who has died at the age of 84, saw failure as just another kind of success because it sprang from the same inviolable sense of self. Everything was about him, and it was ipso facto a manifestation of his own greatness.
An essay he wrote about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy somehow referred back to Norman's trouble with women. He described his one meeting with Bobby, and managed to convey his own guilelessness in a way that served to garnish his own image.
Similar embarrassing encounters with the likes of Hemingway, Dorothy Parker or Jimmy Carter were described with meticulous rawness. So much of his writing seemed to emerge from exposed nerves and jagged edges. He seemed to write from precipices entirely of his own making. His unvarying tactic was to praise himself with faint damnation. He would use fake self-deprecation to underscore how raw and honest and emotional he was. “Oh Norman, how can the world forgive you for being so you.”
His overwhelming self-regard might have been the reason why he was so promiscuous with his genius, and the reason why he wrote so much shit on so many different subjects he really had no business dabbling with. He believed he could be everywhere. He aspired to be panoptic and omniscient. Mailer didn't seem to worry about appearing ridiculous, but just got on with fulfilling a self-appointed role as world sage.
In the end, Mailer seemed to be one of the last vestiges of an age where the status of authors was protected and constantly underscored, where one of the privileges of being published was a modicum of respect, however grudgingly bestowed, and a certain aura or celebrity. By now, with the internet, audiences are there merely to undermine, to nitpick, to prove that their opinions are just as worthy as the author. That etymological link between author and authority has been undermined by the white noise of internet opinion, by the democratization of the writing industry, by the sense that any half-wit celeb or sports star, any shameless self-publicist or narcissist, anyone with enough persistence or petulance can make a small and temporary splash in an ocean of voices. The prodigious Mailer will be missed.
