Norman Mailer, literary rebel,dies

THE literary world paid tribute to Norman Mailer, the one-time enfant terrible of American letters, who died yesterday at 84. He suffered from kidney failure.

Joan Didion, the writer, described him tearfully as “a great American voice”.

The New York columnist and author Jimmy Breslin said: “From one end of his life to the other he sat in solemn thought and left so much to read, so many pages with ideas that come at you like sparks spitting from a fire.”

Mailer was regarded by a generation of feminists, however, as a quintessential male chauvinistic pig. He built and nurtured an image of a writer who was pugnacious, street-wise and high-living.

He drank, fought, smoked pot, fathered nine children, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party. He also headbutted his fellow writer Gore Vidal. His friends said he had a softer side, though.

“I found him to be extremely kind and gentle,” bestselling novelist Luanne Rice, a friend of Mailer, said. “The Norman Mailer that I knew was very different from the angry, contentious man that was famous.”

Born in Brooklyn, Mailer first hit the literary scene in the late 1940s with The Naked and the Dead, the novel based on his experiences fighting the Japanese in the second world war. The Sunday Times pronounced it too obscene to review, but it made him instantly famous.

He once told The Sunday Times: “I went from being an unknown young man from Brooklyn to a celebrity overnight. I was totally unequipped for it. As I said more than once, it was as if there was somebody else named Norman Mailer, but to meet him people had to meet me first.”

He moved into political activism during the Vietnam war. The Armies of the Night, a nonfiction work about the war protest movement, won him the first of his two Pulitzer prizes and broadened his appeal beyond America.

In later years, Mailer was particularly harsh on George W Bush and on “flag-waving patriotism”, which he regarded as misplaced in a superpower. Explaining his frequent critiques of the United States, he said that “when you have a great country, it’s your duty to be critical of it so it can become even greater”.

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