N AT I O N A L R E V I E W/A P R I L 7, 2008
Dead—published in 1948, when he was 25—selling 200,000 copies in three months. Though Mailer had seen very lit- tle combat in the Pacific in World War II (in which he was a cook), the book was an auspicious beginning. Critic Charles McGrath notes that it “remains Mr. Mail- er’s greatest literary and commercial suc- cess.” (It may be argued that Mailer was never to write so well again.) The book launched him into literary celebrity, but his two subsequent novels in the 1950s were unsuccessful with critics and readers alike. “For much of the ’50s he drifted, frequently drunk or stoned or both,” McGrath noted in the New York Times obituary; he “affected odd accents: British, Irish, gangster, Texan.” In 1955, the same year William F. Buckley Jr. founded NATIONAL REVIEW, Mailer helped found the Village Voice, New York’s avant-garde clarion of Hip and Beat existentialism, which increasingly became his obsession. Mailer’s first literary mod- el, and the one he said was longest-lasting, was Ernest Hemingway, though for what John Berryman called Hemingway’s “moral vacancy” Mailer substituted a pas- sionate but incoherent blend of Nietzsche and Marx, of amoral vitalism and hyper- moral leftism. Yet Hemingway’s descrip- tive precision and moral minimalism, the eschewing of ideas and abstract nouns, were not Mailer’s style. In 1957 he pub- lished an influential essay called “The White Negro,” in which he applauded the murder of an aged white shopkeeper by two underclass black youths as a kind of brave emancipation. Here and elsewhere he glamorized criminal violence as “self- expression,” the cultivation of the “flow- ers of evil” that had been pioneered by Sade and fostered by the 19th-century French poètes maudits and their diabolist 20th-century successors, the novelists André Gide and Jean Genet. In the native idiom Mailer’s kinship with the bombastic egotism of Whitman and the sexual preda- tion of Henry Miller intensified; increas- ingly, in the 1950s and ’60s, he became an books, arts & manners
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