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Summary
Summary
From the biographer who knew Norman Mailer for decades comes the definitive, authorized portrait of the eminent novelist, journalist, and controversial public figure, based on extensive interviews and unpublished letters.
Norman Mailer was one of the giants of American letters and one of the most celebrated public figures of his time. He was a novelist, journalist, biographer, and filmmaker; a provocateur and passionate observer of his times; and a husband, father, and serial philanderer.
Perhaps nothing characterized Mailer more than his unbounded ambition. He wanted not merely to be the greatest writer of his generation, but a writer great enough to be compared to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. As Michael Lennon describes, he even had presidential ambitions, although he settled for running for mayor of New York City. He championed personal freedom and civil liberties, calling himself a "left conservative," and yet he was Enemy #1 of the Women's Movement. He was as pugnacious in real life as in print, engaging in famous feuds and fights. Although he considered himself first and foremost a novelist, his greatest literary contribution may have been in journalism, where he used his novelistic gifts in tandem with self-revelation to explore the American psyche. In that regard, the subtitle of his Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning Armies of the Night is telling: "History as a Novel, the Novel as History." He would return to certain subjects obsessively: John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, sex, technology, and the intricate relationship of fame and identity. Michael Lennon's definitive biography captures Mailer in all his sharp complexities and shows us how he self-consciously invented and reinvented himself throughout his lifetime.
Michael Lennon knew Mailer for thirty-five years, and in writing this biography, he has had the cooperation of Mailer's late widow, Norris Church, his ex-wives, and all of his children, as well as his sister, Barbara. He also had access to Mailer's vast, unpublished correspondence and papers, and he interviewed dozens of people who knew Mailer. Norman Mailer: A Double Life gives us the man in full, a remarkable and unique figure in the context of his times.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this meticulous authorized biography, Lennon offers a comprehensive and unflinching look at the life of the controversial American novelist, journalist, and filmmaker who dissected the zeitgeist from the 1950s until his death in 2007. Lennon, a personal friend and the literary executor of Mailer's estate, had access to a trove of unpublished letters and interviews. The result, written in a measured and sometimes dry style, stresses the extremes of ugliness and compassion that defined the author's life and work. Made famous by the publication of The Naked and the Dead, Mailer had a manic energy for writing and a roving intellect, thrusting himself into the center of current events and exploring topics such as Vietnam War protests and the history of the C.I.A. The prolific Mailer was also a public celebrity who made frequent television appearances and even ran an unsuccessful campaign for mayor of New York City. Though Lennon doesn't hide Mailer's dark side-his belligerent narcissism, infidelities, public drunkenness, and violence-he tries to balance these flaws by emphasizing Mailer's passion for challenging received ideas, his sense of humor, and his moral seriousness as an opponent of power. While it's difficult not to find Mailer the man repugnant, Lennon's almost clinical perspective shows the author's restless innovation, which was indispensable for understanding the U.S. in the second half of the 20th century. Agent: Ike Williams, Kneerim, Williams & Bloom. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
A larger-than-life personality, Norman Mailer was a force to be reckoned with in his personal life he knew many, many people and as a voice in the American literary canon between WWII and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Any writer of a serious biography of Mailer who hopes to contain the excesses of the man within the covers of a book must know that since Mailer in his own lifetime grated on people's taste and nerves, he could easily grate on the reader, even when presented within the pages of a biography. Lennon, authorized by Mailer before his death to write the definitive life treatment, performs a great task, letting Mailer's obnoxiousness have free rein in balance with the biographer's easygoing narrative style, which coaxes the reader into accepting and even enjoying all sides of Mailer gregarious, notoriously thin-skinned, grandly egotistical, and monstrously talented. Understanding Mailer is only half the object of this welcome biography; its other intention is for readers to be enticed into reading or rereading Mailer's works.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
Choice Review
Lennon (Wilkes Univ.), longtime Mailer scholar, editor, and collaborator, offers a comprehensive authorized biography attentive to the many aspects of Mailer's creative powers and his formidable role in American public life over six decades. All of Mailer's works (films as well as books and essays) are discussed thoroughly, as are his fights, foibles, philosophies, and acts of historical witness and provocation. The microscopic level of detail, particularly regarding Mailer's private life, makes for an often-cumbersome read; one senses that Lennon has been awfully close to his subject for an awfully long time, and he tends to paint the social and political backdrop of the 1940s through the 1970s in fairly cliched ways. But as the book proceeds, its accounts of how Mailer produced masterworks like The Naked and the Dead, The Armies of the Night, and The Executioner's Song offer rich insights into Mailer's rigorous approach to his craft and to the complex ideas he discerned in the topics he tackled. Readers of literary biography will, if they are patient, learn a great deal about one of the most significant--and often poorly understood--critical observers of the US's 20th-century inner turmoil. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. A. M. Bain independent scholar
