Happy Centenary Birthday ~ Norman Mailer

 

Happy Centenary birthday to American novelist Norman Mailer.  To commemorate what would be the 100th anniversary of his birth, January, 31st, the Library of America will reissue his famous novel "The Naked and the Dead".   

In a recent New Yorker article "Flesh Wound"  David Denby examines Mailer's life and career and poses the question: "Norman Mailer went to war and wrote a big novel about it.  Did he ever  come back?" 

Mailer's service in the Second World War transformed him from a diminutive 'Jewish, middle class Brooklynite' before he enlisted into "a barrel-chested macho- a man six times married, the father of eight children and an adopted son, and the author of more than forty books, some of them American classics."  Upon his return from war he wrote "The Naked and the Dead", which quickly became an American classic.  The text offered a very candid and brutally real picture of war and made him an overnight literary celebrity.  It also solidified the Mailer ethos: "He believed that physical courage was necessary equipment for a great writer {Hemingway was the model}" which led him to 'head-butt people at parties and brawling'.  One notorious time, drunk, "he twice stabbed one of his wives Adele Morales".  "I let God down" was Mailer's penitent confession to one of his daughters.  

I was commissioned to create a caricature of Mailer for a review of one of his very last novels "The Gospel According to the Son" which was written as a 'first-person memoir' by Jesus.  By this time, Mailer was seen as a 'by-gone era' author who had not evolved since his Post-War novel "The Naked and the Dead" and had solidified into a caricature of the pugnacious macho.  In form, if not content, critics gleefully panned 'The Gospel" and dredged up the salacious details of Mailer's past.  It seemed he was still good copy.  

I drew Mailer a couple of times.  His shirt is opened to the chest to reveal his forest of chest hair- the trademark macho look he cultivated.  In one brush and ink rendering I have a full figure Mailer walking on water which lampooned Mailer's preposterous attempt to speak in the first person for Jesus but also to capture the lofty ambitions of the man.  He was unafraid to tackle any one or any subject.  

The original artwork is part of a recent acquisition by the Archives of Canada.