Charles Finch

I wonder how Norman Mailer, who died on Saturday, will be remembered. His first book, The Naked and the Dead, and his last, The Castle in the Forest, were equally unreadable, though some of the pretension and self-congratulation of the first had gone by the last. As a prose stylist he was awful, as far beneath Capote and Roth as a writer for Reader's Digest is. His best books, including Executioner's Song (though not, I'd say, Armies of the Night) were part of the New Journalism, but still probably inferior to Didion's, Capote's, and even Wolfe's.

In the end, as much as anything, he was a personality, rather like Anatole France or Robert Greene. He belonged to the second, attenuated generation of the masculine tradition, and literary historians may well look back on him as a last expiring gesture of Hemingway's. Even though the obituaries so far have contained an element of hagiography, already there are writers of his generation far more respected and famous than he.

But that sounds judgmental. He spent his life in service to some inner counsel nobody else could hear, and for fifty years he was significant. He just may not have been a genius, but he can hardly be blamed for that. It was Emerson who said, and might almost have been describing Mailer's exact opposite, that, "Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them. Plato especially has no external biography. If he had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground them all into paint. As a good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual performances."