Get over it! Norman Mailer was a legend in his own mind.  He was a pompous New York twit.  He is part of the very decadence that is now mass-marketed by Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson. I could care less about him.

He wrote a brilliant review of Huckleberry Finn for the centennial of its publication.  It’s in The Time of Our Time, I haven’t read much of his work, but it’s my favorite of what I have read.  And it’s about the best book review I’ve ever read.

I remember first taking a look at Mailer back in 1991-1992 when my high school sweetheart bought me “Harlot’s Ghost” for Christmas. I still wonder how that saga was supposed to end.

I have read most of his books since then. The books on Picasso and Marilyn did little for me. I had some problems with “The Gospel According to the Son” but some of it, the tempting in the desert comes to mind, was well done.  “Tough Guys” had me in stitches, “Ancient Evenings” had me confused.

There was a reference Mailer had made to himself, I think it was in the interview he did with Madonna which was in “Time of Our TIme,” when he called himself an Edwardian. I bought the paperback of “The Castle in the Forest” and could not shake that or his “left conservatism.” Mailer was a man who believed in Good and Evil as his most recent books clearly revealed. More than a few critics have been baffled over why Mailer included a description of the coronation of Nicholas II being plagued by devils in “The Castle in the Forest.” Having seen so much of it, Mailer simply decided the 20th century was not a good one and that mankind has taken big steps back.

Norman Mailer, reactionary? Who would have thought it. Peace to his restless spirit.

Though I did not share their politics, Mailer, like Hampton Roads ‘ native son Bill Styron, loved and served their country. American letters has now lost twoo giants in 12 months. God have mercy on their souls.

Hell has a new coal.  Good riddance to this trash, the pity is that his end didn’t come 50 years sooner.  He did everything in his power to tear American society down.

He now joins jack henry abbot in the great penitentiary in the sky.  I wonder what the family of Richard Adan are thinking and feeling at this moment?  Twenty six years may pass but some people never forget.

Is Taki a conservative or does he just have a vendetta against Norman Podhoretz?  He seems to enjoy name-dropping.

Re: Peter Ramos. Of course, Taki drops names. In addition to being a political conservative he is a society columnist, as in gossip, for the Spectator and has been forever or longer.

I saw the movie Tough Guys Don’t Dance and read the book Ancient Evenings.  From those two examples of Mailer’s art, I agree with Taki:  Mailer was a madman.  But in my opinion, he wasn’t very talented.

De mortui nil nisi dict bonum.  Cut the guy some slack, will ya?  A New Yawk Jew who did a drunken impersonation of Brendan Behan and his reporting on the political conventions was always a great read.

Oh for God’s sake (agreeing with John Gillis), cut the recently departed soul of Norman Mailer some slack, yeah?

At least he knew how to throw a good punch,
AND he knew when and how to pull his punches - and that’s an exquistitely rare quality among American writers (and among ALL Americans!) in these times.

Better an honourable pugilist than a dishonourable publicity-hound.

Mr Mailer:  WHOOSH!  Here’s a left-hook from me to you, and eternal draughts of drinks of your choice, where you now keep company with Poe and Whitman and Fitzgerald, and please invite Hemingway too, please invite Hemingway out of his purgatorial state after his suicide, because (as one of my best teachers, a Catholic Brother of the Order of St John Baptiste de la Salle, said to me at a time when I almost destroyed my life when I was a very young man of age 22):

“Good men, like you, are hard to find.”

And that is a fitting epitaph for the late Norman Mailer.  “Good men are hard to find.” And all men are sinners, but only very rare, scarce men have any goodness in them at all, and Norman Mailer was one.

First an aesthetic judgement. Success kills the American artist.  One great novel is all that Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Twain, Sinclair Lewis, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Capote, and Styron ever wrote. Melville wrote one great novel and two great novellas. In the novel, only Henry James was consistently great American novelist.

Mailer’s first novel isn’t so much great as it is very promising.  The same could be said for the early Bernstein’s music. The promise wasn’t fulfilled. Killed by success and the desire for cheap celebrity by saying the outrageous.

The"tough guy” in the American tradition is in fact an inheritance from one of the early immigrant groups:  The Border-Backcountry people, misnamed the “Scots Irish” David Hackett Fischer has done a good job on discussing this group and their legacy.  It certainly isn’t a legacy from the other early immigrant groups, the Puritans, the Quaker-Pietists or the Virginia Cavaliers.  It isn’t a Jewish legacy as well.  Mailer didn’t know his real cultural ancestors. 

