“A noisy, nasty, competitive display of putdowns; an audacious act of flashy self-confessed self-aggrandizement.” That is how essayist Cynthia Ozick described Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. The description is typical of the attention Mailer received for his entire career. He was even the target of fictional graffiti in Anthony Burgess’ novel M/F: “Mailer sux”. Martin Amis has said: “programmatic self-destruction has always been the keynote of Mailer’s life and times”. What critics have always missed about Mailer is that he was a ‘free-lance explorer of spiritual dangers’ who set himself the goal of revolutionising the consciousness of his time, with scant regard for his reputation. The Epigraph to The Deer Park by Andre Gide which says “Please do not understand me too quickly” is an important reminder that attempts to reconcile Mailer’s work with his life are impossible unless we appreciate his peculiar brand of metaphysics. And while Ozick may claim elsewhere that “an author’s extraliterary utterance may infiltrate journalism” but “cannot touch the novel itself”, this delineation between Life and Art has never applied to Norman Mailer, and for very good reason.
One might well ask at this point, now that we have Mailer’s final literary exposé On God, what more is there to know about his metaphysics? The book reveals that Mailer’s conception of the Cosmos was much like his conception of the Novel: a place where the artist plays out his dreams as the “Supreme Creator.” We discover that Mailer sees “God… as the greatest artist.” The book posits a theory about humans and the universe, in which God and the Devil compete for human allegiance. But rather than being passive conduits for supernatural war, human souls represent the third cosmic force in play. “God was in the slime from the beginning…God has grown with us” says Mailer. A more poetic book-end to an author’s life would be hard to find. But it is precisely the perception of Mailer’s ‘programmatic self-destruction’ which demands that we delve more deeply into the origins of this paradigm, tracing Mailer’s literary lineage from DH Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and finally Henry Miller, and examining his evolution as a writer and a man.
Mailer’s nascent aspiration was to become the literary champ. That aspiration came to fruition with the The Naked and the Dead. The quickdraw success had an unnerving affect on the 25 year old. Some time later, Mailer wrote about the direct challenge to his manhood:
“I spent the next few years trying to gobble up the experiences of a victorious man when I was still no man at all, and had no real gift for enjoying life…”
To save his career from premature decline, Mailer felt that he had to become ‘a man’. The only way forward was a conscious erudition in “Hemingway’s discipline”. At the heart of this borrowed approach was Mailer’s belief that:
“…even if one dulled one’s talent in the punishment of becoming a man, it was more important to be a man than a very good writer, that probably I could not become a very good writer unless I learned first how to keep my nerve...”
Here we uncover the careful hierarchy of values that set the tone for Mailer’s career: first become a man; then you will become a great writer. But in the process of self-actualising, Mailer would “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.”
In oIn the years between Naked (1948) and Advertisements (1959), Mailer set about keeping and finding his nerve. He found it mostly in very public and sometimes violent ways. In his first TV appearance on Night Beat with Mike Wallace, he remarked: “President Eisenhower is a bit of a woman”; he opened his New York Mayoral campaign with “Fuck you, fuck you All!”; there were various fistfights, one which left Mailer “with his left eye ‘almost out of his head’” according to Amis. In In the Belly of the Beast he wrote that “society should seek to cultivate the potential of its violent citizens”.
For critics oblivious to the spiritual game, Mailer’s public obscenities contaminated a holistic understanding of his Art, which explains why Gore Vidal wrote:
“There has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression.”
The comparison to Manson was sloppy, but the comparison to Miller was apposite. While Hemingway had been Mailer’s guru on finding one’s nerve, by the time Mailer was appearing regularly on TV, it was clear he had more than found his nerve. He had become it: a giant twitching reflex channelling messages from on high to the benumbed ganglia below. He had no more need for his old guru Hemingway; for he was no longer inhibited by fear of emasculation. Miller inspired Mailer to realise his goal of revolutionising the consciousness. In Mailer’s own words “…Miller took off at the place where Hemingway ended.”
