Mind of an Outlaw

LET US SUPPOSE
that a writer has sat down at his desk, aligned his fingers to familiar postures of readiness at the bare existential stage where wait QWERT and YUIOP—those unhelpful companions, mute as Beckett’s clowns—let us go and suppose the writer has offered himself here to a situation that is, on its face, impossible, a battle almost certainly lost before it begins.

Well, the odds are awfully good that the writer who has put himself in this position is Norman Mailer—unless it happens to be, as at this moment, another writer attempting to introduce Mailer’s
Selected Essays
and at the same time beguilingly ape Mailer’s typical strategy in arriving at a topic. Whether awarding
Waiting for Godot
a negative review without having seen it (as Mailer once did in his column in
The Village Voice
); or pegging his long consideration of the death penalty—in
Parade
magazine, no less!—on the defense of a flip provocation he’d made on
The Phil Donohue Show
, where he’d claimed “we need a little capital punishment”; or prefacing his skirmish with feminism with a digression on how he’d spent a day mistakenly believing he’d won the Nobel Prize; or insistently reminding his readers that he wrote a lot of his books hurriedly, to satisfy contracts or
make child-support payments—or, really, whenever frontloading nearly any stirring hypothesis with a prominent reminder of
who
it was that was doing the hypothesizing—Norman Mailer was a writer who never met a corner he didn’t wish to paint himself into. It is one thing to go looking for fights. Certainly this is our default image of Mailer: provocateur, bare-knuckle brawler. It is another thing to go into so many fights having artfully tied one hand behind one’s back. Sometimes both hands. If Mailer’s favorite quote, from André Gide, was “Please do not understand me too quickly,” it might often seem he baited his most significant forays into prose with a temptation to the reader to dismiss him almost
immediately
.

And here, tasked with giving a proper
envoi
to what I do believe is a great reader’s voyage of a book, I’ve gone and “done a Mailer”—I’m burying the man before I even begin to try to figure out how to praise him. My excuse is that he seems to demand it, by the logic of his own self-demolitions: Watch Mailer climb out of the hole once again, folks! I’ll commit another Mailer gesture, then, and quote myself. This, from the first and only other time I tried to write about the man:

Reading that now, it seems to me that despite how I’d assumed a (rather Maileresque) posture as the lone voice in the wilderness, I really fell in with the rough consensus: that Mailer, self-appointed great novelist with no definitively great novels to his credit, found his greatness instead in his nonfiction voice—in the volcanic river of his “New Journalism,” from the
Village Voice
columns through to when, in the eighties, he (largely) recommitted himself to novels. A consensus that Mailer’s great subject was himself, not in the usual personal-essayist’s sense of “a private man revealed,” but as a public entity, an existential shadow-boxer and buffoonish slumming-patrician refusenik, moving through American history as a kind of disastrous recording angel, a lightning rod for exemplary controversies, a cautionary tale he alone couldn’t learn from. In the words of Harold Bloom, “he is his own supreme fiction.… the author of ‘Norman Mailer,’ a lengthy, discontinuous, and perhaps canonical fiction.”