Has cancel culture dealt a knockout blow to Mailer? - The Jewish Chronicle

There were giants on Earth in those days: Malamud, Roth, Bellow. In the second half of the 20th century, Jewish authors dominated the American novel. But will their reputations survive – and will they stay in print at all?

Norman Mailer was a pocket colossus in his day. His debut, The Naked And The Dead, came out in 1948, when he was only 25. The first American bestseller about the Second World War, it featured in the Modern Library’s list of the best hundred books in the English language.

Mailer died in 2007. Random House was interested in publishing a collection of his essays to mark his centenary next year — until, it seems, a “junior staffer” objected. It will instead now be brought out by another publishing house, Skyhorse.

Mailer was a major public figure. He was a political writer, a kind of madcap sociologist covering a country coming apart at the seams.

He campaigned bravely against the Vietnam War, he feuded crassly with feminists, and he even ran for mayor of New York City. His grander flights of fancy included training with Muhammad Ali — the material for The Fight, perhaps the best book on boxing ever written.

I’m not a great fan of his novels, but if you want to understand postwar America, you have to read him. The Pulitzer-winning Armies Of The Night is a brilliant fictionalised report from the March on the Pentagon in 1967.

Another Pulitzer-winner, The Executioner’s Song, is a stunning exploration of the American enthusiasm for crime and punishment. And there might be no clearer account of the cultural politics behind Beat literature and much else than Mailer’s 1957 essay The White Negro, in which he argued that white radicals should adopt the “outlaw” style of black criminals.

I winced when I read the essay in the late Eighties. Even then, it seemed like a mashup of racial stereotypes and semi-digested Existentialism. I winced some more when I read it again last week. But it remains a significant document, wrongheadedness and all.

Was Mailer “cancelled”? Yes and no. Random House says it would be “factually incorrect” to call it that. His son John Buffalo Mailer agrees: “They didn’t feel they would be the right house to do it now. I don’t think they have any interest in trying to cancel Norman Mailer. You can’t cancel Norman Mailer.”

What you can do, however, is informally render an artist beyond the bounds of good taste in the republic of letters. The land beyond good taste was a terrain familiar to Mailer.

Still, we have to ask, what took them so long? This was the man who stabbed his wife at a party in the Sixties — not that it stopped Random House from publishing him.

Other major writers from the golden age of Jewish American letters are getting the same treatment. Bernard Malamud, a master miniaturist, is said to be “problematic” for his depiction of black-Jewish tensions in his 1971 novel The Tenants.

Saul Bellow got there first, when he announced his rightward turn with 1968’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet — and he kept going, notoriously asserting the supremacy of Western culture when he asked, “who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?”

Bellow apologised for that, but it’s not just his Nobel-winning work that is controversial today. He was married five times, and his letters continue some strong views on race and the decline of Chicago. Nothing is private these days, and everything is the material of politics.

Philip Roth never got the call from Stockholm, but he seems to have answered other urges with unseemly enthusiasm. The recent revelations about his love life are all of a piece with his books.

Who would have thought that Roth’s fictional alter egos, some of them called “Philip Roth” and all of them selfish and sex-obsessed, might bear resemblance to their creator?

Times change, and attitudes too — frequently for the better. In the old days, American male novelists of all backgrounds tended towards machismo: all that Hemingway-style boozing, brawling and women-chasing. In a way, you could call the machismo of Roth and Bellow a kind of assimilation.

It hasn’t aged well. But books about Caravaggio, a murderer, get published. Audiences still give standing ovations to Wagner in the opera houses of the world.

Alice Walker, who has made appalling statements about Jews, remains a darling of the critics and books sections. Is it, as a transplanted British Jew’s famous race-crossing character might ask, because they is Jewish?

Or is it the price of success that the young must pull down the monuments of a previous age — the kind of radical insurrection Norman Mailer might once have approved?

Dominic Green is the editor of The Spectator’s world edition