Depending on whom you believe, Miller is either an unparalleled narcissicist or an egoless mouthpiece for the Overmind. Defending his book Sexus to penpal Lawrence Durrell, Miller wrote “…only a man without ego could write thus about himself.” According to Gore Vidal, “Only a total egotist could have written a book which has no subject other than Henry Miller.” “…to make art of self-confession it is necessary to tell the truth. And unless Henry Miller is indeed God… he does not tell the truth.”
Henry Miller may not be the God, but he admits to being his own god in The Cosmological Eye. So strong was his worship of Self that he wrote most of his books on the topic. Tropic of Cancer was a “turning point” in his life. This is Miller:
I decided that henceforth I would write about myself, my friends, my experiences, what I knew and what I had seen with my own eyes…I learned not to be ashamed of myself, to talk freely about myself, to advertise myself…
Enter Norman Mailer.
From the outself, In oIn November 55, Mailer took out a full-page advertisement in The Village Voice for his new book The Deer Park. Paid for and composed by Mailer, the ad featured various grabs from the book’s worst reviews including “Gauche”, “Golden Garbage Heap” and “The Year’s Worst Snake Pit in Fiction”. He wrote about the stunt later in Advertisement. Like Miller, Mailer was a god unto himself who shared the unabashed conviction to advertise himself.
The most austere judgments of his behaviour can be found not in the media, but in his own work, where he appears as both hero and villain, Christ and Anti-Christ. The catharsis of self-exposure allowed both writers to explore the truths behind human condition. “What’s the truth?” asks a young actress of her director. And Sergius O’Shaughnessy overhears the director retelling the story in The Deer Park: “I said it could be defined as the real relation between human beings.” Sometimes this approach to truth meant personal truths suffered. Mailer offers a clue to his weltanschauung in his own dissembling self-analysis: “Saying the truth makes us burn with the desire to convince our audience, whereas telling a lie affords ample leisure to study the result.” The result which we can study, is a spectrum of actions and illocutions which are as much part of the fabric of Mailer’s writing as the tendrils of the words themselves.
Surrealist Andre Gide wrote that “Our biggest and most salutary work of art is our life.” The cosmology of Norman Mailer sits comfortably within the sparse potential of these words. There can be no doubt that it is with Henry Miller that Mailer found his guru on living one’s art. “My aim, in writing,” Miller said, “is to establish a greater REALITY”. And what is reality but the flow of consciousness, which was for DH Lawrence “an end in itself”. The ‘greater reality’ which Miller sought to establish was one in which art coheres with life. Here creating is breathing, where the fantastical potentialities of Art become manifest. This is Lawrence in the poem We Are Transmitters:
“As we live, we are transmitters of life. And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us. That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards. Sexless people transmit nothing. And if as we work, we can transmit life into our work, life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready and we ripple with life through the days.”
And this is Mailer, speaking through the character of Charles Eitel, in the Deer Park:
“…one day he would take his life and transmute it into something harder than a gem and as imperishable, an art work.”
We can ground the lineage of Embodied Art even further. Inherent to this idea of Life as Art is an element of divine creativity. Listen to Mailer’s description from Advertisements of writing the last 6 lines of The Deer Park: “Then, out of some flesh in myself I had not yet known, with the words coming one by one….like the touch of being coming into other being, so the last six lines of my bloody book came to me…” The event is close to creative stigmata. Mailer virtually bleeds his ectoplasm.
When the artist contemplates with pen in hand, poised over the page, creative intention leads to manifestation. In life, it is the same. What we think creates our own reality. Yet there is a second hand too. In Art, we call it Inspiration; in Cosmology, we call it the Absolute. The primary conceit of fiction is to allow the author to create alternate realities in which to live as a multidimensional being. The characters she creates are the result of a co-creational process, and the novel is a place where the artist plays out her dreams as the Supreme Creator. Miller venerates Dostoievski for this reason: “Dostoievski never lived the life of Stavrogin…He had to create him in order to live out his other life, his life as a creator.” He fashioned out of Stavrogin an inner god, “the fullest portrait of God which Dostoievski could give”.