Second, a social judgement.  The Borderer people, misnamed the “Scots-Irish”, and the First American Blacks (pre 1808) were before 1960 forced into a certain social class because of historical circumstances.  That social class was the “lower proletariat”, rural and industrial; i.e. “unskilled manual labor”.  Yet this social class had in the 1950s fewer tattoos, no piercings, no gangs, no whoredom; had stable families, low divorce, low llegitimacy, low crime, relatively low substance abuse, and high church attendance.  They also wanted education for their children and aspired to Bourgeois respectability, and only asked for a chance.

After 1960, many of them, be they “Scots-Irish” or First Blacks, fell into the Lumpenproletariat, the class Marx hated the most, and began to manifest all the signs of that class’s social pathology.  Why this fall in social class in the 1950s after the 1950s is a story yet to be told.  I suspect the reason to be that the ghetto and trailer-park thug first received legitimacy from intellectuals, and then the pop-culture, as a more “authentic” human being, or as a “rebellion” against the Bourgeois.  Mailer in his thesis of “the white negro” (i.e. the white lumpenprole, the white ghetto thug) may have held started this legitimation.  Shame on him.  We are all now the victims, the Borderers and the First Blacks among them.

I may not be in the Midge Decter fan club.  She all the same has argued a correct point.  The students of the 60s were not being rebellious.  They were being obedient, obedient to the tradition handed to them by their professors—the anti-Bourgeois tradition.  The same could be said for other putative rebelliousness.

Sid, this is the marginal difference between you and me.  A great American bard, Norman Mailer, has died, and unlike you, Sid, I refrain from relating it to any political or religious abstractions.  All I know is that a great American bard has died, and now is the time for requiem beyond all theology and/or ideology.

More simply, dare I say:  Sid Cundiff, our friend, will you please just shut up while some of us mourn the passing of Norman Mailer?

Ideology and political theory should just SHUT UP for at least a few days, while many of us mourn the passing of a good man, a great American man of letters, and a personal Friend of Taki and of some others among us here.

I despised around 80 percent of Ron Reagan and what he did, but when he died, all of my friends (in many countries all over the world) refrained from talking to me about Reagan until his funeral was over - because they knew I respected him as an honourable President of the USA.
Please, Sid Cundiff, please allow a bit of time for mourning for Norman Mailer, before you bash him. 

Sid, please save your criticisms of Mailer for later.
Now, in this time of mourning, is not the right time - and you, Sid, as a Southern Gentleman, ought to understand that.  As I know you will, Sid, because you are a Gentleman.

Norman Mailer may have been an entertainig writer but he certainly didn’t have much timber to make a ‘great man’ as Taki suggests.
He could never elevate himself above his tribal Jewishness which was transparent despite his conscious effort to hide it.(Those who are interested, should read last Taki’s interview of him in the TAC)

At the start of his literary career, Mailer vowed to destroy fascist America.  He must have meant FDR’s America, and what a punch in the jaw to that hearty monger of the “good war”. And as his ouevre ran on to the end of his days, here was a big punch in the jaw, a butt to his head: Aggression in Iraq, a swaggering square-off against the Omar Khayyam of Iran, and the strongest, most hideous Leviathan ever. Say a prayer for Norman.  Wherever he is, he must be scratching his bleep that all his cantering filth and lefty prancing saw him breathing his last inside the fascist regime he sought to destroy.  I’ll say this for the pre-fascist regime he lived through. He became a rich man.  Hypocrites have to live, too.

As John Ball wishes.  If the editor wishes to remove my writeback and repost it a few days or weeks later when a forthcoming appraisal of Mailer will be the leading essay—and I am not so asking—I would not object.

Mailer was a great writer and a bad novelist. His real forte was description and reportage. When good he was very good, when bad… Like most jewish authors,
he couldn’t create convincing gentile characters. His politics were also based on his left-wing NY Jewish background. Ever changing his only constant political view was his hatred for white, gentile America.
But I’m Glad Taki liked him.

My sincerest condolences.

I have to admit that I have not read Mailers. Taki may want to reconsider what Norman said about earths power,although it doesn’t come up thru our ass. =) We exist in what is basically a giant dynamo, a living planet. As we have energy that courses thru our nerves that make us think and make our hearts beat, so does mother earth. Thales, as many here may recall, believed a soul could exist in a magnet. The earth has a magnetic field about it, the flux the flow the aether.

Harlot’s Ghost was a very good (not great) novel. The Time of Her Time - both the specific story and the larger collection that bears that name, were well worth reading.
Mailer was an interesting man with much to say. Most of his critic, like the laughable Roger Kimball or the silly Timeswoman Kakatuni, are not fit to unloose his boots.
So maybe he was not perfect. Who is?

