Norman Mailer was literary lion

Published 11:18 pm Saturday, November 10, 2007

NEW YORK — Norman Mailer, the author whose name was synonymous with literary celebrity in the second half of the 20th century, died Saturday at the age of 84.

Mailer died of renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, Mailer’s biographer.

“He was a great American voice,” said a tearful Joan Didion, author of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” struggling for words upon learning of Mailer’s death.

Mailer’s death represents “the loss of a literary giant who was 100 percent American,” said Dick Cavett. Cavett presided over a legendary name-calling battle between Mailer and fellow writer Gore Vidal in 1971, on “The Dick Cavett Show.” During the show, Mailer and Cavett also traded insults, but, Cavett said, “That was just show business.” They remained friends, and he remained a fan: “Some of his paragraphs just lift you out of your chair, he’s so good.”

We’ve lost “the last of the great World War II American writers,” said author James Brady (“The Coldest War,” “Why Marines Fight”), who knew Mailer 30 years.

Mailer won two Pulitzer Prizes, for “The Armies of the Night” in 1969 and “The Executioner’s Song” in 1980. He also won a National Book Award for “The Armies of the Night,” and in 2005 was awarded a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation, presenters of the National Book Awards.

With an eye toward his legacy, Mailer sold his vast archives — 20,000 pounds of letters, manuscripts and memorabilia — to a research center at the University of Texas, for $2.5 million in 2005. In a February interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said he was feeling his age and the pressure of mortality. “I have all sorts of regrets,” he said. “I regret all the novels I promised to write but never wrote.” However, he said, he also believed in reincarnation, which he called “a way for God to improve his earlier works.”

Because he led such a high-profile and tumultuous public life, Mailer was probably the best-known writer in America. Among critics and fellow writers, he was considered a writer whose achievements, however admirable, never quite matched his enormous literary gifts.

Still, his so-called nonfiction novels, notably “The Armies of the Night” (1968) and “The Executioner’s Song” (1979), stand among the most celebrated books of the past 50 years.

By turns contentious and gracious, outrageous and gentlemanly, Mailer thrived on being a larger-than-life figure impossible to ignore. A regular on talk shows and high-brow symposia alike, he was a ubiquitous presence on the American cultural scene since the 1940s.

Controversy and Mailer were lifelong partners. He challenged the notion of World War II as a “good war” in the ’40s, championed sexual liberation in the ’50s, marched against the Vietnam War in the ’60s and clashed with feminists in the ’70s.

The preoccupations of his books — masculinity as combat, the literary life as competition, the hipster as cultural avatar, American life as repression, violence as redemption — were equally controversial.

Brooklyn-born and Harvard-educated, the pugnacious and publicity-conscious Mailer thought of himself as the natural heir to the Hemingway mystique. Although a small man, about five feet eight, he was known to challenge rivals to fist fights and head-butting contests.

Never shy about touting his own work, he took to the pages of Esquire on two occasions to dismiss his contemporaries as decidedly inferior. Thus he lost friends as easily as he made them.

A Newsday interview just before his 80th birthday in 2003, however, revealed a mellowed elder statesman. “I was dead wrong on (John) Updike. I was dead wrong on (Philip) Roth,” Mailer admitted. “I was pretty mean to them, and they’ve been doing excellent work for years.”

Mailer had nine children and six wives. Although his last marriage, with Norris Church, was relatively placid, his unions were marred by frequent infidelity and public shouting matches.

In the most notorious incident of his married life — not widely known until years later — a drunken Mailer stabbed his second wife, the painter Adele Morales, at a party in 1960. The blade narrowly missed her heart. Since she did not press charges, the writer was punished only with probation.

Mailer’s public esteem plunged to its lowest in the wake of his efforts to win parole for Jack Henry Abbott, a convicted murderer with aspirations to be a writer. Shortly after Abbott was paroled in 1981 to Mailer’s care, he killed a New York City waiter, and a stunned Mailer was left trying to explain.

Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, N.J., the first child of Barney and Fanny Mailer. He graduated from Boys’ High in Brooklyn and enrolled at Harvard to study aeronautical engineering. While there, his interests shifted to writing and he soon distinguished himself on the college literary magazine. After graduation in 1943 he joined the U.S. Army.

In 1949, with the publication of his first novel, “The Naked and Dead,” which drew on his wartime experience in the Philippines, Mailer was hailed as a novelist of great potential. He was only 25.

Mailer was a prime mover in the historic New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Like Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” before them, Mailer’s “The Armies of the Night” and “The Executioner’s Song” pioneered a new hybrid of fiction and nonfiction. These books are generally regarded as the author’s best.

After the lukewarm reception to his second and third novels, “Barbary Shore” and “The Deer Park,” Mailer increasingly turned his energies to nonfiction. Many of his opinions were first aired in a column he wrote for The Village Voice, the alternative newspaper he and several partners founded in 1955.

“The White Negro,” published in Dissent magazine 1957, signaled the arrival of Mailer as a significant commentator on society and culture. Dividing his contemporaries into the Hip and the Square — rebels and conformists — the essay proved to be prescient about the ’60s social upheavals just around the corner. At the same time, its positive appraisal of violence on behalf of the underdog outraged many readers.

Despite his failing health — in recent years, he needed two canes to walk and said he was going deaf — Mailer grappled with the big questions of life until the end. His latest book, “On God: An Uncommon Conversation,” was published by Random House on Oct. 16. In the book, based on conversations with Lennon, Mailer reveals his concept of “an artistic God who often succeeds but can also fail in the face of determined opposition,” according to the publisher’s description.

Earlier this year, he published his first novel in 10 years. Titled “The Castle in the Forest,” it is a fictional account of Hitler’s boyhood told through the eyes of a devil whose job is to foster young Adolf’s evil. The book — Mailer’s 13th novel — was just released as a paperback.