‘A little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul’: the outrageous life of Norman Mailer

Heroically brave and mad, prodigious in his industry and appetites, Norman Mailer was an altogether excessive figure. Since his death in 2007 there have been several biographies, but this is the big one — big enough to accommodate a triple or quadruple life, let alone a double. It is also the official one, written at Mailer’s request by J. Michael Lennon, his friend, collaborator and literary executor, who is respectful and affectionate but not hagiographic.

He calls Mailer a ‘genius’, which in some ways he was, but does not claim that any of his novels were ‘great’, which is just as well. He never glosses over Mailer’s habitually appalling behaviour, and though he has the right he never calls him ‘Norman’. A Double Life is a judicious and comprehensive
portrait of one of the more entertaining monsters of our times.

That title might apply to the lives of any number of writers, but is especially apt of Mailer, whose life positively pullulated with duality. To begin with his parents: a steely and manipulative matriarch, and a shifty gambler and dandy with a dodgy British accent. Mailer grew up in Brooklyn, ‘a tearful, bookish momma’s boy’, given to tantrums and afraid of local Irish gangs. He wrote his first stories aged seven or so, and in 1934, inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a 35,000-word novel about a Martian invasion, which showed, writes Lennon, his ‘bottomless fascination with war, violence and suffering’.

At Harvard in the 1930s undergraduates were classified as ‘white men, gray men and meatballs’, and as a Jew in green and blue striped trousers and a gold jacket Mailer was a meatball. He majored in engineering, but his interests remained literary, and in later life he nurtured a ‘suspicion of all things mechanical and electronic’. He adopted Hemingway as his guide to violence, and D.H.