The characteristics of a Grand Old Man of Literature are fourfold, and obvious. He must be a man, he must be old, he must be literary, and he must be grand. Mailer scored two out of four: impressive but insufficient. A book about Marilyn Monroe, a book about Jesus, a book about Muhammad Ali, a book about ancient Egypt, a book about the Kennedy assassination, a book about Hitler’s toilet-training—that’s not literature; it’s up-all-night cable television programming.
After the old lion is dead, any dog can nip at him. What needs saying is that the lion had been dead for more than forty years. Consider these lines from 1966’s Cannibals and Christians:
“Now I will give you a set of equations. They are not mathematical, but metaphorical; and therefore full of science. I repeat: they are equations in the form of metaphor; so they are full of science. It is just that they are not scientific. For they are equations composed only of words. I am thus trying to say my equations are a close description of phenomena which cannot be measured by a scientist. Yet these observations are clear enough to say that interruption is shock, and shock deadens mood, but mood then stirs itself to rouse a wave. Why? Well, the sum of one’s experience might suggest that it is probably in the nature of mood to restore itself by raising a wave.”
That’s vintage Mailer: the empty annunciations of now I will give you, I repeat, I am thus trying to say. The saying itself rarely happened; and, when it did, we were none the wiser for it. (See the facing page in the same collection: “A whore was a-scorch / Gorge was the cheese and ass the itch / Of Pussy and Pick-nose / And swish out the twitch [...] Snatch squinch and squeeze / Ear-wax and dingle / Fuck tit and dong [...] One cannot give a funeral service to the fart.”) Reading Mailer was like watching a man have a seizure.
Consider the pattern set by his first decade: The Naked and the Dead, perhaps necessary though not quite readable; Barbary Shore, boring and unreadable; The Deer Park, boring, sexy, and unreadable; and Advertisements for Myself, so deliriously wretched as to have its own peculiar charisma. Average men commit average sins, but only fantastic creatures are capable of fantastic wrongheadedness. The experience of Advertisements, as of so much Maileriana, is one of being transfixed by negative wonder: you can’t tear your eyes from the burning wreck.
Adjusting these proportions, we can sift Mailer’s career into three tolerable books, including The Executioner’s Song; twenty-five books beyond the second chapter of which I am almost certain few people have ever bothered to read; and seven books that make an Advertisements-style virtue of their vices, so egregious that by camp transvaluation they become “good” or otherwise meritorious again.
Anyone else hitting three for thirty-five would long have been looking for another line of work. But Mailer was not really a writer, he was only a personage; and even in death he remains on the front page, above the fold, which tells us as much about contemporary culture as anything Mailer himself ever managed to say.
