WASHINGTON — “I like Norman,” my old friend Malcolm Muggeridge
used to exult when for whatever reason his mind fixed on Norman
Mailer, the great American writer who has now bit the dust. Malcolm
was himself a great British writer whose two volumes of
autobiography are among the best in English in the 20th century and
whose prose Tom Wolfe has placed in a league with Mencken and
Orwell. Muggeridge was also an original, which in part must explain
his fondness for Norman. Norman, too, was one of a kind.
I, at first, did not share Muggeridge’s esteem for Norman. In
fact, when I first read Norman in the 1960s and early 1970s, I
rather hated him. But as life went on I came to Muggeridge’s side.
Norman was a genuine literary talent without being precious. He
could write a very clean sentence and pack it with fireworks. When
he was not snarling — and he snarled less frequently as time went
on — he was good company, always interesting, and occasionally
even right. He was gutsy, energetic, playful, and devoted to
telling a good story and telling it well. Moreover, I liked many of
the same things he liked: competitive athletics, books, politics,
the American scene. Indicative of his independent streak was his
opposition to feminism, which for a New York liberal could lead to
exile. Indicative of his left-wing bent, he obsessed over “the
corporation,” and furnished his obsession with the usual left-wing
ghosts and goblins.
Despite the very public philippics I hurled at him as late as
the 1970s, we entered into an amiable acquaintance. I doubt it was
in Norman’s nature to bear grudges, at least once the peace pipe
had been smoked. When asked to participate in American
Spectator symposiums he would always take part, though the
magazine’s writers often were among his critics. His contributions
were always intelligent and lively. He even attended one of the
magazine’s editorial dinners as featured guest. The scene could
have been bloody, for Norman was given an hour to trot out his
favorite ideas, some of which were quite hostile to our
libertarian-conservative sensibilities. Norman showed up on time,
and unaccompanied by bodyguards. He was as brave as his legend
proclaims. He was also charming, and at the end of the dinner off
he went into the night with a couple of Spectator writers
ready for a few more drinks and laughs.
Norman knew almost as much about boxing as he did about writing,
and for some reason both got intertwined in his thoughts. Famously
he saw himself getting into the ring with Hemingway. At stake would
be the literary championship of America. Were it a fistfight, I
would take Norman. Hemingway was bigger but Norman had more heart
— and he really could put together a combination of lefts and
rights as he demonstrated to me at lunch during the 1996 Republican
Convention. Boxing was on his mind that afternoon. He knew the
legendary manager Cus D’Amato who had worked with two great
handball players to train his fighters.
Handball is my sport and Norman told me that D’Amato believed
that the only athletes he could transform into fighters were
handball players. Norman’s explanation of D’Amato’s reasoning was
typical Norman. It soared into the metaphysical and the
nonsensical, to wit, the lone warrior goes toe-to-toe against his
adversary drawing on spiritual and primal values and…. Well, by
then he had lost me. Actually D’Amato probably had in mind the
fighters’ and the handball players’ need to coordinate their
footwork with their hands. This weakness for complicated and
slightly fla-fla explanations of life was a weakness of Norman’s
(along with another that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. mentions in his
recently published Journals, Norman’s inability to “resist
risks”).
When he pronounced on politics I was never sure Norman really
knew what he was talking about. One night after he had finished his
huge book on the CIA I introduced him to a beautiful Asian-American
lady then serving in the first Bush Administration, telling him she
was “Deputy Director of Central Intelligence,” or some such title.
I could not resist, but Norman took me seriously and spent the
evening with her discussing CIA. As I recall she was a banker
working in the Commerce Department. Somehow she filled Norman’s
image of an American intelligence operative. I never revealed my
joke to him, but if I had I am sure he would have laughed and
somehow recouped with an elaborate explanation.
As he demonstrated in The Armies of the Night, his
journalistic account of the 1967 march on the Pentagon, Norman was
a superb journalist. He had a stupendous sense for detail and could
describe any scene vividly. His problem was his hyperactive
imagination. It caused him to invest chimerical portents into
scenes that were better off without them. Metaphors would take on
the gorgeous trappings of absurdity. This hyperactive imagination
was the ruin of his novels, only one or two of which I could ever
finish. It damaged his journalism, too, but not often. There it
settled down, assuming the dimensions of mere poetry.
I am told he could be a furious controversialist, but I only
knew the charming, somewhat boyish, gent. The night of our
editorial dinner the conservative columnist Suzanne Fields gently
crossed swords with him. They had known each other since the 1960s.
Norman stood his ground and concluded with a twinkle in his eye,
“You remind me of one of my ex-wives.” I liked Norman.
