At the Mailer apartment in Brooklyn on October 15. Photo by Frank Nastasi.
On the afternoon of 10 April 2007 I was on a plane over the Atlantic watchingInfamous, one of the films about Truman Capote. It contains a scene where Truman and his frightful swans are discussing the Clutter family murder case. ‘Weren’t you scared going into their cells?’ asks Babe Paley (played by Sigourney Weaver), speaking of the murderers while sipping a martini and purring for the Upper West Side.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘it’s not as frightening as meeting Norman Mailer.’
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.
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.”