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November 12, 2007

Obituary for a Moonbat: Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer is dead. Kudos to Roger Kimball for not pretending this is a national tragedy:

Mailer epitomized a certain species of macho, adolescent radicalism that helped to inure the wider public to displays of violence, anti-American tirades, and sexual braggadocio. […] In 1955, Mailer helped to found The Village Voice, which, though always riven by internal dissension, quickly became a megaphone barking New Left thought, such as it was, into the mainstream culture. By the mid-1960s, he had emerged as an established antiestablishment guru. The spectacular success of works like The Armies of the Night (1968)—Mailer's bloated, "non-fiction novel" about the 1967 march on the Pentagon and his own role in the demonstration—bore witness to his gifts for literary demagoguery. Subtitled History as a Novel, the Novel as History, the book followed Truman Capote's example in In Cold Blood (1966), deliberately blurring fact and fiction, a procedure gratefully seized upon by a public eager to sacrifice truth to the demands of ideological zeal. Indeed, it was a procedure that characterized the intellectual—or, more accurately, the anti-intellectual—temper of a generation battened on mind-altering drugs and taught to regard any appeal to facts as an unacceptably "authoritarian" threat. Among anti-Vietnam War radicals—which is to say, among nine out of ten establishment intellectuals—Mailer's exercise in narcissistic psychohistory was greeted with ecstatic hosannas, and duly picked up both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Sample adulation from the critic Richard Gilman: "Mailer has opened up new possibilities for the literary imagination and new room for us to breathe in the crush of actuality." From the writer Nat Hentoff: "Mailer has won clear claim to being the best writer in America."

Despite his popularity among fellow moonbats, the "best writer in America" was lousy at writing:

When The Armies of the Night was serialized in Harper's, to the great excitement of the editor, Willie Morris, a young copy editor complained about Mailer's prose and, as one witness recollects, asked, "I wonder what he writes like when he's sober?" The unfortunate copy editor was promptly fired. But she was right: The Armies of the Night is a hyperbolic, self-indulgent mess that looks sillier and more naive with every year that passes.

In place of writing skills, Mailer offered psychosis:

[A]t a party he threw to announce his mayoral candidacy on the "Existentialist" ticket, Mailer got drunk and stabbed his wife Adele (number two), nearly killing her. (In 1969, Mailer ran for mayor again, this time on the "Secessionist" ticket, which included proposals that New York City become the fifty-first state and that disputes among young criminals be settled by jousting tournaments in Central Park.) Adele declined to press charges, and so Mailer escaped this outrage with a fortnight in Bellevue for observation.

Mailer's obsession with violence against women seems to have had a long gestation. Carl Rollyson opens his biography of Mailer with the story of John Maloney, a drunkard and a friend of Mailer and William Styron. In 1954, Maloney stabbed his mistress and fled. He was later jailed but released when charges were dropped. Styron recalled that at the time Mailer said to him: "God, I wish I had the courage to stab a woman like that. That was a real gutsy act." That tells one all one needs to know about Norman Mailer's idea of "courage."

Mailer's admiration for violent criminals extended to the vicious murderer Gary Gilmore, whom he praised for taking "revenge upon the American system," and to a violent communist with alleged writing skills named Jack Abbott, who was released from prison reportedly thanks to Mailer's influence. Soon afterward, Abbott stabbed a man to death. Mailer testified in the killer's defense. After the testimony, he proclaimed:

I'm willing to gamble with a portion of society to save this man's talent.

Mailer did have a redeeming quality — the unintentional humor of his work:

The truth is that Norman Mailer very quickly became a parody of himself. Since the Sixties was itself a ghastly caricature of political radicalism, few people at the time seemed to notice just how ridiculous Mailer's preening exhibitionism and blustering political and sexual pronouncements were. But as the years passed and Mailer became more and more indiscriminate in his enthusiasms, Mailer the existential sage was gradually revealed as Mailer the buffoon. […]

The unwitting comic dimension of Mailer's writing is large. But its many sinister elements far overshadow its humor. Norman Mailer may have been unintentionally funny; he was deliberately repulsive. He was an important figure in the story of America's cultural revolution not because people found him ridiculous but, on the contrary, because many influential people took the ideas of this ridiculous man seriously.

For a sample of the ideas that so inspired our intellectual superiors, here's Mailer on abortion:

I think when a woman goes through an abortion, even legalized abortion, she goes through hell. There's no use hoping otherwise. For what is she doing? Sometimes she has to be saying to herself, "You're killing the memory of a beautiful fuck." I don't think abortion is a great strain when the act was some miserable little screech, or some squeak oozed up through the trapdoor, a little rat which got in, a worm who slithered under the threshold. That sort of abortion costs a woman little more than discomfort. Unless there are medical consequences years later.

But if a woman has a great fuck, and then has to abort, it embitters her.

Mailer was beloved by moonbats for glorifying the hipster ethic in his appalling "The White Negro":

Hip abdicates from any conventional moral responsibility because it would argue that the results of our actions are unforeseeable, and so we cannot know if we do good or bad…. The only Hip morality … is to do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible, and … to be engaged in one primal battle: to open the limits of the possible for oneself, for oneself alone, because that is one's need.

There you have it: moonbat morality in a nutshell. Kimball concludes:

"The White Negro" adumbrates practically everything that went wrong with American society under the assault of left-wing radicalism in the 1960s, from the addiction to violence, drugs, pop music, and sexual polymorphism, to the moral idiocy, jejune anti-Americanism, and mindless glorification of narcissistic irresponsibility and extreme states of experience. It was, as David Horowitz notes in his autobiography Radical Son, "the seminal manifesto of New Left nihilism…. In New Left thinking, criminals were only 'primitive rebels.'" Although many critics took issue with Mailer's exoneration of violence, the real message of the essay—if it feels good, do it!—was just then beginning to sweep the country with irresistible force. "The White Negro," along with some of Mailer's other essays from the late 1950s, represented an important opening salvo in the war on convention, restraint, and traditional morality. This, not his literary accomplishment, was the ultimate secret of Mailer's broad appeal. Mailer, as Joseph Epstein observed, "was one of the key men responsible for releasing the Dionysian strain in American life." He promised his readers what they longed to hear: that ultimate, self-centered ecstasy was theirs for the taking. Mailer once said that he would "settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time." He did not make the revolution, but he assuredly became one of its most egregious abettors.

Some deaths are less sad than others.

On a tip from V the K.

Posted by Van Helsing at November 12, 2007 1:38 PM

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