Mr. Mailer belonged to the old literary school that regarded novel writing as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic characters with egos to match. He was the most transparently ambitious writer of his era, seeing himself in competition not just with his contemporaries but with the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
He was also the least shy and risk-averse of writers. He eagerly sought public attention, and publicity inevitably followed him on the few occasions when he tried to avoid it. His big ears, barrel chest, striking blue eyes and helmet of seemingly electrified hair ”” jet black at first and ultimately snow white ”” made him instantly recognizable, a celebrity long before most authors were lured out into the limelight.
At different points in his life Mr. Mailer was a prodigious drinker and drug taker, a womanizer, a devoted family man, a would-be politician who ran for mayor of New York, a hipster existentialist, an antiwar protester, an opponent of women’s liberation and an all-purpose feuder and short-fused brawler, who with the slightest provocation would happily engage in head-butting, arm-wrestling and random punch-throwing. Boxing obsessed him and inspired some of his best writing. Any time he met a critic or a reviewer, even a friendly one, he would put up his fists and drop into a crouch.
Gore Vidal, with whom he frequently wrangled, once wrote: “Mailer is forever shouting at us that he is about to tell us something we must know or has just told us something revelatory and we failed to hear him or that he will, God grant his poor abused brain and body just one more chance, get through to us so that we will know. Each time he speaks he must become more bold, more loud, put on brighter motley and shake more foolish bells. Yet of all my contemporaries I retain the greatest affection for Norman as a force and as an artist. He is a man whose faults, though many, add to rather than subtract from the sum of his natural achievements.”
With the blow-dried, painfully PC crop of artists the NYC scene has produced over the last decade or so, one has to admire Mailer’s persona — even though I think late in his career it was as much a masquerade as those of our wimpy contemporaries are.
Quite aside, of course, from the fact that he was a superb writer. He will be missed. I hope St. Peter has a well-developed sense of humor…
Some readers may wonder what Mailer has to do with religion. Often known simply for his risque novel about World War II, _The Naked and the Dead_ or stereotyped for profane aspects of his own earlier life, he went on to meditate about spiritual and ontological realities, often referring to the human condition as a contest between God and Satan. His book _Of a Fire on the Moon_, about the moon shots of the 1960s, is considered to stand in the “apocalypse” genre. And there is much of the idea of C. S. Lewis’s _Screwtape Letters_ in some of Mailer’s recent work: I don’t mean that he was necessarily derivative, but that he seems to have developed a similar scheme as a frame for his message. Here, for example, is a section of _The Castle in the Forest_, narrated by a truth-telling devil:
“Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil. They have even less readiness to accept the cosmic drama of an ongoing conflict between Satan and the Lord. The modern tendency is to believe that such speculation is a medieval nonsense happily extirpated centuries ago by the Enlightenment. The existence of God may still be acceptable to a minority of intellectuals, but not the belief that there is an opposed entity equal to God or nearly so. One Mystery might be allowed, but two, never! That is fodder for the ignorant.”
He continues: “I will even say that many, if not most, humans, are at present doing their best to be beholden neither to God nor to the Maestro [Devil]. They seek to be free. They often remark (and most sententiously), ‘I want to discover who I am.’ … Humans have become so vain (through technology) that more than a number expect by now to become independent of God and the Devil.”
Here are comments by interviewer Christopher Lydon about Mailer: ” . . . fundamentally _The Castle in the Forest_ seems to me an exercise in theology, a confirmation, finally, that there’s a believer inside Norman Mailer  original, but recognizably sprung from the Jewish and Christian traditions, and almost systematic.” And this: ” . . . his edge in the competitive struggle with the secular storytellers of his generation is precisely this taste for metaphysics and theology.”
http://www.radioopensource.org/norman-mailers-long-view/
(interview March 2007)
RIP, Norman Mailer.
Norman Mailer explains in detail his own personal systematic theology in the newly published tome, [i][url=http://www.amazon.com/God-Uncommon-Conversation-Norman-Mailer/dp/1400067324/ref=sr_1_1/105-0329879-6146053?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194800660&sr=1-1]On God: An Uncommon Conversation[/url][/i].