Norman Mailer and Philip Roth often made the American Jewish community squirm.
By MATT NESVISKYPhilip Roth in New York, 2010(photo credit: Courtesy)
THE PROTEAN American novelist Norman Mailer (1923-2007) has been the subject of four or five biographies and well over 1,000 interviews, profiles and critical studies. He was also the most public American writer since Mark Twain, constantly giving lectures, appearing on television, participating in demonstrations, and campaigning for himself and others.(He ran for mayor of New York City and even contemplated running for president.) So we all know Norman Mailer, right? No matter. J. Michael Lennon’s massive “Norman Mailer: A Double Life” proves to be the best literary biography we’ve come across in years. It might weigh four pounds and tempt one to skim, but to my surprise I found myself savoring it over several weeks, because every page was delightful, insightful and compelling.And the text is not quite as forbidding as it seems; 184 pages are devoted to notes and bibliography.Lennon, emeritus professor of English at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, served as Mailer’s archivist, co-founded the Mailer Society, edited and collated several of Mailer’s nonfiction works, and is currently engaged in editing for publication a collection culled from the novelist’s 45,000 letters. For many years Lennon also lived near Mailer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and was one of Mailer’s poker and drinking buddies. But Lennon’s closeness to Mailer and his family does not mean he has produced a panegyric.He dutifully lauds the accomplishments, but does not minimize the failures – both literary and personal.Those accomplishments include publishing 44 books, from “The Naked and the Dead” (1948), which made Mailer rich and famous at age 25, to “On God: An Uncommon Conversation” (2007), based on numerous taped discussions with Lennon. In between, Mailer produced classic journalism, most notably his anti- Vietnam War reportage (“The Armies of the Night”), his meditation on the Apollo moon mission (“Of a Fire on the Moon”), a 1,000-page Pulitzer Prize-winning crime story (“The Executioner’s Song”), books on boxing, bullfighting, Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, Lee Harvey Oswald and Henry Miller, and gigantic novels on pharaonic Egypt (“Ancient Evenings”), the CIA (“Harlot’s Ghost”), on Hitler (“The Castle in the Forest”) and on Jesus (“The Gospel According to the Son”). Lennon provides cogent analyses of every volume.The failures include Mailer’s wasting his time, energy and resources on making amateurish movies, writing unproduced film scripts and plays, tossing off forgettable verse and neglecting to complete the promised sequels to the CIA, Egyptian and Hitler novels. Then there was that notorious personal life: the six marriages, the stabbing of wife No. 2, the public drunkenness, the private drug use, the compulsive philandering, the gambling, the mean-spirited literary feuds (William F. Buckley, William Styron), the championing of the murderer Jack Abbott and much more.On the positive side, Mailer was indisputably brilliant. As a child his IQ was measured at 170 – reportedly the highest ever recorded at his Brooklyn public school – although nothing accounts for his lifetime of unconventional ideas, such as his belief in magic and in the devil and in the psychic causes of cancer. He was a true craftsman as a writer. He sometimes spent a decade or more on his major books.Lennon tells us he “hated semi-colons and would often rewrite an entire paragraph to avoid using one.”Mailer was also a tireless researcher.For his book on Oswald, for instance, he lived for five months in Minsk, where the assassin had lived with his Russian wife Marina, and conducted countless interviews both there and in the US. And despite his endless infidelities, he usually maintained good relations with his exwives and his nine children, faithfully providing child support and college tuition. His final marriage, to Norris Church, although not always untroubled, lasted 27 years. Lennon tells us Mailer was also uncommonly generous with time and money to family members (including his father, a compulsive gambler), friends,sparring partners, several prison inmates and many aspiring writers.Mailer’s personal obligations, along with his cuckoo artistic pursuits and a fairly lavish lifestyle, required plenty of income; as Lennon puts it, rivers of money flowed in, rivers of money flowed out.His million-dollar advances for multiple book deals meant for years he was paid $30,000 a month by his publisher. Sweet, but his monthly nut ran to $50,000. He made up the difference with lucrative magazine assignments, lecture fees that would have staggered even the highly paid Mark Twain, and other gigs. For example, as a “consultant” on a boxing movie, he collected a cool $100,000.THE PUBLIC Norman Mailer, often drunken, abusive or violent, was not the kind of Jew to make the American Jewish community especially proud. Although he was the grandson of a rabbi and developed an early affection for hassidic folklore, Mailer expressed interest in all religions, largely for their magical properties. He was far from a practicing Jew and had his own, mystical notion of God.His book on Jesus didn’t exactly enhance his Jewish credentials, even though he told a television interviewer that Jesus was “extremely Jewish. He worries all the time, he anticipates, he broods upon what’s going on, there’s an immense sense of responsibility.” In writing the novel, he added: “I began to realize for the first time in many, many years how Jewish I am.”A trait that he shared with Jesus, Mailer said, was the belief that you pay a price for everything you get.