A society that has gone from Emily Dickinson to Norman Mailer doesn’t deserve to survive.

“Sic transit gloria mundi,”
“How doth the busy bee,”
“Dum vivimus vivamus,”
I stay mine enemy!

Oh “veni, vidi, vici!”
Oh caput cap-a-pie!
And oh “memento mori”
When I am far from thee!

Hurrah for Peter Parley!
Hurrah for Daniel Boone!
Three cheers, sir, for the gentleman
Who first observed the moon!

Peter, put up the sunshine;
Patti, arrange the stars;
Tell Luna, tea is waiting,
And call your brother Mars!

Put down the apple, Adam,
And come away with me,
So shalt thou have a pippin
From off my father’s tree!

I climb the “Hill of Science,”
I “view the landscape o’er;”
Such transcendental prospect,
I ne’er beheld before!

Unto the Legislature
My country bids me go;
I’ll take my india rubbers,
In case the wind should blow!

During my education,
It was announced to me
That gravitation, stumbling,
Fell from an apple tree!

The earth upon an axis
Was once supposed to turn,
By way of a gymnastic
In honor of the sun!

It was the brave Columbus,
A sailing o’er the tide,
Who notified the nations
Of where I would reside!

Mortality is fatal --
Gentility is fine,
Rascality, heroic,
Insolvency, sublime!

Our Fathers being weary,
Laid down on Bunker Hill;
And tho’ full many a morning,
Yet they are sleeping still, --

The trumpet, sir, shall wake them,
In dreams I see them rise,
Each with a solemn musket
A marching to the skies!

A coward will remain, Sir,
Until the fight is done;
But an immortal hero
Will take his hat, and run!

Good bye, Sir, I am going;
My country calleth me;
Allow me, Sir, at parting,
To wipe my weeping e’e.

In token of our friendship
Accept this “Bonnie Doon,”
And when the hand that plucked it
Hath passed beyond the moon,

The memory of my ashes
Will consolation be;
Then, farewell, Tuscarora,
And farewell, Sir, to thee!
~Emily D.

“A society that has gone from Emily Dickinson to Norman Mailer doesn’t deserve to survive.”

Society and Dickinson will survive, Mailer won’t. Mailer was good at catching each passing fad, but he himself was a fad. He’s already a back number and will fade into oblivion like JP Marquand.

Christian charity and manners prevent from commenting on Mailer before his burial. Those interested in a proper assesment of this man, see Roger Kimball’s essay.

http://pajamasmedia.com/xpress/rogerkimball/2007/11/10/norman_mailer_a_dissenting_vie.php

mourn the passing of a good man, a great American man of letters

Rubbish! Mailer was none of that.  He was hip and fashionable to New York snobs. I could care less.

In addition to being a political conservative he is a society columnist, as in gossip,

I’d sooner work on a chain gang than hang out with deracinated Eurotrash all day.

“Society and Dickinson will survive, Mailer won’t. Mailer was good at catching each passing fad, but he himself was a fad. He’s already a back number and will fade into oblivion like JP Marquand.”

Posted by pablo H on Nov 11, 2007.

Hey, knock it off!  I love Marquand’s Mr. Moto novels.

Mr John Ball:

You wrote:

“Good men, like you, are hard to find.”

Perhaps you meant:

“Good men like you are hard to find.”

Or perhaps not.

What I can say? I never read Norman Mailer. Back in ARgentina,
we had too many good Spanish language writers to look into
what the US produced (It is thus that I never read Eudora Welty
either, of Flannery O’Connor, or any other authors, and I look like
a complete idiot when they are discussing them in my presence).

What I gathered when I got here is that he tended to make a spectacle
of himself, and that gave me even less reason to read him. Apart from
that I discovered Science Fiction here - starting by the great William
Tenn. Dr. Isaac Asimov in one of his science columns made some comments
about Mailer that indicated that he thought him a pompous fool, and I
trusted the Good Doctor’s judgement.

So, I cannot say how good a writer he was, but I hope that he wrote better
than he conducted his life.

To Ramus, # 1

Please, Old Darling, allow a friend a few kind words about the dearly departed.

@ Sid, as I said, you are a real Gentleman.

@ Mr Wurth, since my friend spoke rather than wrote it, the commas are speculative.
In any case he said it in context, and meant that I was too good a man to go to waste.  But being a categorically “good man” is a work in progress until we die;
as Taki knows, the way of Bushido says Honour is not a static quality, but rather an aspiration.  My friend simply told me to keep aspiring to it instead of despairing.

And so back to Norman Mailer:  one thing his life did NOT personify was despair, and that’s a rare quality in these times when despair and cynicism are pandemic.