In his critical encomium for Henry Miller, Genius and Lust, Mailer says of his guru: “There is not one Henry Miller, but twenty...”. Through multiple selves, Miller is capable of indulging his crazy cock and contemplating his navel. Moods and modes tumble along at breakneck pace gathering speed like great avalanches of experience. When Miller criticises contemporaries like Proust and Joyce for creating a dying world, in which “The Absolute remains outside their works”, where there is a disconnect between art and existence, he is really criticising the fear of that divinity which connects each of us to the Spiritus Mundi.
Notice Miller’s choice of words: ‘the Absolute’. This is the language of a pantheist experiencing a connection to all things. And Mailer is arguably an existential pantheist. Recall Cannibals and Christians where he states that “The truth is found first in the Gestalt” which he defines as the “totality of an experience” and “the harmony or discord of the life present in the context”. This harmony he also calls ‘Mood’- akin to “a psychic organism” which “reacts to each new breath of the environment”. When the Interviewer asks Mailer to pinpoint the Mood, Mailer chastises his scientific reflex: “It may be possible that literature has more to offer on the nature of the universe than the cyclotron” he quips. Call it Gestalt, Brahma, Tao or The Absolute, the point is Art cannot be external to life any more than Art can be ripped from the matrix of existence. Art is part of the interconnected universe, and so we have no choice but to live it, as we live our biology and experience our physics. In Miller’s words “The artist does not tinker with the universe: he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.” When Mailer came to redraft The Deer Park, he started “with the conscious thought” that he would “tinker just a little” but eventually found that “the book had come alive” and he learned “how real a novel is.” Notice how he talks in terms of the general rather than the specific. A novel is real. We are back to the organism again - breathing. Flesh.
In both Miller’s and Mailer’s universe, Art is an expression of human creativity which allows us to express infinite potential. Therefore, the “worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfilment instead of an horizon.” Miller considers that:
“Unconsciously…every great artist is trying with might and main to destroy art. By that I mean that he is desperately striving to break down this wall between himself and the rest of humanity.”
If we start creating in our lives with unbridled passion, we no longer need to express creativity through Art. The end of art, for Miller, represents the beginning of human connectedness. Here is Miller’s eschatological imperative: the end of ordinary reality and reunion with the divine (not to be confused with his scatological one). Here lies the ‘horizon’ he speaks of – not physical, but perceptual. He may achieve it through all kinds of chicanery, but it’s a small price to pay for shifting the consciousness up a gear.
Norman Mailer also perceived life through the liminal prism of the artist’s mind. He once told V.S. Naipaul: “We must create drama by our own actions.” Through his actions, he advocated a style of living that pushed the boundaries of reality. In Cannibals and Christians he admits, “the first art work in an artist is the shaping of his own personality. An artist is usually such an incredible balance of opposites and incompatibles that the wonder is he can even remain alive.” To observers unaccustomed to this brazen style, Mailer’s active philosophy appeared nothing more than the jejeune antics of a perennial superbrat. In fact, Mailer’s transgressive behaviour bore his most elaborate lies about himself, delivered live on stage, so that he could sit back later and “study the result”. Life was simply another branch of literature.
The periods of study afforded Mailer the detachment necessary to observe the effect on and behaviour of his audience. Through this reciprocal play, he would draw conclusions about human nature and put them down on the page. And to prevent criticism for being self-righteous, he conjured himself as a character in the narrative subject to the same creative whims as the rest of the cast. In works such as Armies, The Fight, Miami and the Siege of Chicago and Of a Fire on the Moon we find Mailer inhabiting the role of the third person protagonist. In all, he is a hybrid of participant and observer, making him part-character and part-journalist. Factually, Mailer was not always the centre of attention, but by making himself the fictional centre he was able to mock the pretensions of ‘objective’ history and still critique his own part of it. These metafictional incarnations allowed him to draw out the narrative aspects of life, and the real aspects of fiction. The subtitle to Armies of the Night – ‘History as a Novel, The Novel as History’ – aptly expresses the intersection of his Life and Art.
