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Banner file photo/Harrison
Norman and Norris Mailer with sons John Buffalo (left) and Stephen in 2003. |
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Banner file photo/Guadazno
Gore Vidal and Norris and Norman Mailer at Provincetown Town Hall for a reading in 2002, a benefit for the Provincetown Repertory Theatre. |
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Norman Mailer: A spirit that never faltered
Norman Mailer, Provincetown’s literary lion, dies at 84
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
PROVINCETOWN — The family of author Norman Mailer brought his body back to Provincetown to let friends say a final goodbye at a Monday evening visitation and to bury him here in the place he called home on Tuesday.
At 84, Norman died before dawn on Saturday of acute renal failure at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, and when the sun rose it came up on a decidedly grayer literary world. News agencies around the world flashed the story of his death across front pages and television screens, and outpourings of sympathy rolled in from around the globe. In Provincetown it was a more personal loss as e-mails and phone calls spread the news like a web of sadness.
His wife, Norris Church Mailer, and family arrived back in Provincetown Sunday and arranged for visiting hours on Monday at Gately-McHoul Funeral Home. His nine children and 10 grandchildren gathered at the family home to prepare for the burial. Former President Bill Clinton and Sen. Ted Kennedy called on Monday and condolences flowed in from others on high as well as from those with a more daily connection with the family.
Norman’s younger grandchildren ran around during the viewing, circling the legs of black-clad mourners, oblivious to death and somehow, unwittingly completing the circle of life as their parents and grandparents alternately laughed at old memories and tried to hold back tears.
Large photos from throughout the author’s life ringed the rooms, bringing back the richness and fullness of the days of Norman Kingsley Mailer.
Some say he was a lady’s man, others say a man’s man; one thing for sure, he was his own man, and maybe that’s why both women and men loved him throughout his provocative and productive life.
He won Pulitzers and National Book Awards, was feted, roasted, interviewed, quoted, revered, reviled, loved and sometimes hated, but it was more the man than the giant persona that people in Provincetown embraced. Here, he wasn’t so much the literary legend as he was the astute poker player or the interesting guy sharing a drink at the bar.
His health had been faltering and for the past few years he walked with two canes and counted on a hearing aid to either bring in or keep out the world, depending on whether he turned it on or not.
In Provincetown, where he lived for over three decades, Norman was not exactly as anonymous as the guy next door, but he walked the streets with the ease of an everyman and not the over-the-shoulder wariness of one who is famous and used to being hounded.
Maybe it was that ability to be the man and not always the myth that made living on the Cape’s tip so satisfying, or maybe it was the possibility of daily solitude needed for his writing.
He and his wife of 33 years, Norris Church Mailer, were often out at restaurants, openings and panel talks, and he was unfailingly generous with his time and attention. If he traded on his celebrity in Provincetown it was only to benefit someone else. When he and Norris joined Gore Vidal and J. Michael Lennon on stage in Provincetown Town Hall in 2002 in a benefit for the Provincetown Repertory Theatre, their reading of George Bernard Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell” raised $30,000 and showed everybody that the mellifluous Mailer had lost none of his ability to charm and deliver the goods.
He was a man of great energy in his mental pursuits, steel discipline when it came to his daily writing and solid devotion to Norris and his family. Their East End house was often full of happy voices as the grandchildren played inside or out on the flats.
But it likely will be the first 50 years of his colorful and influential life for which much of the world will remember him.
Born in Long Branch, N.J., in 1923 into a middle-class Jewish family, Norman grew up in Brooklyn, graduating from Brooklyn Boys School in 1939. He entered Harvard at 16 and studied aeronautical engineering but knew from that age that he wanted to be a writer.
During WW II he served as a sergeant in the Army in the Pacific and later wrote about his experiences in “The Naked and the Dead,” which made him a celebrity at 25. He spent a year in Hollywood but quickly tired of the shallow life there. He returned to New York, settling in Greenwich Village, the perfect spot for a young intellectual with radical political leanings. His next two books were not as well received, and one of them, “Deer Park,” published in 1955, was rejected by numerous publishers for its sexual content.
One can see Mailer’s evolution from that era as his writings began to delve ever deeper into drugs, sex, violence and racial unrest. By the 1960s his political interests won out and he began to cover the Democratic and Republican conventions as a journalist. He also co-founded The Village Voice, the nation’s first alternative weekly.
He was arrested at the Pentagon in 1967 in an anti-war demonstration, and that experience later surfaced as part of “The Armies of the Night” (1968), the book that won him his first Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and the National Book Award.
He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York in 1969 and his outspoken and outrageous statements may have done him more harm than his opponent.
He earned a reputation as a brawler and a womanizer, and his publication of “The Prisoner of Sex” in 1971 certainly put him on many feminists’ hit list.
He married six times, and his early relationships were often tempestuous and occasionally violent.
He won his second Pulitzer Prize for his 1979 book “The Executioner’s Song,” about convicted murderer Gary Gilmore and his execution by firing squad in Utah.
He turned his pen to a variety of subjects ranging from a novel about Ancient Egypt to a film noir tongue-in-cheek detective novel set in Provincetown, “Tough Guys Don’t Dance.” He later directed the film version of “Tough Guys,” endearing himself to a town-full of extras for his lavish parties and charming ways.
He looked at the CIA with “Harlot’s Ghost” and took on JFK’s assassin in “Oswald’s Tale” in 1995.
He surprised everyone with his 1997 book “The Gospel According to the Son,” a novel designed to be the autobiography of Jesus, and began to look inward with his 2003 “The Spooky Art,” in which he wrote about the art of writing. He published a small book with poems and drawings titled “Modest Gifts” and put out a book of conversations co-written with his son John Buffalo Mailer titled “The Big Empty” in 2006. But before anyone could say he was no longer up to the serious task of writing the big book, he dropped his impressive tome about Hitler — “Castle in the Forest” — on the table early this year.
If that were not enough, he finished a second book this year, “On God, An Uncommon Conversation,” released on Oct. 16.
It’s fair to say he mellowed over the years, dropping some of his contentious ways. Certainly his 33-year marriage to Norris reveals a shift in his life toward becoming a different kind of man.
But at no time did the literary lion ever completely give up his roar. Headed into his mid-80s, he was still a force to be reckoned with. His white hair did nothing but make his blue eyes bluer and his smile never lost its ability to capture an entire room. His rumbling voice was a balm to listeners and his spirit never faltered to the end.
In addition to his wife, Norris Church Mailer, he is survived by nine children: Susan, Danielle, Elizabeth, Kate, Michael, Stephen, Maggie, Matthew, John Buffalo; 10 grandchildren: Valentina Colodro, Alejandro Colodro, Antonia Colodro, Isabella Moschen, Christina Marie Nastasi, Natasha Lancaster, Callen Mailer, Theodore Mailer, Cyrus Force Mailer, Mattie Mailer; a sister, Barbara Wasserman; and a nephew, Peter Alson.
Private services were from Gately-McHoul Funeral Home in Provincetown on Tuesday and burial followed in Provincetown Cemetery. Public memorial services are planned for the spring in New York and Provincetown.
Read a tribute to Norman Mailer from his friends and supporters in this week’s arts and entertainment section on page 34.
artseditor@provincetownbanner.com
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Dayna Gryzwoc, 57
Dwight Willson Webb
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Nov 15th, 2007