I love thee, Norman Mailer

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Norman Mailer, who died last year, was called a misogynist and a bully (and more) by critics. It didn’t help that he stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, or that he married six times, or was a notorious philanderer. But before all that -- in 1944, while writing to first wife Beatrice -- he was a pussycat. He addressed her as ‘sweet baby.’ He signed off, more than once, ‘I love thee.’

These little touches may, for some, be further evidence of his misogyny. But they also shed light on how he kept convincing women to love him.

I’m the rare woman who considers herself both a feminist and a fan of Norman Mailer, and I was excited to see that The New Yorker has dozens of his letters, previously unpublished, in this week’s issue.

The letters, written over 60 years, have been selected to portray his evolution of his political identity. He muses on Marx and McCarthy, on Baudelaire and Pound, on Jack Kennedy and Joan Didion, on Cuba and Russia.

What shines through, to me, though, is his lively writing. In 1949, he finds the Parisian Review full of not ideas but ‘canapés.’ He is not blind to his own faults -- ‘My ambitions seem far beyond my talents, and light-years beyond the vicissitudes of my character,’ he writes at the end of 1957. Nor is he blind to others’: ‘I write you this letter in great envy,’ he wrote to William F. Buckley in 1965. ‘I think you are going finally to displace me as the most hated man in American life.’ After meeting Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter, ‘he stayed with me in a good glow.’

I guess it makes sense that Mailer, a writer, thought about writing. In the sixties, when sending Buckley’s ‘National Review’ a donation that he asked Buckley to keep secret, he said it was because ‘good writing is good writing, and occasionally carries the day.’ After reading ‘Libra,’ he wrote to Don DeLillo: ‘what counts is that you brought life back to a place in our imagination that has been surviving all these years like scorched earth, that is, just about. It’s so rare when novel writing offers us this deep purpose and I swear, Don, I salute you for it.’ And when George Will wrote that ‘Bush’s terseness is Ernest Hemingway seasoned with John Wesley,’ in the Boston Globe, Mailer fired off a letter to the editor: ‘Well, one is hardly familiar with John Wesley’s sermons, but I do know that to put George W. Bush’s prose next to Hemingway’s is equal to saying that Jackie Susann is right up there with Jane Austen.’

Who would have thought that in 1957, Mailer would be prescient? Writing to Jean Malaquais, he says, ‘The notion that society has reached a point of such complexity, such ‘organismishness’ that it is capable instinctively of adapting itself to economic crisis by communicating psychological crisis via the mass communications is a notion which you cannot ignore.’ Yikes -- that could have been about the financial news this week. Norman Mailer -- what’s not to love?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of Norman Mailer in 1948 by Carl Van Vechten via the Library of Congress