AMERICANA: Of Time & the Rebel

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In August 1948, a wiry young man with kinky hair, cupped ears and an amiable smile came back to the U.S. after spending a year as a G.I. bill student at the Sorbonne, and found that he had become the overnight lion of American letters. Norman Mailer's brutal, scatological novel of war on a Pacific island, The Naked and the Dead, was in its eleventh week as the nation's top bestseller, and the critical ovation was still going on. A few reviewers detected the strong influence of Melville and Dos Passos in Mailer's massive novel, and many Comstocks of the lending libraries were offended by its festering descriptions and raw, one-syllable dialogue; but in the general acclaim their voices were drowned out. At 25. Mailer had written the great novel of World War II. It had come closer to the heart and horror of war than the seascapes of Monserrat and Wouk, or the peripheries of Michener and John Home Burns. Even Mailer's disgruntled contemporaries admitted it. "At the time," says Gore Vidal, "I remember thinking meanly: so somebody did it."

Proud Rifleman. Doing it was no accident. As a precocious undergraduate at Harvard, Mailer was making his plans, and when the Army drafted him, early in 1944, his only concern was where he would be sent ("I worried whether a great war novel would be written about Europe or the Pacific"). After serving in various rear-echelon jobs and, briefly and proudly, as an infantry rifleman on Leyte and Luzon, he returned to the U.S., wrote The Naked and the Dead in 15 methodical months—exactly according to plan.

But the young man's autobiography did not follow the plot. Although Mailer continued to write prodigiously, he never again came close to his first great acclaim. Barbary Shore, his second novel, was a flop. His third, The Deer Park, a study of the tribal sex practices of Hollywood, was a bestseller largely because the word got around that it was dirty (it was), but the critics frowned. By the time his Advertisements for Myself—a threadbare collection of past and future projects, loosely stitched together with some narcissistic autobiographical notes—appeared, late last year, it was all too clear that Norman Mailer, at 36, had fallen hard.

Painful Descent. There were brief starbursts of the old craftsmanship—his essay, "The White Negro," is regarded as the definitive analysis of beatniks, and the later novels had some passages of surpassing brilliance—but the story Mailer wrote and lived was mostly a story of repeated failures. His first marriage ended in divorce. In Mexico he got on the marijuana kick; in Greenwich Village he took to Seconal and Benzedrine (he later managed to cure himself of dope). He became a fiery advocate of lost and leftist causes—an authority on hipsters, bebop, Marxism, existentialism. Once, in an excess of underdoggery, he wrote an article defending homosexualism (an idea that revolted him) for the deviate magazine One.