Monday, November 12, 2007

Norman Mailer, 1923-2007

"I may be wrong, and if I am, then I'm the fool who will pay the bill..."
--- Norman Mailer

I would certainly be remiss if I did not mark the passing of the man who was an inspiration in so many ways (not the least of which is the title of the blog).

His accomplishments are well-known (two Pulitzers, a National Book Award, mind-altering essays, countless best-sellers, etc etc), as are his low points (stabbing his wife with a penknife, the Jack Henry Abbott affair, Town Bloody Hall), and they have been, and will be, better documented elsewhere. But they miss the most important statement of Norman Mailer’s life.

Norman Mailer was a writer. He was all that, and he was more than that.

He was a Writer.

He was unashamed of it. He embraced the heroism of it. And he went balls-to-the-wall with it.

If you are a writer, you can feel important, you can feel ego-inflated, you can occasionally feel gratified. But if you are a writer, and you listened to or spoke with Norman for any amount of time, you felt… heroic. Like part of a secret, endowed clan that was called upon to move off into hopeless quests that had to be undertaken anyway, or moreso, had to be undertaken because they were hopeless.

In Advertisements for Myself, Norman Mailer said he would settle for nothing less than changing the consciousness of his times. A heroic quest. Norman pointed to the farthest fence, picked up his biggest bat, and took his mightiest swing. Sometimes he connected. Sometimes he whiffed. Some went over the fence, some went into the stratosphere, some went off the wall for a double (and some went off the wall in other ways). But he always took the biggest cut he could and no matter what happened, he still strode to the plate every time up eying nothing but that fence.

And what he taught is what, if you are a writer, could be the most important lesson to learn: you must be absolutely, totally, completely unafraid to fail. Because fail you will at times. But there is something worse than failing, and that’s not taking your turn at bat.


I had seen him speak many times, all when he had passed eighty, but even as I could see him turning frail, his mind was still sharp. We spoke briefly and shook hands at a reading/signing of Castle in the Forest. And we had one encounter in our neighborhood in Brooklyn Heights:

Not too long after we, too, moved here from the Village, my pregnant wife woke up around seven on a Sunday morning famished. So I threw on some scurffy clothes and went out to get us some bagels. I get outside and look up Clark Street and I see a guy, older, wild hair, scruffy chinos, making his way up the block with a very pronounced limp. I’m thinking it’s some guy who woke up on a bench and is just making his way, until I get about half a block behind the guy and I realize “holy s***, that’s Mailer!” So now I’m getting closer and closer up behind him and I’m thinking jees, what do I do when I pass him? I gotta do something, but the wrong thing would just ignite that famous temper. So I give him a wide berth as I pass, then I turn a little to the right and say, “Good morning, Mr. Mailer.” And he looks up at me like Popeye, regards me for a second, then says, in that great inimitable voice, “HOWAAREYA??!” I just said, “Fine, sir” and we nodded and went on our ways.

He had the courage to fail if he could fail brilliantly, and the audacity to risk success if success could make others think and feel in new and different ways. In this, he was the epitome of the artist and the writer. He is a model for all that come after. And in the age of plastics and too much technology, it was his authenticity that made him more and more unique.

Rest in peace, neighbor. It will be sad to look up at the terrace and know you're not in the nabe anymore. You will be sorely missed.