Set amidst events of national if not global significance such as wars, space races and Presidential campaigns, Mailer’s work is still inseparable from the man. His best works are their own picaresque, in which every landscape is Mailer. The world simply happens within the boundaries of his being. What appears solipsistic at first glance was Mailer’s subtle way of exposing the fictions inherent in all histories. The more Mailer explored himself in context, the more authentic his art became, and the closer he got to his own personal truth. In his own words: “The spirits of literature may be the nearest we come to historical truth….the great confessions of literature are apart from their authors.” Mailer may have passed away, but his art of self-confession has cast him as one of our enduring spirit guides.
From the beginning, Mailer’s major goal was to revolutionise the consciousness of his times. For the artist, there is arguably no higher end, and achieving it is limited only by imagination. In Susan Sontag’s essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, she criticises the failure to assimilate pornography as a form of art which reflects the lack of collective cultural nerve. This arguably gives new meaning to Evelyn Waugh’s description of Mailer as “an American pornographer”. Mailer’s fervent search for his individual nerve was therefore a disproportionate compensation for the failure of his contemporaries such as Hemingway to find theirs.
“One of the tasks art has assumed”, Sontag writes, “is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness…and reporting back what’s there. Being a free-lance explorer of spiritual dangers, the artist gains a certain license to behave differently from other people…His principle means of fascinating is to advance one step further in the dialectic of outrage. He seeks to make his work repulsive, obscure, inaccessible…” Mailer embodied this description by exploring consciousness without heed to laws or social mores. In an Interview called The Metaphysics of the Belly he agreed that scatological thoughts give life: “studies of loneliness…corruption… monstrosity…and death can give life…violence…insanity…hell, perversion…these are the states which must in some way be digested, transcended, if one is to make one’s way back to life.”
What critics have always missed about Mailer is that he was one of the rare obscurantists. When he writes unabashedly in Advertisements “I was on the edge of many things, and I had more than a bit of violence in me”, this is Mailer on the frontier of unassimilable states of consciousness. Mailer’s weakness was having no internal filter as the self-designated medium for his era.
With the benefit of frank disclosure, we now know that Mailer’s fictional explorations of the relations between good and evil in human existence were entirely earnest. In each example, his Manichean propensities offered another reflexive opportunity to explore his own psyche, often through the spectral analysis of characters like Jesus Christ (God) and Adolf Hitler (the Devil). Examples of this Manichean paradigm were present from the beginning: in The Fight Mailer reveals the Bantu philosophy of Zaire, which deemed that a man was not only the sum of his personality, but also the forces that “inhabit him at any moment from all things living and dead”; in The Executioner’s Song, Nicole asks Gary Gilmore “Are you the Devil?”; in The Deer Park, Marion Faye remarks “I used to think Eitel was a god and a devil all in one”. And finally in The Castle in the Forest where God and the Devil battle for mastery of human nature, we learn that Mailer’s metaphysics is as much a reflection of human duality as it is a real cosmological paradigm.
And if we are loyal to the principles of the embodied art, then Mailer’s works form a set of crib notes to his beliefs. They teach us that if humans operate subconsciously at the juncture between God and the Devil, then moral action becomes less monochromatic, and stories of the young Hitler become more palatable. As soon as we accept that there is a structural relation between absolute good and absolute evil, human virtues and vices begin to converge, and the complexities of personality can be assimilated. We would all know more about Norman Mailer if we could find in him a little Hitler and a little Messiah.
But perhaps Mailer was “too worrisome for us, too out of measure”, as if he possessed the same quality he ascribed to Henry Miller: “the unadvertised mystery of how much of a monster a great writer must be”. Because the closer we come to transcendent qualities, the more we approach the limits of human experience, beyond good and evil, where the fibrous connections of our moral perceptions foment, and the new nervous system begins. We may call this ‘cosmic consciousness’. It is here we find polarity without judgment, which also happens to be the final vantage point for all literary critique. Final, because to judge art from an amoral perspective marks the death of art. We approach frontiers that look like Nothingness – a force Mailer admits could be even more powerful than God. The world is no more ready for the extinction of art than it is for the extinction of the universe. For the same reason, it was not quite ready for Mailer. If it were, artists like Mailer would not be understood too quickly.
