I was not a big fan of Norman Mailer. If you had asked me about it, I would probably said that he was a narcissistic twerp who yelled and people tend to pay attention to other people who yell. I didn’t think he had a lot to say about anything. I’m not a big reader of Commentary magazine. It is a neocon rabble rouser. But just as a stopped clock tells the correct time twice a day, Commentary ran a piece about Norman Mailer that resonated with me. Here is the money line:
He fancied himself one of the big thinkers, and most of his ideas were not only bad but appalling; for he lived largely for the body’s pleasures, actual and vicarious, and adopted ideas that serviced those pleasures. T.S. -Eliot remarked that a great writer creates the taste by which he is appreciated; Mailer helped create the moral confusion amid which he was glorified—not quite what Eliot had in mind.
Until he is forgotten, Mailer should be remembered not only in a fool’s cap and bells but also in a scoundrel’s midnight black. For in an age crawling with intellectual folly, he was one of the reigning dunces, even his best works were shot through with adolescent fatuities, while the worst of his words and deeds were stupid and vicious without bottom.
Yeah, what he said. Although this ran a close second:
By this point, Mailer had jettisoned his first wife, college sweetheart Beatrice Silverman, and clearly traded up in the sexual-allure department by marrying the painter Adele Morales in 1954. With Adele’s all-too-willing complicity, he cultivated the ugliest part of his nature and called it high moral adventure.
High moral adventure. That’s what you call it when you live a life that is without basis or constraint. Just ask any sociopath.