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Norman Mailer’s Hubris

Jan 07, 2014
by Caroline Miller
"Does Mailer Matter?", Christopher Beha, Norman Mailer, recent biographies of Norman Mailer
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Prior to the Christmas holidays, I had coffee with a friend who announced she was reading a biography on Norman Mailer. I confess, I’ve never read his novels, the most famous being The Executioner’s Song and The Naked and The Dead; but I am familiar with his essays and columns and have watched a few of his television interviews. That he is a master of words, I’ve never doubted but his fictional subjects never interested me. Nor did I admire his macho contempt for women writers which I consider ironic, because he couldn’t stay away from “broads” having had 6 wives.

 Oddly enough, after I’d said goodbye to my friend and arrived home, I discovered a review of two books recently published about Mailer. (“Does Mailer Matter?” by Christopher Beha, Harper’s, December 2013, pgs. 88-94.) According to the writer, his biographers agree that Mailer was haunted by his desire to write the great American novel. For him that meant he could settle “for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” (Ibid, pg. 90)

 I sat for a moment to think about Mailer’s objective. If true, it struck me that he’d gotten the cart before the horse. Surely a writer’s ambition should focus on having something to say rather than groping for effect. Writer’s don’t change minds, generally. Rather, they marshal the public in a direction it is already going — as Harriet Beecher Stowe did with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Betty Freidan with The Feminine Mystique. Hubris is required to believe that ideas rise up from the writer as if from the void and that once created, these ideas alone can change the world. True, J. D. Salinger’s, Catcher in the Rye may have looked revelatory – the story of a teen age boy expelled from a private school and forced to examine his grievances. But the novel survives because it touches upon the insecurity of the young, a condition which is constant and universal. Salinger didn’t create that consciousness; he tapped into it.

 Like Icarus, Mailer attempted to fly too high. He gave himself god-like ambition and suffered for it. Too bad he forgot that Life makes the statement. The writer is merely its humble scribe.

The fall of Icarus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Courtesy of callipoewrites.wordpress.com)

 

 

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Contact Caroline at

carolinemiller11@yahoo.com

Portland, Oregon author Caroline Miller had distinguished careers as an educator, union president, elected official and artist/advocate.

Her play, Woman on the Scarlet Beast, was performed at the Post5 Theatre, Portland, OR, January/February 2015

Caroline published a serialized novelette, Marie Eau-Claire, on the website, The Colored Lens.  She also published the story Gustav Pavel,  a parable about ordinary lives, choice and alternate potential, on the website Fixional.co.

Caroline has published four novels

  • Ballet Noir
  • Trompe l’Oeil
  • Gothic Spring
  • Heart Land

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