When Norman Mailer was inducted into the Army, in March, 1944, he was a freshly married twenty-one-year-old Harvard graduate, a slight young man of five feet eight inches and a hundred and thirty-five pounds. In the previous few years, he had published some stories and written a play and two novels (one of them published, in a typescript facsimile, as “A Transit to Narcissus,” in 1978). Even as a student, he thought of himself as a professional writer, and from the day that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, in December, 1941, he had wanted to write a big book about the war. He was sent for basic training to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where many of the men were from Pennsylvania, the South, and the Upper Midwest. Mailer was from middle-class Jewish Brooklyn; he had landed in the great working-class Gentile world, and was eager to observe. He canvassed the recruits about their sex lives, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. (He discovered that many of them did not believe in foreplay.) Mailer knew that tough Jews served in the war, including criminals, louts, and bitterly determined, hardworking men, but he was without physical skills. He had never worked a thresher, or manhandled heavy goods into a truck, or tinkered with Dad’s jalopy.
In early January, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur landed with an enormous invasion force on Luzon, the largest of the Philippine islands; Mailer, after waiting in a troopship, went ashore a few weeks later. He was thrown as a rifleman into the 112th Cavalry Regiment, out of Texas. The 112th had been in combat in the Pacific for more than a year, and many men in the unit had died. Mailer described those who remained as a little crazy, and physically messed up—some with open ulcers from jungle rot. The Texans were joined by men from other parts of the country, some of them bar fighters and casual anti-Semites (not by theory but by habit). “I didn’t open my mouth for six months in that outfit,” he later said.
“The nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn”—that was the one image of himself that Mailer said was “absolutely insupportable.” It was insupportable because, for a while, it was true. A picture of him in uniform from early in his service shows a young man with soft lips, large ears, a gentle gaze. He did indeed write his big war book, “The Naked and the Dead,” and it presents a fascinating paradox. A tough, even pessimistic work, filled with sordid sensuality—muck and detestable odors; bodily discomforts and mutilations; the tedium, exhilarations, and cruelties of an army fighting in the jungle—it may also have been a book that only a nice Jewish boy could write. A nice Jewish boy, that is, in flight from his background.
It requires some effort to recall the young Mailer across the intervening years of turmoil. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, as doggedly as an earlier puny American, Theodore Roosevelt, Mailer transformed himself into a barrel-chested macho—a man six times married, the father of eight children and an adopted son, and the author of more than forty books, some of them American classics (“The Armies of the Night,” from 1968, and the supremely abundant and sympathetic “The Executioner’s Song,” a “true life novel,” from 1979), some of them clogged and nearly unreadable. Attentive and sweet-natured much of the time—his letters to friends and even to strangers are generously supportive—he also brawled and headbutted at parties. He was decked, hammered, billy-clubbed; his eye was gouged. He believed that physical courage was necessary equipment for a great writer (Hemingway was the model), and that Jewish men in particular had to overcome all sorts of weaknesses. “In the first week/of their life/male jews/are crucified,” he wrote in a poem. His recklessness encompassed an abominable act: at the end of a drunken party, in 1960, he twice stabbed Adele Morales, his second wife and the mother of two of his children. “I let God down,” Mailer later told Betsy Mailer, one of his daughters with Adele.
For good and for ill, that was the Mailer the world knew for more than fifty years. When he died, in 2007, at the age of eighty-four, his reputation was at a low ebb. His temperament and preoccupations seemed artifacts of a bygone and benighted era. And not without reason. His reactionary sexual politics, expressed at length in the rapturously composed but morally preposterous polemic “The Prisoner of Sex,” published in Harper’s, in 1971, have been at the center of searing critiques for a half century.
Still, writers have a way of losing their labels. In the nineteen-forties, T.S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and George Orwell all wrote essays about Rudyard Kipling, retrieving what was aesthetically and emotionally satisfying from the bitter effusions of a rank imperialist and racist; some four decades later, Edward Said and other post-colonial critics and scholars continued the effort of defending the art embedded in the toxic mesh of Kipling’s attitudes. Mailer is a very different writer, but a similar kind of sorting out may be in the works, especially now that a major revival of interest in him has begun. The Library of America, which has brought out two volumes of Mailer’s writing from the sixties, is now reissuing “The Naked and the Dead,” in honor of Mailer’s hundredth birthday, on January 31st. The volume is edited by J. Michael Lennon, whose many-sided biography, “Norman Mailer: A Double Life” (2013), is by far the best that the author has received. Lennon has accompanied the novel’s text with a selection of the extraordinary letters that Mailer wrote from the battlefield to his first wife, Beatrice Silverman. Many additional projects devoted to Mailer are under way or have been proposed, including selections from his mid-fifties philosophical and erotic journal, a collection of his writings on democracy, a Showtime documentary, two TV series, and extended critical studies by Christopher Ricks and David Bromwich. In a new book, “Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer,” the British literary scholar and biographer Richard Bradford has produced an almost entirely negative portrait of a man whose life is “wonderfully grotesque,” and yet the book’s very existence attests to a more complicated reality. It would be naïve to suppose that the renewed attention on Mailer has nothing to do with the scandals attached to his name. It would also be naïve to pretend that he was not a great American writer.
