Norman Mailer will be dead soon. He is 83, after all. Which is an age when, by common consent, men die or begin dying or continue dying, assuming they're not dead already. It's kind of like puberty. Norman Mailer novelist, journalist, politician, playwright, screenwriter, movie director, et cetera has always taken a perverse pleasure in confounding our expectations. But it seems safe to assume that eventually he too will die.

Obituaries are always a fun read. Norman's obituaries promise to be especially readable, perhaps uniquely so. People like to talk about Norman. Some like to say very, very nasty things. Some are absurdly complimentary. I suspect Norman rather enjoys reading both the nasty and sycophantic things written about him. So I am sad for Norman that he won't be around to enjoy his obituaries. Barring the existence of an afterlife.

Norman's obituaries will have a theme. He has already laid out the terms by which he shall be judged. Here is how he put it in 1958 in a collection of his early writings called Advertisments for Myself:

The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time. Whether rightly or wrongly, it is then obvious that I would go so far as to think it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years. I could be wrong, and if I am, then I'm the fool who will pay the bill, but I think we can all agree it would cheat this collection of its true interest to present myself as more modest than I am.

So that's it then. Either Mailer is the greatest novelist of his generation and the root cause of a revolution in consciousness or he's a failure. To be fair, I do have a rooting interest in this debate. I'm a sucker for ambition.

Norman Mailer is a New Yorker. Like most New Yorkers, he was born in New Jersey. Norman Kingsley Mailer was born in Long Branch in 1923. His father was an accountant. His mother was a housewife. Norman was raised in Brooklyn. Whenever anyone writes about the life of the young Norman Mailer, they always find room to mention that his parents were Jewish and that his mother adored him. So I do so here. Make of it what you will. 

Norman Mailer did well. He got into Harvard at a time when there were quotas for how many Jews were allowed to enroll. He studied aeronautical engineering. He wrote some pieces for the campus literary magazine. He discovered he wanted to be a writer. The United States entered the Second World War. Mailer graduated and joined the army. He served as a rifleman in the South Pacific. After the war ended (we won), Mailer returned home and wrote a novel. The novel was called The Naked and the Dead. It was hailed as one of the greatest novels to come out of the war years. It was a bestseller.

Success can be hard. The success of The Naked and the Dead was hard on Norman Mailer, formerly nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, now promising young writer of the first order. There is very little to say about Norman that he hasn't said about himself. Good or bad. Norman knows what this early success did to him as a man and as a writer. It fucked with his head. 

And so I was prominent and empty, and I had to begin life again.

—Advertisements for Myself

It had always been Norman's intention to be a great writer; now he found that others were willing to play along. People were suddenly much more interested in Norman than he was in them. As a young novelist, Norman needed to refill his bank of life experience, but he found that his experience had become artificial. Norman was famous and fame had left him disaffected. The famous are placed on a pedestal or nailed to a cross. Either way, the experience must be weird. Norman had to begin again, creating work out of the weirdness. 

Other books followed, The Barbary Shore (1951), The Deer Park (1955), Advertisements for Myself (1958). Norman become at once the darling and the beast of the New York literary establishment. Wild rumors flew about his late-night sexual shenanigans. Marriages fell apart in quick and epic succession. He ran for mayor. He marched on Washington to protest the Vietnam War. He was, by turns, a Marxist, an existentialist, a boxer, a marijuana enthusiast and, in his own memorably explosive phrase, a white negro. He seemed to be enjoying himself. 

Norman continued to write. He was a persona now and people were gunning for him. Each book he wrote was a target for people ready to declare him a fraud, a failure, or a pervert. Norman upped the ante. He insisted on a place beyond the merely literary. He was going to change the consciousness of our time. He was going to be Hemingway. He was going to be Jesus. 

Partly, Norman was and is just fucking with us. He knows what people think of Norman Mailer. So he plays with our perceptions. He writes a life of Jesus from the first person perspective, The Gospel According to the Son (1997). He knows what people will say. He doesn't care. And, at the same time, he wants them to say it. He's playing at a different game. 

Norman's got a new book coming out this January, The Castle in the Forest. It's about Hitler. According to early reports on the novel, young Adolf's existence is under the supervision of some sort of deputy devil. There's a debate within hell's bureaucracy about whether this Austrian is up to the task. Will Hitler ultimately make it? We'll have to read the novel to find out. Even in his dotage, Norman is provocative.  

Age has changed Norman in some ways. He doesn't spend as much time in New York City anymore. Norman lives for much of the year in Provincetown, Massachusetts. This is unfortunate. Provincetown, whatever its charms, could not have created a Norman Mailer nor could it sustain one. Wisely, Norman holds on to his old apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Norman Mailer could only be a New York writer. Hubris grows better in some places than others.

Back in the day, an Athenian architect of no small ability by the name of Daedalus found himself working on the island of Crete under the patronage of a certain King Minos. 

Despite building a truly first-rate labyrinth for Minos Minotaur, Daedalus eventually fell afoul of the king and resolved to escape from Crete with his son Icarus. Unfortunately, Minos power was based on his control of the seas. So it wasn't possible to just sail away. Clever Daedalus was not daunted. He built wings of feathers held together with wax so that he and Icarus could fly away from danger.

Daedalus cautioned his son not to fly too close to the sun, for the heat would melt the wax and cause him to fall. But kids being kids, Icarus got caught up in the thrill of flying and flew higher and higher. Eventually, the wax softened and the wings came apart and Icarus plunged to his death into the sea. Father knows best. 