Guardian Review
Seven years have passed since the death of Norman Mailer, and a campaign is being waged in his name on several fronts. The publication late last year of J Michael Lennon's authorised biography asked us to contemplate what its title referred to as a double life. A series of Random House reissues shifts attention to the essays and novels. With the release of the selected letters the most congenial approach to Mailer is illuminated: one in which the works and days are understood as marching, like his "armies of the night", in lockstep. If John Updike's larger body of work somehow seems a less of a vertiginous challenge than Mailer's 44 books, it is because Updike's chief legacy is his style: the profusion of opiate sentences that delivers us hit after euphoric hit. Mailer bequeathed us no style. What he wanted to do was to save our souls, and that was a battle to be fought in a variety of guises: General Marijuana, Aquarius, the Prisoner, and, of course, the Great Illeist - someone who refers to themselves in the third person - Norman Mailer himself. Selected Letters of Norman Mailer grants us access to the dressing room. Lennon's role as custodian of Mailer's literary estate may seem redundant: after all, acting as his own curator was part of Mailer's addiction to self-dramatisation. Commencing with the taming and recontextualisation of the juvenilia and marginalia in 1959's Advertisements for Myself, he was determined to frame his own works and set the parameters within which they were to be considered. However, his executor's pruning proves indispensable: having given himself over to the fanatical labour of making a selection from more than 45,000 letters, Lennon presents us with 716 key missives, dating from 1940 to Mailer's death in 2007. Reviewing The Essential Norman Mailer (non-canonical and thrown together for a quick buck) in 1982, Martin Amis wrote: "No one in the history of the written word, not even William McGonagall or Spike Milligan or DH Lawrence, is so wide open to damaging quotation." Or, indeed, to damaging anecdote: at that time precisely Mailer was still in correspondence with Jack Henry Abbott, the murderer-turned-author whose parole he'd supported a year previously, despite the fact that Abbott had killed again only six weeks after his release. Amid the subsequent pummelling of Mailer's own credibility, he yet had some counsel for the reincarcerated: "Get it through your head, Jack, that any media representative, if they want to fuck you, have more opportunities than a prison guard, and to pour out your heart and say what you think to a media representative whom you have not checked out from asshole to appetite is equal to a pretty boy stepping into a tank for the first time and saying, 'Gee, do any of you fellows have a light?'" But Mailer was always able to wrestle something out of the wreckage of a bad situation. The astonishing essays on theatre and cinema (collected in 1972's Existential Errands and now begging for reissue) were the autopsies of his misfired and misbegotten efforts to revolutionise those disciplines. Likewise, following the Abbott fiasco he was able to apply his enriched perceptions to other feats of imaginative empathy. That quality distinguishes his unblinking portrayals of two other murderers: Gary Gilmore and Lee Harvey Oswald. This empathy is of a piece with an aggressive amour-propre rooted in and justified by his particular notion of "existentialism", here recast as a ceaseless oversight of a fragile yet demanding inner self, one continually threatened by indolence and compromise. A 1961 letter to writer Don Carpenter reveals our quick-change artist considering his options at the lexical boutique: "I got so sick of 'hip' and 'square' as words that from now on they're out. I mean, let's start something new. Existentialism is the word we have to use now as in 'That's very E-X, man, very E-X.' Squares will now be called essentialists, as in 'That's very E-S, man, straight 8.'" While Mailer never ran with the essentialism tag, what we do witness is the birth of a lifelong love affair with a word: "existentialism" would remain his catch-all, encompassing the transformative experiences of prison, bullfighting, good and bad sex, and a hell of a lot more besides. If this elastic usage cuts us adrift from the term's usual meaning, it is because his route to it had "almost nothing to do with any formal existentialism" (to David E Gerard, 1963). What really alerted him to the possibilities for existentialism in the novel was his encounter with EM Forster's insight that "character can dissolve in one stricken event and re-form in startling new fashion". For "Norman Mailer" - that is, the character who first appears in The Armies of the Night - the "stricken event" occurred in 1948 with the publication of The Naked and the Dead, the success of which acted like a lobotomy on the writer's past and demanded the hasty forging of a new psyche and persona to face a wildly different reality. "It was as if there was somebody named Norman Mailer, but to meet him people had to meet me first," as he put it in Advertisements. The Brooklyn kid, Harvard alumnus and Pacific veteran found that sudden fame forced him to recalibrate his conception of authenticity, for his new life had nothing to offer him with either the scale or the intensity of his wartime experiences. A brief flirtation with Trotskyism and a stint as a Hollywood scribe-for-hire proved dead ends: Barbary Shore and The Deer Park were savaged by the critics. By this point something has vanished from Mailer's letters. What makes the correspondence predating The Naked and the Dead so thrilling - and what it evokes more effectively than any biographical narrative - is the omnivorous innocence of