Norman Mailer was one of the most critically-acclaimed authors of the twentieth century. He won two Pulitzer Prizes. He was (I am told) innovative in the way he blended fiction and nonfiction. He was, like Ron Burgundy, Kind of a Big Deal.
Until fairly recently, that was all I knew about him. He was a Big Name in the literary world, so I’d made a mental note to read at least one of his books and see what the fuss was about.
Here’s something else I learned about Norman Mailer:
In 1960, he stabbed his second wife – Adele Morales – with a pen knife, just missing her heart. After that, he stabbed her in the back. As she lay bleeding, a friend tried to help her. Mailer said, “Get away from her. Let the bitch die.”
Yeah.
I am told he was drunk at the time. I am told he was later diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. However, he apparently never showed any remorse (and was generally a jerk the rest of his life), so I am not inclined to feel much warmth toward him on either account.
My first reaction to all this was “F*** you, then, see if I ever read any of your books.”
Except – does that even make sense?
The man’s been dead for four years, after all. It’s not like he’s going to see any benefit from book sales. Adele Morales is still alive, but I don’t know her, and I don’t suppose it would affect her life in any way if I read one of her late ex-husband’s books. It doesn’t seem like it would hurt anybody.
And yet – it feels like a betrayal, doesn’t it? A sort of tacit approval? To read a book by somebody like that, when so many other, perfectly decent authors go unread? Like you’re saying “Here you go, you fail as a human being, gold star.”
The odd thing is, I think I’d be much less conflicted about reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf. After all, Mein Kampf is long, badly written, and boring. Nobody’s reading it for any other reason than to try and understand the mind of a mass murderer, to play some small part in fighting atrocities like that. Aside from a few neo-Nazi idiots, nobody’s putting Hitler on a pedestal.
But Mailer was a good writer, by all accounts. He is on a pedestal. There’s a good chance that if I read his most famous work, The Naked and the Dead (what a title), that I would learn from it and be enriched by it, and even have praise for its literary merits.
That just feels wrong. And not wrong in some abstract sense, but wrong in that deep-down, sticky, I shouldn’t be doing this kind of way.
He wasn’t especially high on my list anyway. There are lots of great authors I still haven’t read yet; I’ll get to them first. Maybe someday I’ll decide about Mailer. Maybe it’ll just never come up. But I’m really not sure what to think.
What’s your take on it? Should I boycott? Am I over-analyzing? Tell me in the comments.
Brian D. Buckley 
I think I would feel the same way. I would almost feel “dirty” reading it because of all his personal atrocities. It’d be different if it was a work of non-fiction in which you’re trying to attain insights into the mind of an apparant sociopath but to just enjoy his writing in a work of fiction, yeah, I’d feel like I was somehow validating his scumbagness.
Yeah, absolutely. But to play devil’s advocate: if I can extract some positive experience from a person who’s done negative things, isn’t that a net win?
To put it another way: if we found out Shakespeare was a pedophile, should we stop reading Hamlet?
That is true. But at the same time I think that if we knew Shakespeare was a pedophile we would look at Hamlet in a whole new light. Information has a way of tainting our perceptions even when we try to be objective. But i do believe we should try to play Devil’s Advocate. Makes life interesting =)
It’s important to remember that Norman Mailer was instrumental in getting Jack Henry Abbot freed from prison. Abbot’s jailhouse writing made him – much like Mumia the cop killer, the darling of the Left. Once they finagled him out of prison it didn’t take him long to revert to type. At a restaurant, Abbott became incensed by a waiter who told him he had to go outside to use the restroom (because that’s where the bathroom was.) Jack Henry Abbot followed the waiter outside and proceeded to stab him to death.
Do not lose any sleep over your decision to put Mailer on the bottom of your list. Frankly, IMHO, he doesn’t deserve even to be on your list. Kol Tuv, Moriah
I hadn’t heard about that. Interesting. Thanks.
Jack Henry Abbot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Belly_of_the_Beast
Great blog post. All my life (it seems) I had it rammed down my throat about what a great writer Normal Mailer is/was. Funny though, I never once had anyone recommend any of his work to me. No, “Dude, you just GOTTA read such and such.”
Over the past year I saw some clips of him on the Dick Cavett Show and my main impression was, “Man, this guy’s an IDIOT.”
That how I found this post. I used “Was Norma Mailer an Idiot?” as my search parameters.
Yes he was. And worse.
If that’s your yard stick you can expect to miss great art, great music and hmgreat literature. Learn to separate the maker from the material.
Mailer is an easy man not to like, but you’ll notice that his critics over the decades, the one who truly dispise the things he’s said and done, have actually read his many books and are able to precisely detail what they object to in his work. Like it or not, Mailer is a major American writer who deserved his two Pulitzers and his National Book Awards , and there are books of his that are masterpieces in every sense of the word. I’ve been reading Mailer for decades and have my issues with his writings and views, but I’m not out to cancel him in any sense of the word. You haven’t read Mailer, it seems, which makes your blog post a species of cheap gossip; you bring nothing to the conversation. Read a his non fiction–Armies of the Night, Executioner’s Songs, Miami and the Seige of Chicago, Of a Fire on the Moon–and come back and offer up an informed critique.