Mailer’s message is clear: art and life possess a natural symmetry. But by analysing his Life of Art we also see that his exposition is incomplete. For there is one force missing from his triptyche: that is Art itself, that hyrbrid of deity descended into flesh, and man ascended into deity. Art is the unifying field which allows us to see Mailer’s life as a masterpiece. For Norman Mailer was a pornographer of the spirit, who captured in the cinema of his soul the bestial relations between man and all his sacred cows.
One might well ask at this point, now that we have Mailer’s final literary exposé On God, what more is there to know about his metaphysics? The book reveals that Mailer’s conception of the Cosmos was much like his conception of the Novel: a place where the artist plays out his dreams as the “Supreme Creator.” We discover that Mailer sees “God… as the greatest artist.” The book posits a theory about humans and the universe, in which God and the Devil compete for human allegiance. But rather than being passive conduits for supernatural war, human souls represent the third cosmic force in play. “God was in the slime from the beginning…God has grown with us” says Mailer. A more poetic book-end to an author’s life would be hard to find. But it is precisely the perception of Mailer’s ‘programmatic self-destruction’ which demands that we delve more deeply into the origins of this paradigm, tracing Mailer’s literary lineage from DH Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and finally Henry Miller, and examining his evolution as a writer and a man.
Mailer’s nascent aspiration was to become the literary champ. That aspiration came to fruition with the The Naked and the Dead. The quickdraw success had an unnerving affect on the 25 year old. Some time later, Mailer wrote about the direct challenge to his manhood:
“I spent the next few years trying to gobble up the experiences of a victorious man when I was still no man at all, and had no real gift for enjoying life…”
To save his career from premature decline, Mailer felt that he had to become ‘a man’. The only way forward was a conscious erudition in “Hemingway’s discipline”. At the heart of this borrowed approach was Mailer’s belief that:
“…even if one dulled one’s talent in the punishment of becoming a man, it was more important to be a man than a very good writer, that probably I could not become a very good writer unless I learned first how to keep my nerve...”
Here we uncover the careful hierarchy of values that set the tone for Mailer’s career: first become a man; then you will become a great writer. But in the process of self-actualising, Mailer would “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.”
In oIn the years between Naked (1948) and Advertisements (1959), Mailer set about keeping and finding his nerve. He found it mostly in very public and sometimes violent ways. In his first TV appearance on Night Beat with Mike Wallace, he remarked: “President Eisenhower is a bit of a woman”; he opened his New York Mayoral campaign with “Fuck you, fuck you All!”; there were various fistfights, one which left Mailer “with his left eye ‘almost out of his head’” according to Amis. In In the Belly of the Beast he wrote that “society should seek to cultivate the potential of its violent citizens”.
For critics oblivious to the spiritual game, Mailer’s public obscenities contaminated a holistic understanding of his Art, which explains why Gore Vidal wrote:
“There has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression.”
The comparison to Manson was sloppy, but the comparison to Miller was apposite. While Hemingway had been Mailer’s guru on finding one’s nerve, by the time Mailer was appearing regularly on TV, it was clear he had more than found his nerve. He had become it: a giant twitching reflex channelling messages from on high to the benumbed ganglia below. He had no more need for his old guru Hemingway; for he was no longer inhibited by fear of emasculation. Miller inspired Mailer to realise his goal of revolutionising the consciousness. In Mailer’s own words “…Miller took off at the place where Hemingway ended.”
Depending on whom you believe, Miller is either an unparalleled narcissicist or an egoless mouthpiece for the Overmind. Defending his book Sexus to penpal Lawrence Durrell, Miller wrote “…only a man without ego could write thus about himself.” According to Gore Vidal, “Only a total egotist could have written a book which has no subject other than Henry Miller.” “…to make art of self-confession it is necessary to tell the truth. And unless Henry Miller is indeed God… he does not tell the truth.”
