Mailer was a generous friend who was known for helping younger writers and giving freely of his time and experience. He mellowed with age and ended famous feuds with Gore Vidal, William Styron and others. He had a big life, and Lennon’s biography is a big book, 947 pages and compulsively readable.
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It could be said that Norman Mailer was a man and a writer halfway between fame and infamy and yet with little in the way of middle ground. He was, in varying combinations, a world-class drinker, feuder, provocateur, self-mythologizer and anti-feminist. He was a war protester, a mayoral candidate, a co-founder of The Village Voice, as well as a wife stabber, a serial husband (of six wives), and a father (of nine). He was a boxer, an actor, a filmmaker, a poet and a playwright. He was also a journalist and a novelist of enormous and singular narrative inventiveness and thrust, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and one of the least boring and most tireless and tiresome public figures of the last half of the 20th century.
“I knew Mailer’s books the way Southern Baptists preachers know the Bible.”
When Norman Mailer spoke, you paid attention. Whether he was standing on a stage and speaking for an hour — without notes — on writing, or art, or politics, or in a manic monologue around a dinner table, or in a chance encounter on the sidewalks of New York or in an airport, you listened. Especially if you grew up idolizing him, as many of us did.
Photo by Stephen Borkowski
“Norman Mailer lived a big, brash, bawdy, belligerent life, and J. Michael Lennon has captured every moment of it.” So says author Gay Talese about Norman Mailer: A Double Life, written by Forsythia Lane, Westport, resident Lennon and published this month by Simon & Schuster.
Photo by Stephen Borkowski
World-famous at age 25 for his gritty, in-the-trenches, war-is-hell novel, The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer spent the last half of the 20th Century giving everybody something to talk about. A prolific writer of fact and fiction (and some new forms he invented), Mailer inserted himself into the history, politics and literature of his time. J. Michael Lennon’s new, authorized biography, Norman Mailer, A Double Life, gives us a front-row seat for the non-stop action of a man who’s credo was, “Itch, you bastards, I hope I make you uncomfortable to the death.”
In the annals of American literature, has there ever been a major writer more easily distracted than Norman Mailer? The author of such classic books as “The Naked and the Dead” and “The Executioner’s Song” had a penchant for tangents that took him, over the course of his 84 years, far afield of his chosen profession. “Mailer loved to drop everything, mobilize his energies, and launch in a new direction,” writes J. Michael Lennon in Norman Mailer: A Double Life, the first biography of the author to appear since his death in 2007.
Professor J. Michael Lennon talks with Jim about the book he published “Norman Mailer: A Double Life”. The book is an autobiography of American Novelist and Journalist Norman Mailer.