Writers puzzle out Mailer legacy

NORMAN MAILER, who died last weekend at 84, was incontestably one of the titans of American letters: novelist, journalist, essayist, would-be politician and overall provocateur. Whatever the genre, he was a powerful writer -- New Yorker editor David Remnick calls his a “locomotive prose style” -- who could combine sheer intellectual force with great literary finesse. As Peter Kaplan, editor in chief of the New York Observer, put it, Mailer “made nonfiction writing into an intellectual and soulful exercise,” in the process transforming American journalism with his “pyrotechnic” style and “massive, cosmic” ideas.

And yet in the past week the literary world was not just mourning him but also grappling with his complicated legacy.

“If there’s a conventional wisdom over the last week, it seems to be that his great literary talent was always at war with his judgment and exhibitionism,” Remnick said. “And there is no doubt in my mind that some of his political judgments, especially early on, were foolish.

“But if you were to judge all literary reputations on consistent liberalism, and even temper, you’d have a very small canon, wouldn’t you? It wouldn’t just eliminate people like Pound and Eliot and the obvious people who were edging toward fascism, but even people I know now -- I wouldn’t want them to be president of the United States.”

Remnick added that besides the acknowledged classics such as “The Armies of the Night” and “The Executioner’s Song,” such books as “Harlot’s Ghost,” the 1,300-page novel inspired by the CIA, have a lot of Mailer’s strengths.

Still, for all of his importance to what’s known as New Journalism, Mailer is not as widely read as the other lions of the movement, according to Marc Weingarten, author of “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution,” and he lacks the following those iconic three have among the current crop of younger writers.

Sexual politics may have often kept this supposed sexist off college reading lists, said his friend and fellow writer Gay Talese. “With feminism so powerful in the academic world, he was not up there with Toni Morrison.”

Similarly, said culture critic Lee Siegel, who praises the late work, including the recent “The Castle in the Forest,” as well as the early, Mailer was the object of envy throughout his life. He was also disliked by many fellow Jewish writers and critics, Siegel said, because he didn’t write about Jewish life, and didn’t effect their gentility. “His personas were usually redneck Texans or tough Irish cops, and that alienated a lot of Jewish critics.”

His work was more difficult, with fewer surface pleasures, than the other writers who merged journalistic and fictional techniques, Weingarten said. “Hunter was a comedian, in a way, and Wolfe was a deconstructor of a specific time in our social history. While Mailer was sort of a dark skeptic of everything going on in that era, neither a cheerleader nor a funny debunker.” Thompson’s books, he said, became “self-help guides to personal desecration. And Wolfe was more fun to read.”

And especially as the nation’s gender politics changed in the ‘60s and ‘70s, he became harder for men and women to like because of a machismo widely interpreted as misogyny. Though he was a founder of the alternative press -- Mailer helped establish the Village Voice in 1955 -- he was not often claimed by a subculture that went in a very different direction than he did.

“His propensity toward violence, the fact that he stabbed his wife Adele, the Jack Henry Abbott stuff” -- in which Mailer lobbied for the parole of a prisoner who killed a waiter soon after his release -- “left a bad taste in people’s mouth,” said Weingarten. “That’s why they embraced Didion the way they couldn’t embrace Mailer.”

It’s a shame, he said, because despite spotty recent novels -- “The last decade has been a lost decade for him” -- Mailer’s best nonfiction work can compare with anyone’s. (Weingarten is fond of Mailer’s writing about Los Angeles, as when he described the city, in a piece about the 1960 Democratic National Convention, as looking like it “was built by television sets giving orders to men.”)

“ ‘The Armies of the Night’ to me was the best examination of the counterculture I’ve read -- anything that was wrong and right about it. How the counterculture had alienated the civil rights movement. By making himself a flawed character, with self-doubt and his own divided loyalties, he made himself a conduit for all these questions. It’s more insightful than the books of Thompson and Wolfe.”

Influence on writers

Remnick thinks Mailer continues to be “a big influence” on writers.