Before there were After School Specials, stories like this one were passed on in order to educate and edify the young. Icarus, in the heedless way of adolescents flies too high and suffers the consequences of his actions. The myth reinforces the value of prudence and moderation. Don't fly too high. Don't get too big for your britches. Don't raise yourself up above the crowd lest you risk divine comeuppance. The gods don't like hubris. Pride invites a visit from Nemesis, the ancient Greek goddess of divine indignation and retribution.  

Or so we're told. Whatever the actual opinions of Zeus et al. it seems clear that people don't like hubris. Excessive pride in your own accomplishments is a fast way to piss people off. And, to most people, any amount of pride is excessive. Modesty is a virtue. Accomplishment brings unwanted attention. Protect yourself against the envious glances of others by keeping your head down and your successes private. In early twentieth-century Greece, grandmothers would spit in the faces of a beautiful grandchild, lest the child develop pride in their appearance and risk the Evil Eye.

I can sympathize. Hubris seems to invite a face-full of warm spit. Every accomplishment and boast raises our own inadequacies into stark contrast. So why would a man, as apparently intelligent and self-aware as Norman Mailer risk a literary spit bath by putting himself so far out there? Why insist that he has greatness in him?

You almost can't become a serious professional writer unless there is a built-in arrogance in yourself that you have something special about yourself. It's a vanity, and when the vanity is misplaced, as it usually is, it's sad, if not tragic.

—Norman Mailer, interview for The Academy of Achievement

There is nothing wrong with being an unambitious writer. Just as there is nothing wrong with being an unambitious astronaut. Very few people feel the need to actually get anywhere. Better to be precocious than ambitious. Precocity being so very cute and effortless. Ambition is sweaty and trying. 

Over and over again in descriptions of Norman the phrase naked ambition is used. In polite society, ambition must be kept as private as a trip to the bathroom. So much better to be an undiscovered genius, toiling away in gentle obscurity. We could all be undiscovered geniuses. It's possible, however unlikely. And undiscovered genius doesn't make people uncomfortable by getting in their faces. Hence, undiscovered.

Better still than undiscovered genius is promising talent. Genius demands effort and sacrifice. Promising talent can be quickly proven in a clever turn of phrase. For a generation that grew up gifted and insufficiently challenged by the classes we failed, it is better to be have unrealized potential than outright failure. Of course, this makes for shitty literature. 

Writing is hard. Writing a novel is harder. Novels are not written by accident, whatever the Infinite Monkey Theorem might tell us. A writer needs at the very least a sense of purpose to plow through the moments when inspiration fades into labor. A novel will never exceed the scope of the ambition of the novelist. If a novelist decides in the privacy of their own thoughts to write a novel that doesn't suck, they will not write a great novel. At best, they may write one that doesn't suck. In all likelihood, they will write a novel that only kind of sucks. The idea of the great American novel has become a punch line. It shows. A writer of chick lit is as likely to pen an important novel as I am to win An Olympic gold medal in figure skating.  

Before I was seventeen I had formed the desire to be a major writer.

—Advertisements for Myself

You cannot accuse Norman of limited ambition. From the start, he nominated himself as Hemingway's successor. Not in terms of style, but in terms of scope and influence. Then Hemingway became too small for him and he focused his sights on Tolstoy. Other writers may hate Norman for advertising his ambitions, but the ambition itself isn't that unusual. Every hack writer needs to drink his or her own Kool-Aid from time to time. The work is just too mentally draining to be fully mercenary. 

The problem with keeping ambition private is just that it's private. If you fail to achieve your goal, no one will know. And we are all elaborately well-practiced at making excuses for our own failures. We are far too forgiving. But an ambition shared is an act of pride that risks humiliation. If I tell my friends that I am going to win the Olympic gold medal in figure skating, then I had better achieve my goal or risk looking like an ass. I will work harder knowing that the price of failure is public humiliation than I ever would have worked to avoid private disappointment. There is no superego as powerful and persuasive as public ridicule. 

When I wrote Advertisements for Myself, I realized that one could literally forge one's career by the idea you instilled of yourself in others. That is, impersonate the person you might have some reasonable chance of arriving at in a couple of years and soon enough you are lifting yourself by your own bootstraps.

—The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

Norman Mailer's public acts of hubris have created the conditions for the realization of his talent. He lives and has lived in a pressure cooker of his own creation. How many times has the threat of derision forced this natural pleasure-seeker to submit to the discipline of his writer s desk for long, fruitless (or fruitful) hours? Why does he endlessly manufacture feuds and enemies if not to increase the legion of haters that need to be silenced by that one work of transcendent genius? Forget Hemingway, Norman is the natural heir of Faust. He risks a public damnation in his bid for public genius because there is no such thing as private genius. Private genius is masturbation. And Norman doesn't approve of masturbation. Oddly. 

Nothing is simple with Norman. And this story about hubris seems too simple, the type of thing Ayn Rand would write up while suffering from a toothache. In truth, Norman has been known to dabble in the cowardly art of excuse making. Norman is incapable of talking about Norman without hypothesizing about what it is Norman might have done that wasted some of his natural talent. If only he'd stayed away from drugs, women, politics, newspaper writing, public life, editors, critics and an assortment of other shits, well, then we would have seen something. As it is, this is the best Norman could do with the cards he was dealt. So says Norman. Incidentally, Norman has been bemoaning his wasted youth in this way since his early thirties. 

But all this smacks too much of an early obituary. The truth is that I come not to bury Norman Mailer, but to praise him. When the obituaries finally do appear, they will represent the ultimate triumph of Norman's hubris over the sniping of his critics. Norman Mailer has used an old high school debate team trick and he has used it to brilliant effect. He has framed the debate. Is Norman Mailer the greatest novelist of his generation or is he not? Go ahead, take a position pro or con. Either way, Norman wins.