Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer, a classic of American literature, has died. Why classic? Yes, because they read it. The novel "The Naked and the Dead" was published in 1948 and is still being published. Bookstores offer a lot of Norman Mailer books, old and new. Even a cursory glance at the shelves of domestic stores convinces that we are not talking about a momentary hype caused by the death of the writer.

In fairness, it should be noted that Mailer's fame was brought not only by the literary perfection of his texts. He carefully and originally built his career, and therefore he can be considered a PR genius with good reason. A small talent, a huge conceit, an evil irony and an accurate thought are not the best combination for a creative person. It's easier to get drunk or go straight to the psych ward. Mailer was saved by one quality - incredible hard work. They say that his books are mostly poorly written - but we will answer with the classic argument of a graphomaniac: try to write these thousands of pages yourself!

For Mailer, literature was always just one way of expressing himself - an extremely important one, no doubt, since he still belonged to a time when writing was considered almost heroic.

Norman Mailer was 84 years old, and his death did not become a sensation - he died after a serious illness. So the world's press writes mostly about Mailer's role in American literature - which is not very clear, however - and discusses the details of his rich biography. Moreover, this saturation is quite peculiar - Mailer managed to remain the hero of a scandalous chronicle until a very old age. In his life, there was an attack on his wife with a penknife, and majestic spree, and a mental hospital, and a game of politics, and numerous fights. But all this existed somehow in parallel with his texts, which were based on the novel "The Naked and the Dead".

Mailer wrote this book at the age of 25, drawing on his brief military experience-he fought in the Philippines with the Japanese. The novel was immediately recognized as anti-war and anti-militarist - in fact, under this label it became possible to publish this book in the USSR (the translation, however, was very far from the original). Of course, the novel "The Naked and the Dead" is written according to all the rules-mainly according to the patterns of Tolstoy and Dos Passos. Mailer also hit the bull's-eye with the topic - the world has only just begun to comprehend the lessons of World War II... Commercial success was guaranteed - and the book sold more than 200 thousand copies.

This was followed by three dozen more books - novels, biographies, essays, but the writer did not manage to rise to that height. The novels he published after The Naked and the Dead were so weak that Mailer stopped writing prose until the 1960s.

And the time required journalism. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the United States was shaken so violently that you can't help but think of the 1990s. In the wake of the rising movement against racial segregation and for the rights of black people, Mailer wrote the essay "The White Negro" in 1957, combining the post-war rebellious spirit, hatred of black neighborhoods, radicalism of the American intelligentsia and the eternal American dream of private freedom. Magically, these components defined the counterculture formula of the 1960s - but few realized that Mailer looked much further. In the same "White Negro" he wrote: "For a liberal, the psychological need is to believe that the reactionary Negro, or even the reactionary white Southerner, is ultimately and essentially human beings like himself, capable of becoming glorious liberals if the fundamentals of liberal thinking are properly explained to them. What liberals cannot allow is the idea that hatred is hidden beneath the surface of public life, because there is too much injustice in this life itself, and therefore the accumulated passion for collective violence in people can probably no longer be contained." Who would dare say that this phrase is not relevant today, after half a century? Unless, instead of " reactionary Southerner "and" Negro", you can enter other definitions.

In the 1960s, Mailer became seriously involved in politics and even seemed to feel like a leader-at least in the book "Armies of the Night" - a lengthy report on the anti - war march on Washington-he gives a lot of space to his own person. However, the author's "involvement" in the event was the last squeak of journalism at that time - let's recall the same Hunter Thompson with his "Hell's Angels". So the Pulitzer Prize for "Armies of the Night" was well deserved. Ten years later, Mailer won another Pulitzer Prize for his book "The Hangman's Song" - a documentary story about the killer Gary Gilmore. (In a similar genre, Mailer wrote a thorough biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy, as well as his own investigation into the death of Marilyn Monroe.)

In one way or another, Norman Mailer was among those who shaped the way modern America thinks - partly by accident, partly by design. His private life, which was constantly a slap in the face to public tastes and attitudes, worked well for the image of a consistent radical. The trouble is that Mailer, as a consistent radical, did not like the fruits of the revolution that was not made without his participation. Since the 1970s, he has taken aim at all the sacred cows of intellectual America, from feminism to political correctness, and broken many taboos by carefully choosing a path against the current. Take at least the themes of his novels: "The Forest Castle" - about Hitler's childhood on behalf of the Devil, "The Gospel of the Son of God" - a novel about Christ, his last book was "About God: a difficult conversation", written in collaboration with Michael Lennon. The title of a collection of his dialogues with John Bufallo Mailer, "The Big Dummy: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and America's Guilty Conscience,"perfectly describes Mailer's range of interests and his attitude to modern American society.

Say what you will, but Mailer is a writer for everyone and for no one - because his texts allow for multiple interpretations. We may find his books boring or outdated, but no matter how you look at them, you can't get him out of the history of world culture. At least for the word "hipster".

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