Words with Friends

Norman Mailer: A Double Life By J. Michael Lennon NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 2013 Release date: October 15, 2013 960 pp. Cloth $40.00 Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays Edited by Phillip Sipiora Introduction by Jonathan Lethem New York: Random House Release date: October 15, 2013 632 pp. Cloth $40.00 Full disclosure: J. Michael Lennon, author of Norman Mailer: A Double Life, and Phillip Sipiora, editor of Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays, are good friends of mine, as were Norman and Norris Mailer, though I did not know them nearly as long as did Lennon or Sipiora. But as I learned in reading Lennon's scintillating and thought-provoking new biography, it was not unusual for members of New York's literati establishment "family" to review their friends' works, and the assessments were not always favorable. It seems that quite a few literary feuds had their origins in bad reviews from friends, transforming many a wine-sipping Upper East Side salon and drug-fueled Greenwich Village bacchanal into literal blood sport. Happily, from my reaction to both volumes, I expect from Professors Lennon and Sipiora no such head-butting, drink-splashing, invitations to step outside or extended periods of malign silence--all favored techniques of the author in question. Norman Mailer: A Double Life is as close to a definitive biography as is likely possible from this close and recent a remove. And Mind of an Outlaw is a virtual casebook of the nonfiction essays that exemplify and explicate the narrative of Mailer's protean life. What emerges from both books is a vivid and engrossing portrait of the artist as a young, middle-aged and old man, who never abandoned the courage to keep trying new things no matter the success of previous ones, who spent a long literary lifetime as a public intellectual and agent provocateur, breaking old molds and recasting new ones; continually venturing into new subjects, wholly new styles and ways of seeing things, very much a literary equivalent of his art world icon Picasso. In his Editor's Preface, Sipiora calls the task of shaping the collection "daunting" because of the sheer volume and gamut of Mailer's nonfiction. "For Mailer, the essay, even more than fiction, provided him a forum to unrelentingly confront the social, political, and cultural crises of the day. In the essay, Mailer's relentless curiosity, coupled with his discursive prose, engages, opposes, clarifies, complicates, and rigorously challenges whatever subjects he takes on." Jonathan Lethem's Introduction puts it even more directly: "Norman Mailer was a writer who never met a corner he didn't wish to paint himself into." The subtitle Double Life resonates on many levels. And Lennon knows what every good novelist and playwright discovers: that our best qualities and our worst qualities coexist side-by-side. Sometimes, it is difficult to tell them apart. So may it be with Mailer. The title of a 1993 essay states it in the context of boxing: "The Best Move Lies Close to the Worst" As Lennon tells the story, Mailer's God-given talent and unlimited range of interests send him off in all directions and often keep him from concentrating on arguably more literary and important projects, such as the oft-promised but never delivered second volume of Harlots Ghost, in which he introduces the concept of the "alpha" and "omega" of every life, or "the big novel" to which he referred so often as an almost mythic vision. It is impossible to regard either Mailer or his work without reference to the other, or both without reference to the time and cultural ferment in which they coexisted. It can even be difficult to distinguish his fiction from the nonfiction. His two Pulitzer Prize winners, The Armies of the Night and The Executioner's Song, are labeled, respectively, History as a Novel/The Novel as History and A True Life Novel. …