The Big One

I think the greatest American writer of my lifetime so far is probably Philip Roth. It is a view I formed early on, when I fished my mom's copy of Portnoy's Complaint out of the living room bookshelf and found myself relating completely to its narrator's first-chapter confession of his confused guilty feelings about his parents, even though I was Southern Baptist instead of Jewish and hadn't learned to masturbate yet. (I guess I must have been eleven or twelve. I was a late bloomer, so sue me.) I always grab Roth's latest whenever it comes out, and I've spent time wondering how it'll feel like, someday, to live in a world without him. I respect and admire him. But I loved Norman Mailer! Mailer wrote a lot of books that I've never had the guts to read; when he was bad he could stink up the whole building, and the ones that look unpromising to me tend to be doorstops. (Sometime during the last few decades, Roth developed an admirable pattern where he always seemed to make sure that his most negligible books were also his shortest.) I didn't want him to ever die, and I'm not sure that I really ever forced myself to admit that, at some point, he would probably have to. When Roth came out with Exit Ghost recently, I read it, liked it, recognized the sense in which it seemed designed as a final say, and thought, good, he's covered. Earlier this year, when Mailer kept turning up on the interview circuit, sharing his views on George Bush or Barack Obama with this paper, his take on God with this magazine, and whenever I came across one of those articles, I would feel a great weight lifted off me: at eighty-four, he was still talking like someone who wasn't going anywhere. It just hit me as I'm writing this that, for the first time in my life, I'm about to have to try to make it through a presidential campaign year without any input on it from Mailer. I am fucked.

A brilliant man who didn't think that intelligence counted for much in the end unless you used it as a stepping stone to achieving a vision, Mailer wrote a lot of guff and committed some unworthy acts, which I'm sure you'll be able to read about in more detail in the weeks to come. (My old boss at the used book store once told me that she and her girlfriend at college had been so charmed by the old boy's views on women that they'd pasted a picture of him on the bowl of their commode. Incidentally, I wasn't working there at the time, I was a customer, and that was her reaction to me buying one of Mailer's books. And I'll bet she still wonders why her store finally closed.) He seemed obsessed with some things, including Marilyn Monroe and the nature of "being a man", that I doubt I'd have thought about for fifteen minutes in my life, total, if I hadn't wanted to read what he thought about them. It's easy to see why he and Gore Vidal became public feuders. Both were blazingly smart and interested in everything and eager to imprint their views on the public consciousness. But Vidal, in interviews, was attracted to the role of the mandarin, which must have given Mailer the creeps. I mean this as a compliment: he was always willing, often recklessly willing, to end up looking like a fool. He got a lot of mileage out of it. Personal to Michael Moore, the Yes Men, and anybody else working that side of the street: if you want to know what a real creative act of public mischief and political street theater looks like, one that's all the more awesome for the perpetrator's not having planned it, read Dwight Macdonald's account of Mailer's arrest and trial after drunkenly yelling "Taxi!" at a passing police car. Macdonald's article, published in his collection Discriminations, is a journalistic classic, but Mailer's performance, on the street and in the courthouse, was a work of art.

My first serious encounter with Mailer came in 1984, when I tried to read Advertisements for Myself. I had college on the horizon and I had a benighted notion that it was a book that was going to teach me how to be hip. There are, it turned out, other books better suited to that purpose if that's what you think you need. It turned out that the book in question, arguably Mailer's first attempt to explode his person and psyche and examine the pieces in print, was a good deal too personal, messy and complicated to serve any budding punk as a how-to manual. I had to throw myself at it again and again before I started to feel at ease with it, though I felt I had to for the sake of the first thing in it that I fell in love with: the section in which Mailer reprints the Village Voice article in which he denounces Waiting for Godot without having read it or seen it, then attends the play, gets in the car, and hears his wife saying to him, "You blew it, baby." That is something valuable that I learned from Mailer, because nobody else in his position was honest enough, or vain enough in his peculiar way, to actually detail how many false starts and missteps are involved in becoming a genius.

That book, and the flood that eventually followed in its wake--An American Dream, Cannibals and Christians, The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Why Are We in Vietnam?--remain, so far as I can tell, the best sustained record of how exciting it must have been to have been alive and awake and active in the sixties, to be engaged in trying to change the world. Mailer was lucky to have the sixties to write about, of course, and the sixties were damn lucky to have him. But maybe, at what turned out to be his peak, he'd have been able to have generated that kind of electrical force field and set up shop in any period. Mailer had good reason to find the eighties dismaying; it must have been a real blow to him to see the country he loved and wanted to inspire to greatness and cultural courage putting up walls and yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. His own star was dimmed a little by then as a result of his misguided mummy book and, as he freely admitted--that disarming frankness again--the need to churn out inspired work to keep up his alimony payments, but he remained capable of astonishing things, from The Executioner's Song to the thrilling essays about his theories of filmmaking that more than justified the existence of the little-seen, unwatchable movies that resulted from his trying to carry that theory out. Through it all, he was usually the smartest guy in the room, and very often the only one who could make the moment seem like one a-tingle, no, throbbing with rich, thrilling possibilities, if only some young stallion or mare who didn't get winded as easily as he did now would get off his or her ass and follow his example, go out and actually see something, then write about it in a way that was a challenge to the world to refuse to settle for mediocrity, apathy, and the great crime of leaving it to others to have all the fun. All of it, the masterpieces and the botches and the headlines and the gossip, was part of what James Wolcott has simply and rightly called "a great life," maybe the last one of its kind that any of us will ever see.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going outside to see if I can hail a patrol car.