Henry Miller may not be the God, but he admits to being his own god in The Cosmological Eye. So strong was his worship of Self that he wrote most of his books on the topic. Tropic of Cancer was a “turning point” in his life. This is Miller:
I decided that henceforth I would write about myself, my friends, my experiences, what I knew and what I had seen with my own eyes…I learned not to be ashamed of myself, to talk freely about myself, to advertise myself…
Enter Norman Mailer.
From the outself, In oIn November 55, Mailer took out a full-page advertisement in The Village Voice for his new book The Deer Park. Paid for and composed by Mailer, the ad featured various grabs from the book’s worst reviews including “Gauche”, “Golden Garbage Heap” and “The Year’s Worst Snake Pit in Fiction”. He wrote about the stunt later in Advertisement. Like Miller, Mailer was a god unto himself who shared the unabashed conviction to advertise himself.
The most austere judgments of his behaviour can be found not in the media, but in his own work, where he appears as both hero and villain, Christ and Anti-Christ. The catharsis of self-exposure allowed both writers to explore the truths behind human condition. “What’s the truth?” asks a young actress of her director. And Sergius O’Shaughnessy overhears the director retelling the story in The Deer Park: “I said it could be defined as the real relation between human beings.” Sometimes this approach to truth meant personal truths suffered. Mailer offers a clue to his weltanschauung in his own dissembling self-analysis: “Saying the truth makes us burn with the desire to convince our audience, whereas telling a lie affords ample leisure to study the result.” The result which we can study, is a spectrum of actions and illocutions which are as much part of the fabric of Mailer’s writing as the tendrils of the words themselves.
Surrealist Andre Gide wrote that “Our biggest and most salutary work of art is our life.” The cosmology of Norman Mailer sits comfortably within the sparse potential of these words. There can be no doubt that it is with Henry Miller that Mailer found his guru on living one’s art. “My aim, in writing,” Miller said, “is to establish a greater REALITY”. And what is reality but the flow of consciousness, which was for DH Lawrence “an end in itself”. The ‘greater reality’ which Miller sought to establish was one in which art coheres with life. Here creating is breathing, where the fantastical potentialities of Art become manifest. This is Lawrence in the poem We Are Transmitters:
“As we live, we are transmitters of life. And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us. That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards. Sexless people transmit nothing. And if as we work, we can transmit life into our work, life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready and we ripple with life through the days.”
And this is Mailer, speaking through the character of Charles Eitel, in the Deer Park:
“…one day he would take his life and transmute it into something harder than a gem and as imperishable, an art work.”
We can ground the lineage of Embodied Art even further. Inherent to this idea of Life as Art is an element of divine creativity. Listen to Mailer’s description from Advertisements of writing the last 6 lines of The Deer Park: “Then, out of some flesh in myself I had not yet known, with the words coming one by one….like the touch of being coming into other being, so the last six lines of my bloody book came to me…” The event is close to creative stigmata. Mailer virtually bleeds his ectoplasm.
When the artist contemplates with pen in hand, poised over the page, creative intention leads to manifestation. In life, it is the same. What we think creates our own reality. Yet there is a second hand too. In Art, we call it Inspiration; in Cosmology, we call it the Absolute. The primary conceit of fiction is to allow the author to create alternate realities in which to live as a multidimensional being. The characters she creates are the result of a co-creational process, and the novel is a place where the artist plays out her dreams as the Supreme Creator. Miller venerates Dostoievski for this reason: “Dostoievski never lived the life of Stavrogin…He had to create him in order to live out his other life, his life as a creator.” He fashioned out of Stavrogin an inner god, “the fullest portrait of God which Dostoievski could give”.
In his critical encomium for Henry Miller, Genius and Lust, Mailer says of his guru: “There is not one Henry Miller, but twenty...”. Through multiple selves, Miller is capable of indulging his crazy cock and contemplating his navel. Moods and modes tumble along at breakneck pace gathering speed like great avalanches of experience. When Miller criticises contemporaries like Proust and Joyce for creating a dying world, in which “The Absolute remains outside their works”, where there is a disconnect between art and existence, he is really criticising the fear of that divinity which connects each of us to the Spiritus Mundi.
