Death of the White Negro: Norman Mailer, 1923-2007

I can’t be highfalutin about this, I really can’t do it. Truth is, I’ve never read a Norman Mailer book in my life. I bought An American Dream (a 1965 novel he wrote to satisfy alimony payments) sometime in my 20s and didn’t get past page 10. My relationship with Mailer comes from reading interviews with him over the years, occasional magazine pieces like his 1994 Esquire profile on Madonna, and his commentary on Muhammad Ali in When We Were Kings, not to mention Baldwin skewering dude in “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy.” That last was a critical response to “The White Negro,” which I must have read once upon a time, Mailer’s earnest-yet-(naturally)-racist treatise on how black jazz musicians live more authentic lives and have more authentic orgasms or somesuch.

I eulogize Mailer because he wrote well and mastered the business art of branding himself. By this count, I owe a personal debt to Mailer (as well as Baldwin, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Wright, Tom Wolfe, and a host of others). The Times called Mailer “transparently ambitious”; The Village Voice (which he named and helped found in 1955) said he was well known for “arrogant, despairing egocentrism.” Writers of my generation (myself included) are guilty of these traits and more. Growing up the children of television – and reality TV is a whole ’nother ballgame – nothing much matters to us unless we see it on TV, and the talking-head syndrome a lot of us have fallen prey to is directly traceable to the multitude of provocative talk show apperances writers like Mailer made over the years. (Does a writer exist nowadays if he doesn’t pontificate on Book TV? Or at least MTV?)

Mailer lived out loud, so to speak, and if I don’t know anything about his books other than 10 pages of An American Dream, I know that he once stabbed his wife with a pen-knife, picked fistfights with people with contrary opinions, ran for the mayor of New York, often drank too much and won the Pulitzer Prize, twice. If my roots as a writer stem from any school in particular, I’d have to claim the hiphop cultural critic renaissance of the 1990s. The time, place and space has been written about before (check Oliver Wang’s “Trapped in Between the Lines” or Selwyn Seyfu Hinds’s “The Source of It All,” or just see here), but I’d say that as young writers glancing over our shoulders at each other – proud, insecure, arrogant, and (sometimes) high as hell – hiphop journalists had a lot in common with Mailer, Joan Didion, Lester Bangs and anyone else you care to name who chronicled a certain American social moment with insider clarity.

I could go on and on and on, but who cares? Norman Mailer, rest in peace, you sexist, misogynist white Negro.