On Reading Mailer in Dhaka
Norman Mailer with Germaine Greer at the 1971 debate in New York
So Norman Mailer is dead, giving up the ghost on November 10 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Aged 84. I hadn't read him the last twenty years, with his later tomes panned by critics as being overblown.I thought he was somebody I was over with. Not true. A writer that one reads avidly when young, 'avidly' because strange ideas are being written in a strange new language, means that bits and pieces of the old stuff will keep ricocheting inside the old skull. It was in, of all places, Delhi in April of this year that Norman Mailer burst into my head again. Where I and Kaiser Haq, poet and prof, Dhaka University, were taking a break from the speeches being made at the SAARC writers conference. Sipping tea at the India International Center cafe, listening to a woman friend talk about troubles with her organization, with different feminists at loggerheads with each other, about the difficulties inherent in teamwork of any sort, of squabbles and disagreements. It was then that Kaiser, out of the blue, responded with a small disquisition on the active presence of evil, real evil, in the universe, shaking his head from side to side like the sage of the roadside teastall of his poem. And just like that, I was back in the 1970s in Dhaka reading Norman Mailer, whose pronouncements on God and Satan warring for the cosmos I had devoured so avidly. Which now in sunny Delhi beside the Lodhi Gardens came back with a big bang! This is not the place and time to go into a detailed exposition of Mailer's unique brand of philosophy, but at its hard center was the idea that God was not something static and given, but a supreme existential Artist, at war with Satan, and at any given moment the outcome of the universe hung in balance, the pendulum's swing depending on man's actions on earth. Living then as I was in a Bangladesh teetering in the frail margin between chaos and anarchy, his ideas exerted a seductive power. So he's gone,eh?Mailer was pilloried as homophobic and self-aggrandising, hated by feminists and famously labeled by Kate Millet as the primo male chauvinist pig who was a "prisoner of the virility cult." Mailer drank his head off, took drugs, was a prodigious 'womanizer', his public persona a cringe-inducing machismo, the writer who made a ludicrous run for mayor of New York, went through six marriages, stabbed his fourth wife with a knife, and while shooting his movie 'Maidstone' bit off a part of actor Rip Torn's ear. His life at times seemed pure pulp fiction and tabloid gonzo. All of it was true. But he was also something else. Norman Mailer wrote The Naked and the Dead, arguably the most interesting novel about the Second World War, after he came back from the war. It was published in 1948 to great acclaim. He was just 25 years old. It was also the first book of his that I read, fascinated by characters that were vivid, acute portraits of the American mind. At that time, I was unabashedly interested in the United States, a common enough phenomenon among my peers. And this remained Mailer's strength throughout his literary career, a varied, intense exploration of America, in prose that was once labeled 'shamanistic.' He wrote about Marilyn Monroe, about the moon landing, Hollywood, on American art and Jackie Kennedy, on dentists getting stoned in Provincetown, on Watergate and the CIA, on the Sonny Liston-Patterson fight, on an America he termed as Cancer Gulch given its obsessions with sex and power, the uncertainty engendered by that power, and the ravages of an emerging totalitarianism founded on Plastic, Satan and Cancer. And all this was not only different content than what any other writer was saying then, but written in a uniquely American style. Not for nothing would Joan Didion later coolly observe that "it is a largely unremarked fact about Mailer that he is a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story." Living as I did in Dhaka through the 1974 famine, in the aftermath of the bodies after August 15, 1975, smoking cheap cigarettes amid a continuing series of coups, counter coups and curfew nights, I read him greedily. The essays in The Presidential Papers and Advertisements for Myself, his novels Barbary Shore, The Deer Park, An American Dream, Of A Fire on the Moon, Why are we in Vietnam, in articles in 'Harper's' 'Esquire' and 'Commentary' magazines, and even stray issues of the 'Village Voice'(of which he was a founder member, besides carousing with Ginsberg and Kerouac)-- all of which could be found then in Dhaka's USIS library. What would he make of Bangladesh, I would wonder, of statist discourses permeated by the nightly divinations of ondho pirs, of an authoritarian rule floating like gunsmoke across minarets planted in a green landscape, of betelnut-leaf oratory leading a nationalist revolution, and its subsequent brutish betrayal? I had no doubts then which side was winning the battle for the soul of the cosmos! The irony of Mailer's literary career was that even though he aspired to write the Greatest (not simply Great) American Novel, his real gift was in writing nonfiction, in penning what came to be known as the founding document of 'The New Journalism' later attributed to Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. His greatest book, the account of the 1968 Vietnam antiwar protest march on the Pentagon was The Armies of the Night: History as Novel, the Novel as History, for which he won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. It was the most complete portrait of America during the turbulent '60s. It just plain blew me away. In two lines he could pin down redneck America: the autoshop guy in a small town brute-wrestling the engine out of the back of a Volkswagen; unforgettable sketch of Robert Lowell; an account of an anti-Vietnam-war party given by Dwight McDonald and his poet wife Denise ('Dinny') Levertov; wondering what went on inside Noam Chomsky's head as the latter lay in the bunk bed above Mailer in the jailhouse; the ruefully hilarious account of how he missed hearing Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream' speech because he just had to take a long piss behind a bush; the Left fascism of the free speech movement at Berkeley. It was a book that displayed what critic Richard Gilman called Mailer's "brilliant wayward gifts of observation, his ravishing...honesty." The New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, someone not easily impressed, memorably noted Mailer's "bat-quality radar for atmosphere and mood." It was a book that completely redefined the notion of creative nonfiction, as did his later The Executioner's Song, which I never did get to read. I still wonder who the hell has my old, well-thumbed copy of The Armies of the Night. If whoever copped the book is reading this piece, bloody return it, please. No questions will be asked. There's much to write about him. But not enough space, and for Bangladeshi readers who haven't read him at all, the above is probably more than enough. But a couple of things do need to be said. The first is about Mailer's famous 1971 'town hall debate' with lesbian activist Jill Johnstone, the literary critic Diana Trilling, and the-then uber hot Germaine Greer - billed as the confrontation between the man who had just written The Prisoner of Sex and the woman who had published the feminist bestseller The Female Eunuch. Legend has grown that Greer 'demolished' Mailer. But as Midge Decter, columnist for both The New York Times and editorial member of Commentary later wrote in a famous essay 'Liberating Germaine Greer', the real story of the evening was the attempted seduction of Mailer by Greer, in manner, dress and speech. That led Ms Decter to the idea that the "ur-message" of American feminist vision included the idee fixee "that nothing could be more tempting than the notion that no decision taken in your life for which you may harbor some regret was a decision actually taken by you for yourself." In other words, women, take a good look at yourselves! It does not absolve Mailer from his truly weird sayings on women, gays, contraception, abortion, Satan and sodomy, but it did show me - little old me in Dhaka - that things are never as obvious as they seem, or black and white, that there are ways in which the text reads the reader. Ah, those were interesting things to read then in Bangladesh! Unshaven, slumped in a blue chair, in unwashed jeans, hair down to there! The other fact to be said on Mailer's behalf was the unstinting support he lent to all oppressed, jailed, beaten and muzzled writers, wherever they were, from East Europe to his own America to Cuba. In this activity he invoked the wrath of the Left as well as the Right. But he kept signing petitions and speaking on their behalf, even getting elected in 1984 as president of Pen American Center, still combative, ever ready to provoke. And now he's gone. And somewhere up there, no doubt he's already trading barbs with both Artist and anti-Artist warring for the existential soul of the cosmos! Khademul Islam is literary editor of The Daily Star.
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