Customer Reviews

Mailer: His Life and Times

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Best anatomization of everything good and bad in the life (and works) of N. Mailer to date. The Afterword in the new edition can only be called brilliant, on par with James Baldwin's account of his apprentice-mentor relationship with Richard Wright. How Nailer went bad (and boring) is now finally revealed!

Author Peter Manso published a highly readable oral history of his then-hero and mentor Norman Mailer in the '80's titled " Mailer: His Life and Times". Manso, a good writer in all other respects, has republished the book with a lengthy afterword in which he repays the insult Mailer had paid him when it turned out the biography displeased him greatly. Mailer and Manso were close friends during the eighties, with Manso admitting as much that he was , more or less, Mailer's acolyte. The pair even shared a beach front house in Provincetown , Rhode Island. Mailer had written to the local paper ""P.D. Manso is looking for gold in the desert of his arid inner life, where lies and distortions are the only cactus juice to keep him going." Ouch, that hurts. But what puzzles me is that Peter Manso has seemingly nurtured the hurt for over thirty years and now takes a few too many pages to give his account, share gossip, insult Mailer friends. The aggrieved author seems less a wounded innocent than a gold digger . The lesson, I suppose, is that one ought not live with their heroes. I'd agree that Manso's Mailer biography is a fascinating read as far as it goes; it's hard to go astray when you've a group of interesting people giving an intimate account of a singularly intriguing and often brilliant personality like Mailer. But based on this, Manso's introduction to the new edition just sounds like sour grape he wants everyone to take a sip from. The problem with having heroes who embody every virtue and ambition one wants to cultivate for their own is that heroes will betray you, intentionally or otherwise. I've no idea what went on between the two men while they occupied that beach front property, but it's very possible Mailer had other things he wanted to do besides listen the sound and sight of a dedicated fan- boy sucking up; perhaps Manso crossed over from being a mere acolyte and exhibited a malignant sycophancy. Or maybe not; Manso would have served himself better getting over a three-decade old slight and finessed his remarks a tad more. It was Mailer's particular genius to make himself , as subject, fascinating in ways a reader wouldn't have suspected. That same talent isn't Manso's. Would that he merely republished his worthy oral history and gone onto another book.

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I read Manso's oral biography when it first came out in 1985, smitten by the matrix of competing testimony that somehow balanced out the extremes, and made Mailer seem alive, animated with ambiguity, endearing in his flaws, and audacious in his ambition. Now, in this new edition, Manso has added an afterword, detailing the breakup of their friendship and working partnership. He has lost all sight of Mailer as a subject of biography. In sixty pages of unfocused anger, he attacks the very people who were crucial to Mailer's life since Manso's account ended. He gives us a picture of the great author as a desearate to keep his name before the public with a series of what Manso calls "non-books," ignoring the accomplisments of key books written after their breakup, including Gospel According to the Son and the Castle in the Forest. He badmouths Mailer's biography of Picasso as a plagiarism of John Richardson. His screed is especially mean-spirited toward the very people Mailer drew around him in his last years: Larry Schiller, J. M. Lennon, and his wife Norris. Toward Norris, he is most poisonous, willfully distorted each positive attribute into a hideous caricature. I felt a flush of shame pass across my face, shame that Manso should fall so low as to rage against the man he so admired. In the afterword, Manso also belittles Provincetown Arts, the magazine I edit, saying that I rejected an excerpt for his 2002 book "Ptown: Art, Sex, and Money on the Outer Cape." Indeed, I did, but not, as Manso said, because I wanted to make cuts unacceptable to him, but rather because Manso came over to my house and demanded that I put his name in a banner across the logo on the magazine's cover, saying that Vanity Fair did so when his Brando book came out. The cover feature that year was Sebastian Junger, author of the Perfect Storm, and Manso said, "I'm as famous as Junger--I want equal billing!" Mailer's egotism posseses charm, Manso's arid self subsists on its own festering bile.

Peter Manso wrote a book on Norman Mailer back in the 80s and revisited the writer after Mailer's death in 2007. Mailer and Manso had a falling out--the subject did not like the book. Well apparently neither man let go. While "Mailer: His Life and Times" is fascinating when Manso lets Mailer's enemies and friends talk about the subject, he is awful when he talks about Mailer. The last chapter, covering 1985 until 2007 ranks as some of the worst non-fiction I have ever read. Manso dismisses Mailer's many books in those 22 years in sentences--while making claims like Mailer was out of money and that Manso was closer to some of Mailer's kids than their dad was. These may be true--they may not be. Manso offers no evidence for these claims. Even worse, Manso talks about his book on Mailer for pages--and it goes on and on. We can debate the merits of Mailer's last books. Some are interesting (I think "Harlot's Ghost" and "Castle in the Forest"), some offer a window to Mailer's thinking ("On God"), some are cut and paste "greatest hits" ("On Writing" and "Time of Our Time"), some are failures ("Picasso" and Mailer certainly had a low opinion of "Gospel According to the Son" more than a decade after it was published). All of these books meant a lot more to Mailer and help explain his life and times more than the Manso biography. Too bad Manso did not grasp that simple truth. Mailer wrote "Advertisements for Myself" decades before--but it was not a biography of another human being. This biography turns into an advertisement for the biographer instead of the subject--that may the worst literary sin and only the insightful quotes from Mailer's friends, family and foe save this book from being a complete failure.

I'm a fan of oral biographies, of which this is one. I like the immediacey of collected interview quotes, so like the way this book was presented. It's an interesting look at Mailer's life. The bit that impressed me most, was the example of the liberal elite giving a free pass to Mailer for committing a violent crime because he was one of theirs. When Mailer stabbed his wife, sending her to the hospital for a good stay, and himself to an insane asylum, the New York liberal elite pretty much excused Mailer for his behavior! The cocktail party talk about Mailer in Fifth Ave apartments was that Norman must have been a little upset, etc. He was in their clique so it was okay! It was a total duplication of the liberal elites' excusing of Bill Clinton's raping Juanita Broaddrick (read Christopher Hitchens' book NO ONE LEFT TO LIE TO for more on that). Hitchens interviewed three women who independent of each other said Bill Clinton raped them. But the liberal elite excuses Bill Clinton because he's one of theirs! I can't help but think that being a member of the liberal elite is like being the member of a cult. Anyway, it's stuff like this that makes Manso's biography of Mailer worth reading.