US literary legend dies

2007-11-11 20:26

New York - Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as The Naked and the Dead, died early on Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84.

Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J Michael Lennon, who is also the author's official biographer.

From his classic debut novel to such masterworks of literary journalism as The Armies of the Night, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality.

Some of his works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old "enfant terrible."

Stabbed his wife

Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, streetwise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.

He had nine children, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New York, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women's lib.

But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, "in the end it is the writing that will count."

Mailer, he wrote, possessed "a superb natural style that does not crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and characters with real blood streams and nervous systems, a great openness and eagerness for experience, a sense of urgency about the need to test thought and character in the crucible of a difficult era."

Norman Mailer was born on January 31 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey. His father, Isaac, a South African-born accountant, and mother, Fanny, who ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, soon moved to Brooklyn - later described by Mailer as "the most secure Jewish environment in America."

In the army

Mailer completed public schools, earned an engineering science degree in 1943 from Harvard, where he decided to become a writer, and was soon drafted into the army. Sent to the Philippines as an infantryman, he saw enough of army life and combat to provide a basis for his first book, The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948 while he was a postgraduate student in Paris.

The book - noteworthy for Mailer's invention of the word "fug" as a substitute for the then-unacceptable four-letter original -_ was a bestseller, and Mailer returned home to find himself anointed the new Hemingway, Dos Passos and Melville.

Buoyed by instant literary celebrity, Mailer embraced the early 1950s counterculture - defining "hip" in his essay The White Negro, allying himself with Beat Generation gurus Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and writing social and political commentary for the leftist Village Voice, which he helped found. He also churned out two more novels, Barbary Shore (1951) and Deer Park (1955), neither embraced kindly by readers or critics.

Ran for mayor

Mailer's personal life was as turbulent as the times. In 1960, at a party at his Brooklyn Heights home, Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a knife. She declined to press charges, and it was not until 1997 that she revealed, in her own book, how close she had come to dying.

In 1969, Mailer ran for mayor on a "left conservative" platform. He said New York City should become the 51st state, and urged a referendum for "black ghetto dwellers" on whether they should set up their own government.

Mailer had numerous minor run-ins with the law, usually for being drunk or disorderly, but was also jailed briefly during the Pentagon protests. While directing the film Maidstone in 1968, the self-described "old club fighter" punched actor Lane Smith, breaking his jaw, and bit actor Rip Torn's ear in another scuffle.

Mailer had views on almost everything.

The '70s: "the decade in which image became pre-eminent because nothing deeper was going on."

Poetry: A "natural activity ... a poem comes to one," whereas prose required making "an appointment with one's mind to write a few thousand words."

Journalism: Irresponsible. "You can't be too certain about what happened."

Technology: "Insidious, debilitating and depressing," and nobody in politics had an answer to "its impact on our spiritual well-being."

Distrusted technology

Mailer's suspicion of technology was so deep that while most writers used typewriters or computers, he wrote with a pen, some 1 500 words a day, in what Newsweek's Sokolov called "an illegible and curving hand."

In a 1971 magazine piece about the new women's liberation movement, Mailer equated the dehumanising effect of technology with what he said was feminists' need to abolish the mystery, romance and "blind, goat-kicking lust" from sex.

Time magazine said the broadside should "earn him a permanent niche in their pantheon of male chauvinist pigs." Mailer later told an interviewer that his being called sexist was "the greatest injustice in American life."

Two years later, he wrote Marilyn and was accused of plagiarism by other Marilyn Monroe biographers. One, Maurice Zolotow, called it "one of the literary heists of the century." Mailer shot back, "nobody calls me a plagiarist and gets away with it," adding that if he was going to steal, it would be from Shakespeare or Melville.

The Executioner's Song (1979), an epic account of the life and death of petty criminal Gary Gilmore, whom Mailer never met, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Accused of plagiarism

Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984) became a 1987 film.

Mailer's wives, besides Morales, were Beatrice Silverman; Lady Jeanne Campbell; Beverly Bentley; actress Carol Stevens and painter Norris Church. He had five daughters, three sons and a stepson.

In 2005, Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards, where he deplored what he called the "withering" of general interest in the "serious novel."

Authors like himself, he said more than once, had become anachronisms as people focused on television and young writers aspired to screenwriting or journalism.

- AP