Morman Mailer: … Or Hate Him
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

One should not speak ill of the dead, but I shall make an exception for Norman Mailer.
This is not a matter of politics. Arthur Miller, who occupied a comparable position in the canon of American literature, supported many of the same causes, but I found him eminently courteous, especially toward women.
Mailer, unlike Miller, tried to raise misogyny to an art form. This is the man who made the case for feminism better than any feminist. He spent the first part of his career brutalizing women and the rest blaming them for his lack of recognition.
Like Henry VIII, Norman Mailer had six wives; it was lucky for them that he was not a Tudor tyrant but merely a domestic one. Even so, he was in the habit of assaulting any wife who criticized his mother and he almost murdered his second, the artist Adele Morales, because she criticized his drunken brawling. He clearly intended to kill her, because he stabbed her repeatedly with a penknife in the abdomen and back; one wound was 3 inches deep. Mailer escaped with a suspended sentence and probation only because his wife refused to make a formal complaint against him.
Not content with this lucky escape, he added insult to injury in an interview soon afterward by exulting in the violence of the young black gangsters he idolized: the knife was “his sword, his manhood.” In a poetry reading a few months after, Mailer skewered his wife. He told the audience: “So long as you use a knife/there is some love left.”
Already in 1957, Mailer’s essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” had glorified the idea of “hip consciousness” — a euphemism for extreme personal violence and murder. This text, which still enjoys the status of a modern classic, revels in the voyeurism of street violence. Mailer encouraged young whites to embrace the language and lifestyle of the black underclass.
Most notoriously, he invited readers to consider two young hipsters beating a candy store owner to death: “One murders not only a weak, fifty-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life.”
This apologia for gratuitous, casual murder was denounced at the time by Norman Podhoretz as “one of the most morally gruesome ideas I have ever come across.” But Mailer drew on an eclectic intellectual tradition that included the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, and Frantz Fanon.
By lending respectability to the ugliest excrescences of the urban lumpenproletariat, Mailer gave a whole new impetus to this sinister tradition. The 1960s cult of youth became a cult of cruelty.
Today we see Mailer’s baleful legacy in such phenomena as “gangsta rap,” child pornography, and school shootings. He judged violence by aesthetic, not moral, criteria, and this too has become ubiquitous in our culture. The sheer scale of Islamist terrorism has sobered up some of Mailer’s intellectual progeny, but by no means all.
The Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan, writing in London’s Daily Telegraph this week, raved about Mailer as “a writer with a very human heart,” comparing him with, of all people, Charles Dickens.
Yet Dickens’s depictions of the dark underworld of Victorian London, though shocking to his contemporaries, invariably had a moral purpose. The terrifying escaped convict Magwitch proves to be a benefactor, the brutal murderer Sykes gets his come-uppance, and the entire cast of Dickens’s characters serve the purpose of drawing attention to social evils that required reform. It would never have occurred to Dickens to hold up his rogues and villains as examples for his readers to imitate.
Even Dostoyevsky, whose antihero Raskolnikov anticipates Mailer’s hipster killers, depicted him as a pathological case. The very title of the novel, “Crime and Punishment,” implies that civilized norms cannot be defied with impunity. The same applies to Mailer’s contemporary, Anthony Burgess, whose “A Clockwork Orange” presented amoral youth violence in the context of a dystopian future.
Mr. O’Hagan’s cloyingly sentimental tribute mentions Mailer’s final public appearance last summer at the New York Public Library, when he shared a platform with the German novelist Günter Grass.
There is something hideously appropriate about Mailer giving his support to Mr. Grass, who had been a volunteer for the SS but later kept silent about it while denouncing other Nazis for concealing their past. Mr. O’Hagan, who was moderating their discussion, was evidently too star-struck to notice what pathetic figures Grass and Mailer cut, and he let them off far too lightly. Oprah Winfrey would have been a more appropriate interrogator for these two shameless literary self-publicists. Mr. Grass refused to speak about his SS past, even though he was promoting his memoirs on the strength of this belated revelation. He seemed to think that even being questioned about it was disrespectful. Mr. O’Hagan might have turned to the audience at that point and asked which of those present had lost relations in the Holocaust, and how they felt about Mr. Grass’s conduct.
Instead, apparently Mailer talked about how stabbing his second wife had cost him the Nobel, and how he had never been able to write about it because of his shame. For this outburst of self-pity, Mailer received a standing ovation.
His death last weekend was treated as a major international event. Yet nothing Mailer had written in the 60 years since “The Naked and the Dead” could justify such adulation.
What Mailer deserved was not a Nobel Prize, but a life sentence. In death, as in life, he got away with murder.