In the week that Norman Mailer died, the most talked about movies included Into the Wild, drawn from the diaries of an American man who perished in the wilderness, and In the Shadow of the Moon, a film about the Apollo astronauts that continues the new box-office power of cinematic documentary. And, on Broadway, down the river from the author’s hospital death bed, the two new hot plays — Tom Stoppard’s Rock’n’Roll and Aaron Sorkin’s The Farnsworth Invention — both dramatise historical events.
One of Mailer’s intellectual eccentricities was a fascination with astrology, and these items in the listings suggest that, at the time of his death on November 10, the artistic stars were in the right alignment.
Throughout his almost 60-year career, this author was the prophet and pioneer of a culture in which fact and imagination overlapped. Mailer steered the journey to a world where journalism and documentary routinely borrow the techniques of fiction, while a majority of movies and plays seem to be biographical and novels regularly conclude with extensive lists of the volumes consulted as research.
The credit — or, depending on taste, blame — for novelistic reporting and documentary novels has tended to go to other American writers: Truman Capote is generally said to have invented ‘the real-life novel” with In Cold Blood (1966), while Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson are regarded as the fathers of the new journalism in which the reporter shapes and takes a place within the story. But these are false lineages, allowed to stand partly because Mailer, always keen to be remembered as a novelist rather than a journalist, was reluctant to shout about his role in the rise of news-driven fiction and fiction-driven news.
He was, though, absolutely the daddy of faction, his novels or journalism reporting every conflict from 1939 to Iraq and biographising Americans including John F Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali and Neil Armstrong. The subtitle of his magnificent account of an anti-Vietnam march in Washington — The Armies of the Night (1968) — is History As a Novel, the Novel as History, which couldn’t be more explicit about his mission to mix up newsprint with Jane Austen’s two inches of ivory. His merger of journalism and fiction is more daring than anything Capote attempted, with the author even third-personing himself as ‘Mailer”.
When I interviewed Mailer in January, for Radio 4’s Front Row — his knees and breathing going, but his mind ferociously and provocatively intact — I pointed out that his major books all had a slab of fact behind them, whether billed as fiction (his World War II novel of 1948, The Naked and the Dead, or 1991’s Harlot’s Ghost: A Novel, about the CIA) or as non-fiction (1995’s Oswald’s Tale, which applied to Lee Harvey Oswald the techniques perfected on Gary Gilmore).
Mailer’s reply was that he would rather spend his energy on prose than plotting, but he also acknowledged a deeper reason: that he had lived through a century in which a writer’s greatest stories were as likely to come through his eyes as his mind’s eye.
Such was the drama of Mailer’s personality and life that he will almost inevitably be the subject of biopic movies in the future, as Capote has recently twice been. Natural casting might be Russell Crowe as the younger writer, Brian Dennehy as the veteran.
And docudramas would be the perfect epitaph because, though Norman Kingsley Mailer dreamed of being the monarch of the American novel, he was finally the king of faction, the man whose greatest books, a nightmare for any librarian hoping neatly to classify as fiction or non-fiction, consolidated the now standard view that reporting is as important to storytelling as invention. —