Colum McCann, remembrance
Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100, ed. Gerald R. Lucas and Maggie McKinley (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 71; transcribed from the final interior PDF
From Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 71.
He wanted to be Norm, or Norman, or Norman Kingsley at a stretch, but really, truly, honestly, he wanted to be everyone else. Gilmore. Marilyn. Miller. Ali. Eisenhower. Armstrong. Hemingway. Kennedy. He wanted to step from his body into a symphony of imagined bodies. Cummings. McLeod. Esposito. Rojack. Montague. Menenhetet. He took them on, warts and all, and then he slipped out of their skins and away. He was making layers of himself. At the heart of it was a selfishness to live as many lives as possible, but it was also a selflessness showcasing the deepest possible empathy for others. He kept slipping into new times, and geographies, losing himself there, resurfacing elsewhere. The only things worth doing were the things that might possibly break his heart. Oswald. Picasso. Hitler. Even Jesus. And all of that excellent work was also difficult work. Mailer knew that fame was not a cheap dealer he could call up from the street corner. Books didn’t just write themselves. Ideas didn’t just fall at his feet. He excavated. Mailer wanted to get in and populate your mind, and it wasn’t just in the way that he slung his words so tempestuously together, or the way his prose lit up the world, it was also the way Mailer himself emerged from it all. The energy. The ego. The jealousy. The lunacy. The beauty. The searing loneliness. The joy. But at its most elemental core, Mailer was — or rather is — all of us, asking for the very best from ourselves, pleading with us, and with literature, to stand up and be counted.
Colum McCann