Cancel culture is an obscenity; that’s my position and I’m sticking to it. But with any firmly held belief, there is often that idea, or figure, that causes a moment of hesitation: Could the other side have a point? Norman Mailer is such a figure here, and I say that as a fierce admirer of his work. No artist should be “canceled,” least of all one who altered the parameters of his field. But I have a difficult time begrudging the reader who considers Norman Mailer a bridge too far.

We’ll hold that thought for a moment, though. It’s too easy to lead with “Stormin’ Norman” or, to use the author’s own label for his Mr. Hyde side, “the beast.” Better to begin with the accomplishments.

In his time, Norman Mailer was a force. The Brooklyn-raised, Harvard-educated author seized the public spotlight in 1948 with his debut novel, The Naked and the Dead — one of the first notable fictional treatments of World War II — and held it through 2007, when his final novel, The Castle in the Forest, climbed best-seller lists just months before its author’s death. In between, he published over 30 books on a wide variety of subjects in an equally wide variety of styles. He won the Pulitzer twice — once in nonfiction, once in fiction — and the National Book Award. Ever the restless soul, he dabbled in filmmaking, ran for mayor of New York City, and served as president of PEN America. Culturally Jewish, Manichaean by disposition, and an avowed “left conservative,” he was an engaging and unpredictable thinker.

The year 2023 marks the centenary of Mailer’s birth, and some efforts are under way to reintroduce the author to the public, or at least provide a coda to his singular career. Mailer’s Last Days, a new volume of essays from his literary executor and authorized biographer, J. Michael Lennon, hews to the second objective. It’s a lovely blend of scholarly analysis with personal observation and fragments of memoir. The tone is affectionate, and the accretion of small but telling details provides a glimpse of the outsized legend operating at human scale.

But Lennon runs into difficulties when he widens his net to include several of Mailer’s contemporaries. It’s not that the material is weak — indeed, the pieces on James Baldwin and James Jones are insightful and help situate Mailer in his era — but Mailer’s personality is such a gravitational force that some readers may resent the imposition of these other voices.

A larger issue is that a truly great book lurks within and frustrates with its refusal to fully emerge — a book that would explore Lennon’s side of the modern Boswell-and-Johnson dynamic that produced the magisterial biography Norman Mailer: A Double Life in 2013. How welcome would be a companion volume of equal scope, but told from the personal angle: unpacking more thoroughly Lennon’s own history, the experiences that drove him inexorably to Mailer, and his ultimate adoption of Mailer as a surrogate father. The seeds of that narrative are present in Mailer’s Last Days, and they are its strongest qualities. But that larger book remains unrealized.

Surprisingly, Lennon does not explore the double meaning of his current book’s title. Yes, Mailer’s literal last days, weeks, and months are documented in some detail. But there is no reckoning with the idea that we, as readers, may be living through “Mailer’s last days.” No mention is made of Random House’s decision, in early 2022, to walk away from a proposed new collection of its onetime star writer’s work. The reasoning behind the publisher’s about-face remains a matter of conjecture, but, predictably, it ignited an online firestorm. Had Norman Mailer been “canceled” because of innumerable offenses in print — including alleged racism and homophobia — and in his personal life? If not, should he be? It was enough of an inflection point that Michael Mailer, Norman’s son, took to the Spectator and Boston Globe to argue passionately for the old-fashioned idea of trusting readers with difficult material. “Democracy is about the free exchange of ideas,” he wrote, “not the exchange of ideas that will be deemed free so long as they are predetermined to be agreeable.”

Perhaps the brouhaha erupted after Lennon’s book had been finalized. But the storm had been brewing for some time, and Lennon’s absence from this debate — at least within the pages of Mailer’s Last Days — is keenly felt. We needed to hear from him.

Into this vacuum swaggers Richard Bradford’s Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer. Bradford is no proponent of cancel culture; he has, in fact, built a career on the thoughtful study of controversial writers. But his new book will serve as ammunition for those wishing to downgrade its subject. And it must be conceded that Bradford has ample material at his disposal.

“[Mailer has] botched his life and the lives of a lot more people than I’ve botched, I hope,” William F. Buckley once said of his friend and frequent ideological sparring partner. “On the other hand, he’s a genius and I’m not.” Bradford is not buying into the latter statement. He admires The Naked and the Dead and Mailer’s “true-life novel” (and Pulitzer-winner) The Executioner’s Song, and concedes some of the strengths of Mailer’s first Pulitzer champion, The Armies of the Night, which covered the 1967 March on the Pentagon in protest of the Vietnam War. But of the remaining volumes, the biographer’s assessment ranges from mixed to hostile. And so, with the Kool-Aid manifestly not kicking in, we are left with roughly 300 pages of lifebotching. It’s something of an arts-and-letters version of This Is Spinal Tap, full of philandering, hubris, and not a small amount of spontaneous combustion (in the form of Mailer’s public meltdowns and dustups), though it is considerably darker and more violent than Christopher Guest’s rock-’n’-roll satire. Tough Guy is ultimately not a fair portrayal, overweighted as it is toward Mailer’s more flamboyant aspects, but it is compulsively readable, elevated above mere hatchet job by its author’s solid multifaceted critique of Mailer.