Notice Miller’s choice of words: ‘the Absolute’. This is the language of a pantheist experiencing a connection to all things. And Mailer is arguably an existential pantheist. Recall Cannibals and Christians where he states that “The truth is found first in the Gestalt” which he defines as the “totality of an experience” and “the harmony or discord of the life present in the context”. This harmony he also calls ‘Mood’- akin to “a psychic organism” which “reacts to each new breath of the environment”. When the Interviewer asks Mailer to pinpoint the Mood, Mailer chastises his scientific reflex: “It may be possible that literature has more to offer on the nature of the universe than the cyclotron” he quips. Call it Gestalt, Brahma, Tao or The Absolute, the point is Art cannot be external to life any more than Art can be ripped from the matrix of existence. Art is part of the interconnected universe, and so we have no choice but to live it, as we live our biology and experience our physics. In Miller’s words “The artist does not tinker with the universe: he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.” When Mailer came to redraft The Deer Park, he started “with the conscious thought” that he would “tinker just a little” but eventually found that “the book had come alive” and he learned “how real a novel is.” Notice how he talks in terms of the general rather than the specific. A novel is real. We are back to the organism again - breathing. Flesh.
In both Miller’s and Mailer’s universe, Art is an expression of human creativity which allows us to express infinite potential. Therefore, the “worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfilment instead of an horizon.” Miller considers that:
“Unconsciously…every great artist is trying with might and main to destroy art. By that I mean that he is desperately striving to break down this wall between himself and the rest of humanity.”
If we start creating in our lives with unbridled passion, we no longer need to express creativity through Art. The end of art, for Miller, represents the beginning of human connectedness. Here is Miller’s eschatological imperative: the end of ordinary reality and reunion with the divine (not to be confused with his scatological one). Here lies the ‘horizon’ he speaks of – not physical, but perceptual. He may achieve it through all kinds of chicanery, but it’s a small price to pay for shifting the consciousness up a gear.
Norman Mailer also perceived life through the liminal prism of the artist’s mind. He once told V.S. Naipaul: “We must create drama by our own actions.” Through his actions, he advocated a style of living that pushed the boundaries of reality. In Cannibals and Christians he admits, “the first art work in an artist is the shaping of his own personality. An artist is usually such an incredible balance of opposites and incompatibles that the wonder is he can even remain alive.” To observers unaccustomed to this brazen style, Mailer’s active philosophy appeared nothing more than the jejeune antics of a perennial superbrat. In fact, Mailer’s transgressive behaviour bore his most elaborate lies about himself, delivered live on stage, so that he could sit back later and “study the result”. Life was simply another branch of literature.
The periods of study afforded Mailer the detachment necessary to observe the effect on and behaviour of his audience. Through this reciprocal play, he would draw conclusions about human nature and put them down on the page. And to prevent criticism for being self-righteous, he conjured himself as a character in the narrative subject to the same creative whims as the rest of the cast. In works such as Armies, The Fight, Miami and the Siege of Chicago and Of a Fire on the Moon we find Mailer inhabiting the role of the third person protagonist. In all, he is a hybrid of participant and observer, making him part-character and part-journalist. Factually, Mailer was not always the centre of attention, but by making himself the fictional centre he was able to mock the pretensions of ‘objective’ history and still critique his own part of it. These metafictional incarnations allowed him to draw out the narrative aspects of life, and the real aspects of fiction. The subtitle to Armies of the Night – ‘History as a Novel, The Novel as History’ – aptly expresses the intersection of his Life and Art.
Set amidst events of national if not global significance such as wars, space races and Presidential campaigns, Mailer’s work is still inseparable from the man. His best works are their own picaresque, in which every landscape is Mailer. The world simply happens within the boundaries of his being. What appears solipsistic at first glance was Mailer’s subtle way of exposing the fictions inherent in all histories. The more Mailer explored himself in context, the more authentic his art became, and the closer he got to his own personal truth. In his own words: “The spirits of literature may be the nearest we come to historical truth….the great confessions of literature are apart from their authors.” Mailer may have passed away, but his art of self-confession has cast him as one of our enduring spirit guides.