“That conviction,” Mailer said, “is at the very center of Jewish belief, as opposed to Christian belief, where God takes mercy on you, and you’re lifted and you’re saved.The Jews tend to believe that you never get it without paying something in return. So it is delightful to contemplate these miracles once you recognize that you can use yourself up – indeed the angels whisper to Jesus at a certain point, and say in effect, ‘Don’t overdo it.’” That’s Norman Mailer – confounding us even from beyond the grave.Another Jewish writer who often made the American Jewish community squirm is Philip Roth. Mailer and Roth had only a nodding acquaintance over the years, but Lennon records one amusing encounter between the two novelists.This occurred at the memorial service in 2003 for Paris Review editor George Plimpton. After the speeches, Lennon reports, Roth noted the octogenarian Mailer hurrying along on his two walking sticks and asked where he was going. “Let me warn you,” Mailer said, “when you get to my age, you’re going to be looking for telephone booths in which you can relieve yourself.” Roth said that time had already arrived, to which Mailer replied: “Phil, you always were precocious.”Roth has long been as private a figure as Mailer was public. In this regard Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “Roth Unbound” is not a fullblown biography – that reportedly is in the works, authorized by Roth and to be written by Blake Bailey, author of well-received lives of American novelists John Cheever and Richard Yates.But if Pierpont’s book focuses on Roth’s writing, it also serves as a biography, since Roth has drawn so deeply on his personal experiences for his novels and short stories.In addition, Pierpont, a long-standing New Yorker staff writer, has been a friend of Roth’s for some 10 years, and she enlivens her study with copious quotes from her conversations, many of them taped, with the novelist.Their friendship is something of a problem. She can be critical of some of Roth’s books, but she always tempers that criticism by finding virtue in even the most problematic of novels. Roth, who is now 80 and who recently announced his “retirement” from writing fiction, has produced some 30 works in his career, and inevitably some have been more successful than others.It’s easy enough to dismiss the flat-footed Nixon satire of “Our Gang,” or the boring baseball fantasy with the ironic title “The Great American Novel.” Yet the Roth loyalist Pierpont is never in the least dismissive. She is the kind of advocate who can even allow for Roth interrupting his novella “Exit Ghost” for an eight-page digression on George Plimpton (“a formal disruption that pulls the story out of shape” but which is nevertheless “crucial” to the story.) Claudia Roth Pierpont (no relation to the novelist) proves herself a dedicated attorney for the defense. No, Roth is no misogynist.(She takes on faith Roth’s assertion that “some of my best friends are women.”) No, Roth is no recluse. (Roth is gregarious and has many long-lasting friendships.) No, he is no narcissist. (He has performed many acts of charity and devoted much time and resources to aiding suppressed Eastern European writers.) She also makes clear that the charming Philip Roth has not exactly led a charmed life, sympathetically detailing his many debilitating physical problems and mental breakdowns. She’s also clearly on Roth’s side in recounting the story of his divorce from actress Claire Bloom.Happily for us, Pierpont also can’t resist gossip: Roth’s dating Jackie Kennedy, his hobnobbing with the Clintons, his touchy relationship with John Updike, his affection for the often standoffish Saul Bellow. But most importantly, Pierpoint is a good close reader.Her discussions of the individual books are invariably succinct and sharp, and if she is too readily forgiving of what even she must admit is “lifeless” or “slack,” she still exhibits an intelligence that commands respect.Claudia Roth Pierpont come off as a deeply analytical reader and writer, which is presumably what drew her to that deeply analytical reader and writer named Philip Roth, and vice versa. As such, it’s fairly rewarding to watch their minds at work together.
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