Carl Rollyson, remembrance
Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100, ed. Gerald R. Lucas and Maggie McKinley (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 85; transcribed from the final interior PDF
From Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 85.
Norman Mailer brought me to biography. His influence arose in The Armies of the Night, demonstrating the powerful, imaginative possibilities of nonfiction. Then he won me over entirely with Marilyn showing how insightful speculation coupled with the factual record could meld into a compelling conception of the biographical subject. He frankly admitted what he did not know, and what probably could not be known about his subject, but he kept pressing ahead, taking in what other biographers had discovered while pointing out the gaps and flaws in their narratives. He showed how a biography could grow out of the previous biographies of the subject without losing a personal, authoritative voice. Until then, I had not considered the immense possibilities of a genre that remains incomplete and yet ever expanding.
There are not many novelists of the first rank who turn to biography, but Mailer did so without apology. He not only inspired me to write biography but also to write a series of reviews, articles, and books about the history and practice of the genre. Biography, Mailer taught me, is cumulative and incremental, a dialogue of sources and methods, which is why the answer to one biography is another biography. Mailer’s many Marilyns, as I try to show in a recent article, reflect an awareness that his knowledge of the biographical subject must move forward and grow, an awareness I have taken to heart in my third and fourth biographies of Sylvia Plath.
Carl Rollyson