Living Mailer

Mailer Review, The, Fall, 2008 by Richard Stratton

THE DAY HAD ARRIVED FOR ME to tell my ex-wife that my fiance was pregnant.

"Keep it up, Richard," she said. "You'll be just like Norman."

I took it as a compliment, though I'm not sure that was what she intended.

It occurred to me then, as I walked away from her door, that I not only read Mailer but--for better or worse--I lived Mailer. Even before I discovered his work in the late 1960s, and then met him in the winter of 1970-71 in Provincetown, I had lived my life--unconsciously at best, and often intoxicated--according to themes, ideas, precepts, and intuitions we shared, notions Norman not only lived by and articulated, but he examined and illuminated with his unique brilliance in the cold, hard light of the morning after.

This is not to say simply that Mailer had the courage of his convictions, although he had a vast store of challenging beliefs and was the bravest man I ever knew. Yes, he lived by what he believed, as some of us do, or try to; but what Norman did was to consistently test the validity of his ideas in experience, in how he lived life, and then in art, in his prose.

It was his belief, as he wrote in Ancient Evenings, "One has to pay a price for magic. Put the colored powder on the sand, but also take a vow to draw your sword next day at the first insult and obey the vow whether the dancing girl brings poverty or pleasure. That is the obligation. Look for the risk. We must obey it every time. There is no credit to be drawn from the virtue of one's past."

Mailer showed us one must pay the price for the magic of great art. And pay ... and pay, and ante up all over again each and every day. Great writing, Norman said, could only be achieved by living the life you can't escape.

To live Mailer then is to inhabit a world of magic. It is to live in a world where there are consequences for everything we do, and everything we fail to do. Mailer's world is imbued by karma, a place where circumstance builds character or corrodes it, and there is no such thing as coincidence. To live Mailer is to enter a world where every scent on the wind has portent, every event has mystery and meaning, and one never gets away with anything. Finally, it is a world where death is not the end but the beginning, a theistic world where God, having created us in His image, is growing, changing, evolving along with us, His greatest creation, given His essence in our immortal souls. This is the magic land of Mailer.

Norman and I arrived in this world from opposite sides of the street and somehow crossed over. He was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who went to Ivy League Harvard at sixteen, then to war and on to literary fame. I was a rebellious WASP kid from white bread Wellesley, Massachusetts, who went to reform school, became an outlaw and graduated to the penitentiary. In the intellectual realm, we met in some shadowy metaphysical alley where the switchblade is never as sharp or as penetrating as the word, and violence plays out accompanied by jazz and reefer or, in my case, rock and roll and pot.

In his 1957 essay, "The White Negro," first published in Dissent, and then reprinted in his collection, Advertisements for Myself in 1959--when I was just 13, a post-war baby boomer and nascent juvenile delinquent growing up in the suburbs, where the malling of America was already under way with an architectural blight known as Shopper's World--Mailer defined the life that I had unknowingly embarked upon.

   It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the
   American existentialist-the hipster, the man who knows that if our
   collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war,
   relatively quick death by the State as l'univers
   concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every
   creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the
   mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research
   foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry), if the fate of
   twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to
   premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to
   accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger,
   to divorce one-self from society, to exist without roots, to set
   out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of
   the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the
   decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that
   domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore
   sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present
   which is without past or future, memory or planned intention, the
   life where a man must go until he is beat, where he must gamble
   with his energies through all those small or large crises of
   courage and unforeseen situations which beset his day, where he
   must be with it or doomed not to swing. The unstated essence of
   Hip, its psychopathic brilliance, quivers with the knowledge that
   new kinds of victories increase one's power for new kinds of
   perception; and defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body
   and imprison one's energy until one is jailed in the prison air of
   other people's habits, other people's defeats, boredom, quiet
   desperation, and muted icy self-destroying rage.