‘How To Come Alive With Norman Mailer’
Directed by Jeff Zimbalist
Zeitgeist Films

The writer Norman Mailer lived 84 years, but that is hardly the most impressive total he accrued. He married six times, had nine children, wrote 11 bestsellers, collected two Pulitzers, and was arrested three times. He spent six pugilistic decades on the center ring of America’s intellectual life. He loved the television camera. It is impossible to imagine Philip Roth or Saul Bellow running for mayor of New York City. Mailer did it — twice.

Mailer grew up in Brooklyn, to a mother who loved him with abandon and a father who gambled compulsively. Ferociously intelligent, he went to Harvard at 16 and then to war, fighting in the Philippines. He parlayed that experience into his first novel, “The Naked and the Dead.” An instant classic and a smash hit, it sold a million copies in its first year. Mailer was overnight transformed into a literary celebrity.  

The Mailer body of work alternates high craft with indifferent work. Some of his prose is forgettable, a churn of mid-century prose. Others, like the essays “The White Negro” and “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” broke new ground for non-fiction. In this, he is a peer to the likes of Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Hunter Thompson. Mailer helped found the Village Voice. He hoped his column there would be “actively disliked each week.”

“How To Come Alive,” a new documentary playing at Film Forum through July 11, has miles of footage to work with, as Mailer considered it blasphemous to turn down a talk show invitation. There are riveting reels of his confrontation with Gore Vidal on “The Dick Cavett Show” and selections from his epochal confrontation with feminists at a 1971 debate at New York’s Town Hall. Susan Sontag, Germaine Greer, and Cynthia Ozick all sparred with Mailer, and sometimes bested him.

Mailer, though, was in the main his own worst enemy. He drank, brawled incessantly, and, unforgivably, stabbed his second wife with a pen knife after a party. That earned him a stint in Bellevue’s psychiatric ward and haunted him deep into old age. He could have been writing about himself when he observes in “The Naked and the Dead” that the “natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety.” 

Mailer returned to a great war in “Armies of the Night,” about the protests against the Vietnam War mounted at the Pentagon. The difference in that case, though, was that Mailer did not appear in arms in that conflict. Instead, a generation after his own service, he appeared in demonstrations against the American GIs with whom he was once a comrade in arms. The garlands earned by “Armies of the Night” are best understood in that context.   

In any event, in an era when many writers have become practitioners of the most pious and predictable politics, Mailer’s persistent commitment to outrage — one sourced to philosophical challenge, not online algorithms — remains one way to feel alive. He ran for office alongside the journalist Jimmy Breslin to make New York City a state. His film “Maidstone” — campy, raw, barely fictional, genuinely gross — was reality television avant la lettre.

Mailer’s best work, though, was on the page. His politics were a mishmash. He voted for Democrats, but he despised political correctness and government overreach. He relished being too big to cancel. In a letter to Playboy, he wrote ​​“I don’t care if people call me a radical, a red . . . a nihilist, or even a left-conservative, but please don’t ever call me a liberal.” He befriended William Buckley and  called Castro a “genius.” He wrote  novels about Hitler and Jesus.

What is the fate of the dinosaur novelists  — white, largely Jewish, mostly male — of the last century? One fears that the likes of Bellow, Roth, and Mailer, already endangered on college syllabi, could soon go extinct. Reading their work now requires more trigger warnings than would be prudent at an armory. His literary heirs would likely denounce him, even as his mixture of brio, voice, and self-regard paved the way for today’s self-centered age.