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Ill Of The Dead

He comes to bury Mailer, not to praise him. Roger Kimball gets in ahead of the hagiography of the amoral megalomaniac. I’m guessing this one’s been in the can awaiting the blessed event for a while:  

From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania.

…

editor complained about Mailer’s prose and, as one witness recollects, asked, “I wonder what he writes like when he’s sober?”

…

Mailer’s obsession with violence against women seems to have had a long gestation. Carl Rollyson opens his biography of Mailer with the story of John Maloney, a drunkard and a friend of Mailer and William Styron. In 1954, Maloney stabbed his mistress and fled. He was later jailed but released when charges were dropped. Styron recalled that at the time Mailer said to him: “God, I wish I had the courage to stab a woman like that. That was a real gutsy act.” That tells one all one needs to know about Norman Mailer’s idea of “courage.”

…

Written in a clipped, unembellished style, the book contains some of Mailer’s most urgent and compelling prose. Considered as a moral document, however, The Executioner’s Song is profoundly repulsive. For Mailer does not simply delve into and display the humanity of the tortured killer he wrote about: He offers him up as a kind of hero, a courageous “outsider” who deserves our sympathy as a Victim of Society and our respect as an implacable rebel. Gary Gilmore, he said, was “another major American protagonist,” a man who was “malignant at his worst and heroic at his best,” implacable in his desire for (his clinching virtue) “revenge upon the American system.”

After Gilmore had been executed, Mailer’s attention was captured by Jack Abbott, a violent convict and self-declared Communist who began writing Mailer long “existential” letters about life in prison. Mailer loved them. He helped Abbott have them published, first in The New York Review of Books and then as a book, called In the Belly of the Beast (1981). In his introduction, Mailer described Abbott as “an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader, a man obsessed with a vision of more elevated human relations in a better world that revolution could forge.” It seems clear that Mailer’s interest helped to expedite Abbott’s release from prison: “Culture,” Mailer declared at one point, “is worth a little risk.” Abbott had scarcely set foot in New York when he stabbed and killed Richard Adan, a twenty-two-year-old Cuban-American waiter. Mailer testified on Abbott’s behalf at the ensuing murder trial. Asked about Adan’s family at a press conference following his testimony, Mailer said: “I’m willing to gamble with a portion of society to save this man’s talent.” A reporter from The New York Post then asked “who he was willing to see sacrificed. Waiters? Cubans?” Questions to which Mailer had no response but bluster: “What are you all feeling so righteous about, may I ask?”

Anyway, Kimball does the honors. You’re pretty much going to need to read the whole thing. 

Topics: literary

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:56 pm on Saturday, November 10, 2007

4 Responses to “Ill Of The Dead”

1. saltydog Says:
   November 11th, 2007 at 2:44 am

   So, another of the smarmy little cretins who gave us the Cultural Revolution of the sixties and seventies has finally gone. I couldn’t stand him or his prose. The man was so low, he’d have to look up to kiss a worm’s ass. That the universities were already peopled with intellectuals who praised his work tells you that the sixties revolution had been in the works for a long time.

2. Purple Avenger Says:
   November 11th, 2007 at 7:47 am

   Good riddance. The guy was a creep.

3. RebeccaH Says:
   November 11th, 2007 at 11:20 am

   For some reason, I always equated Normal Mailer with Hunter S. Thompson, and I never understood the appeal of either of them. RIP, Mailer. I hope somebody thought to drive a stake through your heart to make sure you don’t come back.

4. Robert Says:
   November 11th, 2007 at 2:12 pm

   Norman Mailer, goodbye and good riddance. He will not be read by our children, nor remembered by our grandchildren

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