Great American character – Weekend – Kommersant
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One hundred years ago, on January 31, 1923, the great American writer Norman Mailer was born. A rebel, a shocker, a brawler, a narcissist, a soldier, a macho, a politician, a brilliant stylist, a mediocre director – the further the twentieth century goes, the more Norman Mailer turns from a classic writer into one of the characters of the lost rebellious time.
Mailer was born in New Jersey, grew up and raised in Brooklyn, studied aeronautics at Harvard, and went to war at 21 to write the great American novel, something comparable to War and Peace. He fought in the Philippines, and his novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) is considered one of the best books about World War II. Mailer draws the reader into the routine of war, its decomposing and decomposing womb, where the battles with the Japanese are only the wrong side of the war with ourselves. War, according to Mailer, “is primarily boredom and routine, charters, instructions and instructions, but there is also something inexplicable in war, like a naked beating heart, deeply addictive to those who are involved in it.”
It was this inexplicable that he tried to explain to himself all his life and got involved in any wars and fights all his life. Where there were no wars, he started them himself: he went in for boxing, dogged with feminists (“I don’t like them for ideological reasons”), with leftists, was married six times, attacked one of his wives with a knife, lay in a psychiatric hospital , ran for mayor of New York, opposed the Vietnam War. He was one of the founders of the newspaper The Village Voice – and he himself delivered issues of the newspaper to newsstands and forced sellers to take more copies than they wanted. His column in The Village Voice was called “Fast,” and in it he insulted whoever he wanted, including readers. TV, where Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer selflessly hate each other, compete in murderous causticity (Gore Vidal, in particular, compares his opponent to Charlie Manson), still looks better than all the films that Mailer tried to shoot.
He was always interested in the “rebellious imperative”, male culture, violence, violence in any form: is it possible to contain the rage? Is it possible not to kill by looking into the enemy’s face? Is it possible to kill? Is it true that murder “always contains sexual motives”? Writing is also violence. Is it possible to make the reader experience what the author or character is experiencing? In order to understand the nature of violence (and therefore human nature), Mailer wrote novels on behalf of a demon (“The Castle in the Forest”, 2007) and on behalf of Jesus (“The Gospel of the Son of God”, 1997), was interested in Marxism and Trotskyism, wrote about Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, the CIA and Vietnam. He always had his own accounts with patriotism and patriots, and he never tried to resolve his contradictions with the authorities – he only aggravated them.
The hallucinations of the American Dream (1965), the vulgar film noir The Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984), the life of Lee Harvey Oswald (1996), Picasso (1995) and Marilyn Monroe (1973), the wild journey through Alaska in Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) – Mailer took on various topics, hoping to create a “great American novel” or just make money. Although his main merit (along with Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson) is considered to be the creation of the “new journalism”, which in the 60s and 70s just became a kind of “great American novel”: it was based on detailed and thorough investigations, questioning of witnesses some event, but from this habitual rubbish grew real rebellious poetry. He received both of his Pulitzer Prizes for documentary works, “real life novels”: for “Army of the Night” (1968), telling about the anti-war march, and for the crime novel “The Executioner’s Song” (1979), based on the life of a killer, a kind of American ” Crime and Punishment”. Mailer spent his life studying trembling creatures and those who are entitled. He probably referred himself to the latter: he saw his mission in helping God. In his old age, never having received a Nobel Prize, he admitted that he was no longer interested in the idea of the “great American novel”: America, he argued, was too multi-layered society to be “embraced by a single literary work.”
But, of course, he wanted to hug her, catch up and hug her again. He loved her and hated her, he was angry with her, but he was her voice. Even in novels not formally American, like Evenings in Ancient Egypt (1983), an attempt to “summon the spirits” of Ancient Egypt, or The Gospel According to the Son of God, he still reflected on the appeal of violence, considered broken social mechanisms and understand the nature of power. It is not so important at what time and in what place the social mechanisms go berserk. What matters is what can be done about it. Mailer was trying to figure out how to deal with a frenzied society: excite him and mock him? Defy social norms like the hipsters in his White Negro manifesto (1957)? How can one respond to a situation where “society is forced to live in fear of instant death in a nuclear war, relatively quick death at the hands of the state … or is otherwise doomed to a slow death under the influence of conformism that suffocates any creative or rebellious impulse”?
In his last book, The Castle in the Forest, the hero was a demon possessed by an SS man, offended by his master. He told the reader a wild, venomous, exuberant story about Adolf Hitler’s childhood and adolescence without drawing conclusions: there were no answers, he explained. There are only questions.
Norman Mailer has died at 84. All his life he asked questions – precise, stupid, outrageous, rhetorical, loud, boorish, unfair. Didn’t find any answers. He didn’t write the Great American Novel. Lived it.
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