Kevin M. Schultz, remembrance
Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100, ed. Gerald R. Lucas and Maggie McKinley (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 88; transcribed from the final interior PDF
From Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 88.
I never knew Norman Mailer, never met him, never really paid attention to him until he was dead. He was always a specter in the literary imagination, a harmless contrarian whose zealous positions made him expendable and a bit of a try-hard. While pursuing another project, though, I stumbled onto his words, and I quickly recognized Mailer was not expendable at all. His quest was profound — to understand how to live a fulfilling life in the modern corporatized world — and his insights into the plight of humanity were deep and often correct. Perhaps a parallel to Karl Marx is not inappropriate? Mailer certainly wouldn’t object. Both were among the best at analyzing the systems they lived in. Both had important insights into what humanity had created and what that world did to our very essence. But both sometimes went too far in their prescriptions to cure the illness, sometimes dangerously so. Mailer left a thousand rich memories, some of which preclude us from seeing the measure of the man, but none can be dismissed as anything other than an effort to understand how to live a life fulfilled, one that celebrated the individual while being conscientious of the community, one that made us laugh and cry and feel pain and joy and bliss. “I had tried to become a hero, and had ended as an eccentric,” Mailer once wrote. We who know him best know that’s not true at all.
Kevin M. Schultz