Mailer’s father, Isaac (Barney) Mailer, was born near Vilnius, Lithuania, but moved with his family in 1900 to South Africa; he served in the British Army during the First World War. In America, he spoke with a punctilious English accent. In all, he was a strange bird—a mock Brit, a Jewish accountant, and a passionate gambler, frequently in debt. In 1922, Barney Mailer married Fanny Schneider. She had grown up in Long Branch, New Jersey, the daughter of a Lithuanian rabbi who never officially practiced in America. (According to a relative, the elder Schneider believed that “rabbis were shnorrers.”) At home in Crown Heights, just east of Prospect Park, Fanny, a loving, capable woman, raised Norman and his sister, Barbara, while managing a home-oil-delivery business by telephone. The Jewish-folkloric combination of a weak father and a strong mother evidently benefitted Fanny’s son, who drew power from the devotion of his parents, aunts, and uncles throughout his seventy-year writing career.
As a child, Norman was quiet and obedient, too preoccupied with his studies to spend much time among the neighborhood bonditts, with their pranks and their passion for stickball. On the way to school (Boys High, in Bedford-Stuyvesant), he kept his head down, avoiding fights with the local Italian and Irish street gangs, and with the local Jewish toughs as well. He built model airplanes, some of them extremely impressive, and spent his summers, with Barbara, in a resort hotel in Long Branch, run by one of his aunts. In a spare room, he would write fiction.
In September, 1939, Mailer showed up at Harvard in an outfit of orange-striped trousers, a gold jacket, and saddle shoes. He was sixteen, and found himself as ignorant about ruling-class undergraduates and the social rituals of the college as he was, five years later, about the habits of working-class Americans. The clothes were soon discarded, though some of his regular laundry was sent home, washed by the family’s Black maid, and mailed back. In his first year on campus, he ate dinner with other Jewish boys at the Harvard Union and began to feel his way around. Until the end of his sophomore year, he lived almost entirely within the protected boundaries of the American Jewish middle class.
At the time, Latin was a prerequisite for English majors at Harvard; Mailer had never studied it, so he became an engineering major, learning much that would serve him well when he reconstructed the liftoff of the Saturn V rocket in “Of a Fire on the Moon” (1970), his impassioned report on the Apollo 11 moon landing. His main occupation at school was reading, particularly the American realists he discovered as a freshman—James T. Farrell (the Studs Lonigan trilogy), John Dos Passos (the U.S.A. trilogy), John Steinbeck (“The Grapes of Wrath”). Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe came afterward, and Hemingway served as a (distant) spiritual mentor. Hemingway’s hunting, fishing, and boxing, his war exploits, his courageous and soulful physicality—boastful yet wounded—bore little resemblance to the habits of Crown Heights Jews. Mailer fell in love.
His own problem as a writer, he believed, was a lack of experience. Escaping from Harvard’s rich preppies and ambitious Jews, he rode the subway around Boston, taking notes on working-class behavior, clothes, and accents. In the summer after his sophomore year, he left his hotel room on the Jersey shore with just a few dollars in his pocket and hitchhiked his way down to North Carolina, sleeping outdoors at night. Voluntarily, and for only two weeks, he became that familiar Depression-era figure, a hobo. When he returned home, Fanny made him take off his clothes before coming inside.
His lack of sexual experience was particularly mortifying. “You bore a standard of shame,” he later said of himself and his friends. He at least lost his physical inhibitions. He played football in front of Dunster House, and loved the bone-jarring contact. At a Boston Symphony concert during his junior year, he met Beatrice (Bea) Silverman, a lively music major attending Boston University. She was argumentative, a passionate lefty, and a proto-feminist; she was also profane and, in the appreciative slang of the day, “earthy.” They carried on in the mattressed trunk of a Chevy given to Mailer by his uncle, and, at Dunster, they became known for their lovemaking in Mailer’s dorm room. Bea would talk dirty in front of his friends; they were both showing off. They got married in secret, in January, 1944. His draft notice arrived a week later.
What Mailer did in the war was not heroic. At first, working at headquarters on Luzon, he typed reports, laid wire, built a shower for officers. Humiliated and bored, he volunteered for a reconnaissance squad. He went on twenty-five patrols, many of them fifteen miles long, and he finally saw some combat: nothing much, as he admitted, but he knew what it was like to climb up a damp, rocky hill in the heat while burdened with a rifle, ammunition, grenades, two canteens, a steel helmet—perhaps forty pounds in all. His real mission was to see the worst and make an account of it. He wrote long letters to Bea (who had joined the Waves), some of which were detailed and harrowing. He was not just creating the book but creating himself as a man. In February, 1945, he entered a Japanese-held town that the Americans had overwhelmed with artillery and tanks. A letter to Bea chronicled what he saw:
Right before us was a destroyed Japanese armored half-track and a tank. The vehicles were still smoldering, and the driver of the half-track had half fallen out, his head which was crushed from one ear to the jaw lay reclining on the running board, and the pitiful remaining leg thrust tensely through the windshield. The other leg lay near his head on the ground, and a little smoke was still arising from his chest. Another Japanese lay on his back a short distance away with a great hole in his intestines which bunched out in a thick white cluster like a coiled white garden hose....
After a half hour or so we descended to the road, and mounted the Jeep again. As we drove along the road the destruction was complete. Fragments of the corrugated steel from the warehouses had landed everywhere, and the wreckage formed almost a pattern on the road. Everything stunk, and everything, the road, the wreckage, the mutilated vehicles had become the two colors of conflagration—the rust red and the black. The whole vista was of destroyed earth and materiel—that battlefield looked like a hybrid between a junk-yard and a charnel house; it was perhaps the ugliest most dejecting sight I have ever seen. You wished acutely for rain, as the quick hand-maiden to time.