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Gordon's Republic

Norman Mailer from new journalism to blogging

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A little after the event, but as Norman Mailer wrote not too long ago "I'm beginning to see why one would want to write a blog".

He might have been in his eighties when he started blogging, but he tried it like just about every other kind of writing. Although he didn't blog a great deal he still managed to sum up what it was about as any great stylist does:

"The following is just for the sake of it -- I want to feed the maw of the blog.”

Mailer when it came to writing was known for so many things, but one of them was (and it ended almost chief among them) was helping to create along with Joan Didion and others what Tom Wolfe dubbed the new journalism – that is journalism written with a novelist’s sensibility. And he became as famous for what he wrote that wasn't fiction as for his novels, which at times must have seemed odd for a writer whose mission in life was to write the great American novel as much as anything else.

Mailer's 1979 'The Executioner's Song' about real-life double-murderer Gary Gilmore won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He won it again for his other new journalism epic The Armies of the Night about October 1967 anti-Vietnam march on the Pentagon, during which he was arrested.

Still for those journalistic "novels" aside he took a lot of flak for failing to live up to his literary mantle and never having achieved his literary goal of writing the great American novel.

Certainly the 'Naked and the Dead' was an achievement for a 25 year old, but his subsequent novels never received the same acclaim (although personally 'Deer Park' and 'An American Dream are favourites) although some said his novel about ancient Egypt was his masterpiece before cracking the gag that this was mostly because no one had ever finished it (people I knew it had as a doorstop).

That said his last epic novel 'Harlot's Ghost' (about the CIA and its OSS predecessor) was as close to achieving his goal as anything, but it was unfairly slated by his reviewers. It was a towering achievement and (again) I thought it was among the best he had ever written. Sadly after 1200 pages it finished with the words "To be continued", but he never did. It was warming to see writing on Slate on Sunday Christopher Hitchins praising this book as his masterpiece.

In the last couple of years of his life he started blogging for Arianna Huffington and her Huffington Post.

As she put it Mailer couldn't turn her down (not because of who she was) but because blogging was just a new way of using language to convey ideas, which was "something impossible for Mailer to resist".

As Huffington put it, it was a shame that because of ill-health and multiple deadlines he didn't get to blog more because "he so totally got the genre, as you can see from the first line of his last post"

"The following is just for the sake of it -- I want to feed the maw of the blog: in the wake of all the fluvial funereal obsequies that the media attached to Ronald Reagan's earthly departure, I felt obliged to remark that he had been the most overrated president in American history and the second most ignorant."

Published Nov 13 2007, 10:20 AM by Gordon Macmillan

Filed under: Huffingtonpost, Joan Didion, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, social media

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Comments

by Darren Davidson

November 13, 2007 9:58 AM

I don't believe anyone has ever written a more accomplished book on sport/Ali/boxing that Mailer with 'The Fight'

by Gordon Macmillan

November 13, 2007 10:00 AM

True and Mailer did love the fight - his and anyone ele's.

by William Lynch

November 13, 2007 12:59 PM

What an informed and well written piece. I loved the writing of Norman Mailer and like yourself, I happen to think that Deer Park was one of his better works. Mailer was certainly a man's man and was an eloquent and voiceferious opponent of the neo-con s plan to expand the American empire.

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