I thank John Ball.

On “The White Negro”:

Was it the Reconstruction of the South that melded once distinct cultures, of Africa and Europe, together?  Was it then LBJ’s “Great Society” pogrom that destroyed the poorer segments of both in America?

As Sid Cundiff alludes too earlier, until relatively recently, there was no more crime among the Africans of the South than there were among the “hillbillies, or “Backborderers” (as Mr Cundiff calls the Scots-Irish).

Despite being destroyed by America’s “Great Leap Forward” (urban renewal, the War on Poverty, etc.), there are certain ethnic/cultural groups that was never melded into the African/Hillbilly culture, such as the Orthodox Jews, the Greeks, Catholics, etc.

What was it about the non-Orthodox Jewish culture, and the “hillbilly"/"backborderer"/"Scots-Irish" culture that enabled both to be melded into/onto the African influenced culture of both South and North?

For example, despite his criminal dealings, none would ever consider the head of, say, the Gambino Family to be a “White Negro”.  However, we would all recognize the trailer park dwelling, tattooed, drug abusing descendant of a hillbilly as one.

Great piece, Taki.

Also, I love to read the comments of no-life losers trying, vainly, to piss on the grave of those who actually made something of themselves. Keep at it, guys--you can always hope that someday someone will actually give a damn about something you have to say.

While I haven’t called my ethnic group “Backborderer”, I like the name.  “Borderer”, “Border Briton”, “Borderer/Backcountry”, and “Backcountryman” might be too much of a mouthful. And it’s more correct than “Scots-Irish”; we are neither.

Andrew Capp is also raising a very important question.  Seen from a literary point of view, to what extent did Hemingway, then Mailer, learn their “tough guy” pose from the “Backborderers”?  To understand “The People With No Name”, as one scholar entitled his book about the Backborderers (and its a good, if a bit dull, book), the better place to start is David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed.  Read the first chapter to get his method, then go to the chapter on the Backcountry.  The reading will astonish you.  For example, “Cowboy culture” and even “Cowboy dress” is 1000 years old!

The connection between Backborderer culture and the culture of the First Blacks (pre-1808), both in good points and in bad, is a story yet to be told.  Thomas Sowell explored the thesis in its negative aspects.  Some think he may have overstated his case.  To refer to my first writeback above, the fall in social class, starting in the 1960s, from lower blue collar and farm laborer to the Lumpenproletariat may in fact have deeper roots that I have supposed. Also, the four original cultures of colonial America may in fact be the “controlling” cultures, and later-comers may have adapted the culture of the area where they settled.

Whatever the case, Real Conservatives know that what counts is history, habit, custom, tradition, class, ceremony, and religion—in short acquired and learned “culture”. Did Mailer acquire his from folk that came to America two centuries before him?

I forgot to add:  When I read Mailer, I thought him a kinsman, transplanted.

Stalin and Hitler “made something of themselves”. Maybe use peons and “losers” have the right to piss on some graves. Even a great man like Mailer, who wrote for money, can be criticized.

With Mailer’s death I feel that my father and mother’s generation, the G.I. Generation, now passes into history.  To count the recent generations, their formative experience, and to judge them:

The true Greatest Generation, born between 1880 and 1890, the Great War their pivotal experience.  Never afterwards have so many of the famous and worthy been born in so short a time.  This generation shaped the 20th century.

The generation of World War I.  Most killed, wounded, or shocked.  It gave us Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and few other worthies in the English-speaking world.

The G.I. Generation, born 1900-1927, World War II their formative experience.

The Silent Generation, 1927-1945, too young for WWII, too young for Viet-Nam, the 50s their formative experience.  Having a bland formation, they had few worthies, and are now passing into history without leaving a US President.

The Worst Generation, the “Destructive Generation”, the Boomers, born 1945-1965. Vietnam the formative experience, and hippiedom.  Their iconic figures: Bill and Hillary. 

Generation X (a Boomer name), born 1965-1985.  The Star Wars Trilogy their formative experience.  Born for trivial pursuits, most likely.

Generation Y, born 1985-, 11 Sept their formative experience.  Their quality yet to be determined.  It will be their job to carry out the trash.

The G.I. Generation gave us many fine things.  Those things are well known and well celebrated, and so need no repetition.  It gave also bad things, among which are the abuse of Vatican II, and a Social Security system and the general social welfare system, the bankruptcy of which they will have caused and will not live to see.

Mr. Cundif. That is a great book. In it I learned the word I now love to use, sneezlepooak. (page 473)

Taki is proof positive that women are idiots.