Mailer, RIP

I'm with Rick Brookhiser more than Roger Kimball. From what I've read of him, Mailer seems to belong - despite their wildly divergent styles and personae - to the same class of writers as Tom Wolfe: Immensely talented and creative wordsmiths who wasted far too much time (Wolfe, late in his career; Mailer, throughout) trying to be Great American Novelists, a task neither was really up to, instead of conducting the experiments in essays and narrative nonfiction that both will be remembered for.

However, I haven't made my way through Harlot's Ghost, which many people whose literary judgment I trust (including Christopher Hitchens) have suggested is the place where Mailer came closet to achieve his GAN ambition, and I should probably reserve judgment until I've blocked out a few weeks to read it.

Comments

I think one thing Mailer's death has demonstrated is the inadequacy (idiocy!) of the "Great Author" model of literary criticism. Who cares if someone is one of the trademarked great novelists? It's such a myopic, blinkered way of analyzing literature. Beginning a contemplation of a writer with a consideration of whether they reach some ill-defined and subjective place of greatness is just dull. There's so many more interesting things to talk about.

Posted by Freddie | November 12, 2007 12:34 PM

Why do you trust Hitchens' literary judgment? He should take the advice of Frank Foer and stop focusing so much on the politics of th authors he reviews. If you put a Hitchens Atlantic review next to any essay by James Wood, it would melt. That said, I thoroughly admire Hitchens as a prose stylist and as a reporter, and I think he is unequalled in his time in those two areas. I just wonder how a man who is so unsypmathetic to the religious impulse can analyze art? Wood is an agnostic, but at least he can understand why Dylan Thomas doesn't want to give in to the good night.

I'll take Hitchens over Kimball any day. Hitchens (like Mailer) is excessive and crazy on some things, but at least they have something to live for -- the revolution, whatever it may be. Kimball is a Christian but it seems to me that for him, the most significant thing that ever happened was the Sixties, and the only genre left to write is cultural criticism -- not even literary criticsm, but rather a catalogue of grievances. I agree with Kimball's overall judgment, and also the necessity of his critical work, but not with his bitterness.

Posted by XC | November 12, 2007 1:02 PM

How can one not be disturbed regarding the sixties nihilism that Mailer represents. I've read virtually all of his stuff, including Harlot's Ghost, a thousand-plus page story without an ending and little real understanding of a spook's life. The man is obsessed with sexual matters, especially buggery, and cruelly fascinated with the sort of criminality of Abbot and Gilmore.

Mailer in the end gave up his profound Jewish roots for a mess of sixties pottage. Harvard was apparently of little help, other than a bit of literary knowledge and craftsmanship. Compared to Saul Bellow he is a cipher.

Posted by Peter Leavitt | November 12, 2007 2:43 PM

Mailer's personal theology was certainly interesting....sort of a neo-Manichaeanism from what I understand, which is a point of view that we certainly don't hear much in the modern age. Whatever you might say about him, he certainly took the reality of evil (natural, moral, and supernatural) very seriously indeed.

Posted by Hector | November 12, 2007 4:10 PM

Hector, Mailer is more nihilist than neo-Manichean. Manicheans, according to Augustine, were dualists who claimed that they could overcome their bad material nature with some sort of ethereal reason. Mailer hated rational types and worshiped macho-romantic vitalism, rather opposite to pale or ethereal reason. That's perhaps why he ended up with six wives, one of whom he stabbed, and became fond of two vicious criminals.

You're right that Mailer took evil seriously, enough so apparently to confusedly attempt to embody it instead of being a "middle class" Jew. He actually turned out to be a fairly garden-variety modern liberal nihilist who fell in with the romantic sixties rebels.

It will be most interesting to hear Douthat's verdict after reading Harlot's Ghost.

Posted by Peter Leavitt | November 12, 2007 5:33 PM

Peter Leavitt's criticism of Mailer for being "fond of two vicious criminals" is especially amusing given his own rabid support for Bush and Cheney - two men responsible for pointless death and carnage far beyond anything Abbott or Gilmore ever did. And unlike those two men, they'll never express remorse.

But of course Leavitt is just a garden variety primitive fascist theist who fell in with the neocon nineties bootlickers.

(As for Mailer, "Executioner's Song" is worth reading for anyone interested in the unique qualities of American violence.)

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | November 12, 2007 11:23 PM

how far?

Posted by euro | November 16, 2007 6:49 PM