Some Final Thoughts on Norman Mailer by Mr. Fish

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http://wordsbymrfish.blogspot.com/2007/11/some-final-thoughts-on-norman-mailer.html



There’s a story about Mark Twain going to visit James McNeill Whistler in his art studio and approaching one of the painter’s canvases resting on an easel. Leaning in to examine the detail of the work, Twain reaches out a finger to touch the face of the painting before being stopped by Whistler who shouts, “Wait! The paint is still wet!”

“That’s okay,” Twain says reassuringly, “I’m wearing gloves.”

It is one of the earliest examples of artistic celebrity trumping art, something that Norman Mailer would, some 60 years later, master better than anybody else in his generation – elevating, in fact, the notion that the ego of a writer, when inflated with massive amounts of hot air, may be capable of carrying him to heights so great that he is required to look down to observe the culture of his time. And while such a perspective might, at first, seem an unforgivably arrogant position from which to comment on a society made tiny by such a lofty point of view and panoramic range of vision, it was the humanity of Mailer’s brain and the fallibility of his all too human eyes and the contradictions in his heart that made the artistry of his observations divinely lacking in condescension. In fact, he maximized the reach of his sympathies by offering their emollience to saints and sinners alike, something that no God wishing to subjugate those beneath him with the jurisprudence of a codification of their souls would ever do.

“He may have been a fool,” Mailer once suggested as a suitable epitaph for himself, “but he certainly did his best and that can’t be said of all fools.”

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