Norman Mailer's Gesamtkunstwerk

Jeff Zimbalist's How to Come Alive colorfully documents a career in work and love that included six wives (and nine children) one of whom, Adele Morales, Mailer comes near murdering the night before the announcement of his unsuccessful campaign for mayor. He makes himself the central figure in Armies of the Night thereby, with a wave of his staff, creating New Journalism. He directs three films including Maidstone where his character Norman T. Kingsley, "the American Bunuel" and its creator (Mailer) are hit in the head and almost killed by the actor Rip Torn. The creator of classics of nonfiction like The Executioner's Song, about Gary Gilmore, he advocates for convicted murderer Jack Abbott who infamously goes on to kill after his release. Author of The Naked and the Dead, boxer and fighting public intellectual, author of 11 bestsellers, the recipient of 2 Pulitzer prizes, he famously debates Gore Vidal on Dick Cavett and feminism in an iconic Town Hall debate where he appears in the role of Satan, going into the ring with the likes of Betty Friedan, Susan Sontag, Germaine Greer and Cynthia Ozick. Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n. As a newspaper publisher (Citizen Mailer btw also debates Orson Welles), he's a founder of the The Village Voice. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy might have been Mailer's mantra. Free speech and expression are too limiting as categories to describe his project, but he's an early opponent of political correctness which places ideology over idea and which he regards as a harbinger of fascism. Is Mailer a figure of world historical importance a la Hegel? Definitely not. Did he wish to be? He is short like Pushkin and Napoleon. He rolls with titans as varied as Mohammed Ali and Marilyn Monroe (to whom he devotes a book). Juggling wives and lovers, drinking and fighting. Was it a deficit of conscience that allowed him to thrive or is Mailer defined by his conflicts (a rebellion against morality and bracingly moral nature) that ultimately make him an exemplar of the 60s zeitgeist? Mailer's Gesamtkunstwerk was his life.

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

and also read "Francis Levy's Divine Comedy," Exquisite Corpse