From the beginning, Mailer’s major goal was to revolutionise the consciousness of his times. For the artist, there is arguably no higher end, and achieving it is limited only by imagination. In Susan Sontag’s essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, she criticises the failure to assimilate pornography as a form of art which reflects the lack of collective cultural nerve. This arguably gives new meaning to Evelyn Waugh’s description of Mailer as “an American pornographer”. Mailer’s fervent search for his individual nerve was therefore a disproportionate compensation for the failure of his contemporaries such as Hemingway to find theirs.
“One of the tasks art has assumed”, Sontag writes, “is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness…and reporting back what’s there. Being a free-lance explorer of spiritual dangers, the artist gains a certain license to behave differently from other people…His principle means of fascinating is to advance one step further in the dialectic of outrage. He seeks to make his work repulsive, obscure, inaccessible…” Mailer embodied this description by exploring consciousness without heed to laws or social mores. In an Interview called The Metaphysics of the Belly he agreed that scatological thoughts give life: “studies of loneliness…corruption… monstrosity…and death can give life…violence…insanity…hell, perversion…these are the states which must in some way be digested, transcended, if one is to make one’s way back to life.”
What critics have always missed about Mailer is that he was one of the rare obscurantists. When he writes unabashedly in Advertisements “I was on the edge of many things, and I had more than a bit of violence in me”, this is Mailer on the frontier of unassimilable states of consciousness. Mailer’s weakness was having no internal filter as the self-designated medium for his era.
With the benefit of frank disclosure, we now know that Mailer’s fictional explorations of the relations between good and evil in human existence were entirely earnest. In each example, his Manichean propensities offered another reflexive opportunity to explore his own psyche, often through the spectral analysis of characters like Jesus Christ (God) and Adolf Hitler (the Devil). Examples of this Manichean paradigm were present from the beginning: in The Fight Mailer reveals the Bantu philosophy of Zaire, which deemed that a man was not only the sum of his personality, but also the forces that “inhabit him at any moment from all things living and dead”; in The Executioner’s Song, Nicole asks Gary Gilmore “Are you the Devil?”; in The Deer Park, Marion Faye remarks “I used to think Eitel was a god and a devil all in one”. And finally in The Castle in the Forest where God and the Devil battle for mastery of human nature, we learn that Mailer’s metaphysics is as much a reflection of human duality as it is a real cosmological paradigm.
And if we are loyal to the principles of the embodied art, then Mailer’s works form a set of crib notes to his beliefs. They teach us that if humans operate subconsciously at the juncture between God and the Devil, then moral action becomes less monochromatic, and stories of the young Hitler become more palatable. As soon as we accept that there is a structural relation between absolute good and absolute evil, human virtues and vices begin to converge, and the complexities of personality can be assimilated. We would all know more about Norman Mailer if we could find in him a little Hitler and a little Messiah.
But perhaps Mailer was “too worrisome for us, too out of measure”, as if he possessed the same quality he ascribed to Henry Miller: “the unadvertised mystery of how much of a monster a great writer must be”. Because the closer we come to transcendent qualities, the more we approach the limits of human experience, beyond good and evil, where the fibrous connections of our moral perceptions foment, and the new nervous system begins. We may call this ‘cosmic consciousness’. It is here we find polarity without judgment, which also happens to be the final vantage point for all literary critique. Final, because to judge art from an amoral perspective marks the death of art. We approach frontiers that look like Nothingness – a force Mailer admits could be even more powerful than God. The world is no more ready for the extinction of art than it is for the extinction of the universe. For the same reason, it was not quite ready for Mailer. If it were, artists like Mailer would not be understood too quickly.
Mailer’s message is clear: art and life possess a natural symmetry. But by analysing his Life of Art we also see that his exposition is incomplete. For there is one force missing from his triptyche: that is Art itself, that hyrbrid of deity descended into flesh, and man ascended into deity. Art is the unifying field which allows us to see Mailer’s life as a masterpiece. For Norman Mailer was a pornographer of the spirit, who captured in the cinema of his soul the bestial relations between man and all his sacred cows.