Mailer before he fell into notoriety. "I was psychopathically marooned in the present," as he put it to Diana Trilling in 1960. After this the letters become those of a man keeping his powder dry so that he could save himself for his audience. While not perfunctory, never again would they overflow with such an ecstasy of perception and raw invention. Anyone familiar with the personal essays will know where Mailer siphoned that energy. With their unguarded directness, the letters allow us access to his naked thought, unshrouded by his often byzantine prose. The present volume is the ideal companion to Mailer's final anthology, 1998's The Time of Our Time, a career-spanning retrospective in which the writer arranged each piece "in accordance with the year it refers to rather than the year in which it was written". Selected Letters of Norman Mailer can stand beside it - or, perhaps more fruitfully, behind it, providing the asides and stage whispers that shape the life and career into a compelling theatre of the creative self. 704pp, Random House, pounds 26 To order Selected Letters of Norman Mailer for pounds 21 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. - Alexis Forss Caption: Captions: Norman Mailer in 1959 This empathy is of a piece with an aggressive amour-propre rooted in and justified by his particular notion of "existentialism", here recast as a ceaseless oversight of a fragile yet demanding inner self, one continually threatened by indolence and compromise. A 1961 letter to writer Don Carpenter reveals our quick-change artist considering his options at the lexical boutique: "I got so sick of 'hip' and 'square' as words that from now on they're out. I mean, let's start something new. Existentialism is the word we have to use now as in 'That's very E-X, man, very E-X.' Squares will now be called essentialists, as in 'That's very E-S, man, straight 8.'" While [Norman Mailer] never ran with the essentialism tag, what we do witness is the birth of a lifelong love affair with a word: "existentialism" would remain his catch-all, encompassing the transformative experiences of prison, bullfighting, good and bad sex, and a hell of a lot more besides. If this elastic usage cuts us adrift from the term's usual meaning, it is because his route to it had "almost nothing to do with any formal existentialism" (to David E Gerard, 1963). What really alerted him to the possibilities for existentialism in the novel was his encounter with EM Forster's insight that "character can dissolve in one stricken event and re-form in startling new fashion". - Alexis Forss.
Kirkus Review
Appropriately sprawling biography of the larger-than-life writer, brawler, provocateur and bon vivant. Norman Mailer (19232007), writes archivist and authorized biographer Lennon, grew up in a reasonably happy family, with a strong mother and dapper father, who, as Mailer wrote, "had the gift of speaking to each woman as if she was the most important woman he'd ever spoken to." Mailer himself was fairly obsessed with women, though his quest was often thwarted--as he recalled, particularly at Harvard, where he served something of an apprenticeship. Mailer came into adulthood with a noticeable chip on his shoulder and some well-aired grievances, and he kept the pattern up throughout a long and productive life. As Advertisements for Myself (1959) proclaimed, for instance, he maintained running feuds and rivalries with all manner of writers--and, as Lennon reveals, even took Ernest Hemingway by the horns, occasioning an apology from Papa some years later. He also battled editors and critics from the start, though Hemingway helpfully instructed on the matter of reviews, "Try for Christ sake not to worry about it so much. All that is poison." Lennon ably reveals the always-contentious Mailer but also a man who could be generous and very smart. Lennon is also a shrewd literary critic, commenting on the origins and fortunes of Mailer's works, notably his study of Marilyn Monroe, which laid bare "his narcissism, born of early spectacular success." Mailer possessed an outsized ego well before then, of course, but the point remains: Though he seems to be little read now, Mailer was of central importance in postwar American writing, as he would have been glad to tell you. Detailed and anecdotal without being gossipy (a yarn concerning a nicotine-addicted cat notwithstanding) and a must-read for students and admirers of Mailer's work.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Lennon is an old friend of American writer Norman Mailer (1927-2007), who lived near the author during his final years in Provincetown, MA, and who worked on several projects with him, including On God: An Uncommon Conversation (2007) and Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988). This biography has Mailer's blessing, and Lennon has taken Mailer's advice-"put everything in"-to heart. Drawing on more than 45,000 letters, conversations with Mailer himself, and interviews with family, friends, and lovers, Lennon presents an exhaustive, fascinating, and fair-minded account of his subject's life and work. He portrays Mailer as a dual-natured personality: a passive observer and an activist, a family man and a philanderer, a generous friend and someone who could hold a grudge, and a man at home with presidents and prizefighters. While Lennon treats readers to accounts of Mailer's celebrity and his relations with stars such as Muhammad Ali and Madonna, he also explores the writer's seamier side, including his stabbing of Adele Morales, his second wife, and his support of Jack Abbott, who committed murder after being paroled. Lennon discusses all of Mailer's works from conception to reception, tracing his artistic development and chronicling his stormy relationships with hostile critics. VERDICT Written with the cooperation of Mailer's family, this thoroughly researched biography promises to be definitive. Essential for anyone with a serious interest in Mailer and his work.-William -Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