“As a young reader,” Remnick said, “excited by the world for the first time as a teenager and as someone who had it in mind to be a journalist and writer, Mailer’s work, particularly his nonfiction, and his self-advertisements, were thrilling to me: The taking of ads, the running for mayor, the essays assessing the other talents in the room as he put it . . . the insistence on being at central events, from political conventions to a heavyweight fight.”

Novelist Marianne Wiggins said she had feminist problems with Mailer, but that she admired his insistence on being “larger than life, pugnacious, politically vigorous” and added that now “no one on the American landscape” is doing what he did.

“We celebrate anemic, cautious writers in a time that needs more Mailers,” said Wiggins, author of “The Shadow Catcher.” “Bless his misogynist, much-missed, heroic bones.”

Talese, who praised Mailer’s endless curiosity and a graciousness that was rarely remarked on, said his influence in journalism is negligible.

“I don’t think he had any influence at all,” he said. “What he had was a healthy disrespect for journalism. He once compared journalism to a goat: Every day you had to feed the goat, and the goat would eat anything. It would eat tin cans, you can throw junk, all kinds of stuff into the mouth of the goat. That’s really a Mailer way of looking at things.”

Maybe tellingly, the great Mailer achievement of the last decade, said Weingarten, is 1998’s “The Time of Our Time,” a career-spanning doorstop of an anthology that shows the writer’s incredible range and power -- and recently went out of print.

Novel’s declining power

Mailer sometimes wrote about the way the literary novel, and the literary novelist, moved offstage during the course of his career. It wasn’t that the American novel had declined from its postwar heights “so much as that the people we knew seemed to care much less about novels,” he wrote in “The Spooky Art.” “One hardly heard one’s friends talking about a good new novel anymore.”

This marginalization makes it hard to find a similar figure.

Ed Park, a founder of the Believer, saw a parallel in William T. Vollman, who shares Mailer’s wide range of interests. Weingarten nominated Christopher Hitchens, because of his provocative opinions and integrity.

Several others pointed to Dave Eggers, whose writing includes memoir, novel and biography, and who runs a publish- ing cottage industry around McSweeney’s and the coast-to-coast educational effort 826 Valencia.

But Eggers is a subcultural figure who seems comfortable on the indie-alternative edge: Despite his rabid following, it’s hard to imagine him running for mayor of San Francisco as Mailer once did for New York.

Or, say, head-butting Jonathan Franzen on national television, as Mailer did to Gore Vidal.

Nobody, said Siegel, would have the guts to do that now. “I found that absolutely thrilling. I’d love to see someone be himself as much as Mailer was.” With one gesture he cut through all the cocktail passive-aggressiveness of the literary culture.

“Speaking as an editor, I don’t think young novelists lack ambition; look at Michael Chabon,” said Remnick. “But they’re not inclined to do this other thing. They don’t rotate their crops in quite the same way, don’t generally see it as their literary business to go to war, to immerse themselves in a political campaign. I think that’s too bad.”

Can a literary figure be so central again?

Vidal, who discussed the literary writer’s loss of prestige with Mailer, doubted anyone would be read in 50 years since movies and pop culture have captured people’s attention.

But he said he’d miss Mailer’s sense of fun. “He had radical notions about everything. And whether they were correct or not was not important: They were invigorating and life-enhancing and good for others to hear.” Vidal called “Barbary Shore” among his favorite of Mailer’s novels.

Talese said Mailer was more accessible and wide ranging than the generation of writers who came after. “Don DeLillo would give an interview to the Paris Review. Mailer would give an interview to Hustler, and the Paris Review. Mailer would have a lot to say to anybody. He thought a writer should have in his collection of friends a range of classes. He would know cops, he could know prizefighters, he would know secretaries of state.”

“What I loved about Mailer was his fearlessness, his bravery,” said Weingarten, adding that the writer’s belly-flops came from that same courage. “Where do you see that now? There’s a timorousness. I don’t think we’ll see the likes of Mailer again.”

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scott.timberg@latimes.com