The main focus of his critique is arguably the most problematic for Mailer in 2023: the romanticization of violence in Mailer’s work from the 1950s through the mid 1960s and his correspondingly violent personal behavior, culminating, most notoriously, in the near-fatal stabbing of his second wife, Adele, at the end of a raucous party in 1960. While Mailer’s previous biographers have treated this incident with the seriousness it merits, Bradford is especially unsparing, even calling into question aspects of Adele’s own account, from her 1997 memoir The Last Party, in which she seemed to shift some of the blame to herself. This is certain to be a controversial move, but Bradford’s reasoning is sound: If Adele had said or done anything to provoke a visibly intoxicated and unstable Mailer, that information would likely have emerged during the criminal investigation rather than 37 years later in a book. Still, without Adele’s version of events we’re left with little to go on. The stabbing is the black hole at the center of Mailer’s life and work.

Viewed alongside his notorious 1957 essay “The White Negro,” in which he appears to approve of random acts of violence as manifestations of revolt against an oppressive society; his poorly titled 1962 poetry collection Deaths for the Ladies and Other Disasters; his 1965 novel An American Dream, in which the protagonist murders his wife during the first chapter and suffers no discernible remorse; contemporaneous accounts of additional personal violence toward wives and friends; and Mailer’s well-publicized confrontations with the emerging women’s-liberation movement, the optics aren’t good in the post–Me Too era. Hell, they didn’t look good in the freewheeling 1960s and early ’70s, but Mailer could talk and/or write himself out of practically any corner when he was alive.

Bradford also takes aim at Mailer’s politics: his mixed messaging on communism and, especially, the cognitive dissonance of this Bard of Violence becoming a prominent anti-war activist during the Vietnam era. Instead of unpacking the perceived shortcomings of the domino theory, Mailer made his primary charge, at least at the outset of the war, that America had grown unsettled and bloodthirsty in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and Johnson’s subsequent Great Society experiment. America “needed a war or it needed a purge,” Mailer said during a 1965 speech at Berkeley. “Bile was stirring in the pits of the national conscience.” Bradford seizes on the contradiction: “For more than a decade his proselytizing mandate was that growing ‘bestial’ and joining the savage underworld must be the true spirit of the new revolution. Now, however, these same impulses had turned Americans into murderous colonialists.”

It could be argued that Bradford’s critique of Mailer’s political philosophy is underdeveloped — and this is a larger problem with Tough Guy; as with Mailer’s Last Days, the enterprise feels rushed, written with perhaps one eye fixed on the impending centenary. Mailer’s views on politics and U.S. foreign policy, when taken over the span of his career, are more interesting and nuanced than Bradford concedes, and Mailer did in fact tackle the domino theory, albeit unsatisfactorily, in The Armies of the Night. But the main point stands: It was jarring that this man, of all people, became a loud anti-war voice, and did so by appearing to invert his own philosophy.

These two critiques — of the violence and of the political opaqueness — form the heart of Tough Guy. They are, in Bradford’s estimation, impediments to taking Mailer seriously as an important writer. The book’s promotional materials also spotlight Mailer’s “homophobic and racist views,” but that is as lopsided a representation of Bradford’s book as Bradford’s book is a lopsided representation of its subject. Yes, that material exists, and yes, Bradford highlights it to typically devastating effect, but it’s not his primary focus. As with most topics, Mailer’s views on homosexuality and race were delivered in a provocative manner. And he was susceptible to indulging in some of his era’s most egregious stereotypes. But Mailer also, somewhat unusually, admitted to and interrogated his prejudices. That is not to excuse the content of the work, which can indeed be offensive, but we would do well to approach such material with Michael Mailer’s pleas in mind. Context is important.

It also matters where a person ends up, and Norman Mailer outlived most of his demons. By the time he entered his eighties, he had reconciled with many of his adversaries. Time and perspective had sanded down his roughest, most disagreeable edges, making way for a sort of fragile grace. Perhaps the biggest surprise of Tough Guy is the tenderness that seeps into its final chapter. Bradford doesn’t think much of Mailer’s later writings, but he appears impressed, in spite of himself, with where the man ended his own story.

Will Mailer’s work continue to fade? Probably. Aside from the sensitivity issues, Mailer will recede because the decade that defined him — the 1960s — has finally begun to loosen its tenacious grip on the popular imagination, crowded out by our own insistent age. But we could use some of Mailer’s audacity around here. The flip side to the offensiveness was an enviable lack of inhibition.

Bristling at the strictures of traditional journalism, Mailer wrote his nonfiction books like novels, famously inserting himself into the narrative and writing about (and lampooning) “Norman Mailer” in the third person. Not stopping there, he later wrote a novel about Jesus in the first person. Was anyone, anywhere, expecting an 832-page novel on ancient Egypt from the author of The Armies of the Night? How about a novel about Hitler’s childhood? Both exist and both have their advocates. And he became an A-list sportswriter, almost by accident, with his boxing narratives, most notably The Fight, his epic account of the Ali–Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle.” In these and other works, there is an electricity to Mailer’s “torrential, Melvillian style” (to use scholar Robert J. Begiebing’s phrase) that simply cannot be found elsewhere — even in Melville. “I can think of no other writer,” Joan Didion said, “who risked so much — and brought it home.”

So yes, it’s past time to put toxic masculinity and glorifications of violence to bed. I understand why people might not want to read Mailer. But we ought to welcome an inheritor, in the next literary generation, of Mailer’s best qualities — someone unafraid to offend and fail, to cause consternation and perplexity and, sometimes, wonderment. Mailer was a firm believer in reincarnation. How lovely it would be if something of his spirit might return to our pages. To bring it home.