The Lives of Norman Mailer.

The Lives of Norman Mailer. Carl Rollyson. Paragon House, $26.95. The temptation for most is to think of Norman Mailer as a sort of heroic flop: the last autodidact, if you will, the novelist as philosopher king--supreme arbiter and embodiment of the history, culture, and politics of his age. He is a boozing, brawling, womanizing, self-infatuated Balzac or Dostoyevsky for post-World War II America. In the kitchen of his Brooklyn Heights brownstone, writes biographer Rollyson (who has never been there), Mailer has a homemade photo montage of himself and Hemingway, previous American incumbent to the throne.

The immediate problem, of course, is that for all the millions of words Mailer has churned out since The Naked and the Dead made him an instant literary celebrity in 1948 at the age of 25, even so fervid an admirer as Rollyson is hard put to name one entirely successful work of fiction. From The Deer Park and Barbary Shore in the fifties (derided in The New Yorker for their "monolithic, flawless badness") to ponderous monostrosities like last fall's Harlot's Ghost, Mailer's novels often read like parodies for scores--and sometimes hundreds--of pages.

Has the man ever created a protagonist who wasn't essentially a fantasy version of his already fantastic public persona? It's hard to think of one. Has he ever created a female character who was anything but a collection of orifices or a punching bag? Can't think of one. Has he added a phrase, image, or metaphor to the language? Not one. Ever told a story that can be summarized with a straight face? No. Is it possible to imagine weeping over a Mailer novel? Hardly. Laughing? Never.

So what's this all about? Why has Rollyson, who teaches art at the City University of New York, written the third biography of Mailer in 10 years (a mostly scissors and paste job--Rollyson himself never got an interview)? Why is The Washington Monthly bothering to review it? And why, dear reader, are you reading this fool thing?

Essentially because Mailer's one successful character is Mailer himself. Or, as Rollyson puts it close to the end of what is, for all one's skepticism, a fascinating book:

What other American writer approaching 70 is still being asked to prove himself and has actually abetted the question? . . . For four decades, each new [Mailer] work has been greeted with great anticipation and skepticism. This has gone on so long that there will be no end to it until there is an end to Mailer.

Simple momentum accounts for part of the Mailer legend. Literary notoriety, once achieved, is harder to lose than other kinds. If Milli Vanilli wrote books, we'd be reading their confessions today. Once enough readers are persuaded (or bullied) into thinking an author is important, they tend to keep buying. Next to making it one the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, it's the surest meal ticket around.

Schmoozing has a lot to do with it, too. An indefatigable self-promoter, Mailer is the Madonna of American letters. That is, he became famous partly by acting famous. Judging by Rollyson's concise second- and third-hand accounts of Mailer's various friendships, feuds, marriages, love affairs, fist-fights, political campaigns, bad movies and assorted minor felonies, he can be charming, he can be a monster, and he can be an unmitigated clown. The only thing Mailer apparently can't be is dull. Sure, he's made an ass of himself on national TV--as Rollyson duly notes --but he also appeared there early and often.

Indeed, while Rollyson is coy abut spelling it out, that's pretty much how he makes his case for Mailer's importance: as a literary performance artist, a Christo of the psyche, a rock star without a guitar. At this late date, anyway, that's pretty much the only case that can be made. Rollyson writes:

To find his true identity, Mailer would have to murder that nice young man his mother had taken such pains to raise. She had indulged him, taken possession of him in such an absolute way that he would always be her boy. She had made him into a "tot of destiny," (to use [Robert] Linder's description of the psychopath's mother, who imbues her child with a grandiose self-image). Not finding a world co-extensive with his will, the child, as in Mailer's case, "acts out" in infantile ways, not having learned to cope with society at large.

Actually, Mailer's grandiosity, his often astonishing energy, mood swings, manic charm, occasional paranoia, history of drug and alcohol abuse, and violent outbursts suggest a different diagnosis altogether--one having nothing to do with the pseudo-Freudian humbug for which biographer and subject share a taste. Suffice it to say that both intellectually and imaginatively, Mailer was shaped by the fifties, that oft-maligned period extending from 1946 until roughly 1968--not coincidentally his own creative annus mirabilus. With political radicalism more or less a given for a would-be artist whose early models were John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell, Mailer's literary personality coalesced around the three great, and now mostly defunct, "-isms" of the period: existentialism, Marxism, and Freudianism.

Never a consistent thinker, Mailer tended toward highly idiosyncratic versions of all three. Anti-authoritarian to his core, he also had (and has) a formidable appetite for power that kept him more or less constantly at war with himself. What may have been Mailer's philosophical nadir was the infamous essay. "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster" in the 1957 book Advertisements for Myself. "The psychopath murders--if he has the courage," he argued, "out of the necessity to purge his violence, for if he cannot empty his hatred then he cannot love." Two 18-year=old punks who beat to death a candy store owner, therefore, cannot be called cowards, "for one murders not only a weak 50-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police." (Mailer treats "Negro" and "psychopath," as synonyms throughout, although he uses the latter as term of praise.)

If morally grotesque, Mailer's ruminations also proved grotesquely prophetic. He was at his best during the great coming-apart of the late sixties, when his personal nuttiness and the nation's briefly became one. Driven by alimony and child-support payments, Mailer was forced to put fiction aside for a time for what he regarded as mere journalism--producing under terrific deadline pressure his two best books, The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago.

Unfortunately, Mailer seems never to have given himself enough credit for what he accomplished in those books. Either that or he never again found the right topic. Still motivated, Rollyson shows, by the need to support himself, five wives, and eight children, his subsequent nonfiction books became as blowsy and self-indulgent as the worst of his novels. The arguable exception. The Executioner's Song, a 1,000-plus-page "nonfiction novel" about Utah murderer Gary Gilmore, turns out to have an odd pedigree indeed. Rollyson's account of the book's genesis makes it clear that most of the research--including all of the interviews with Gilmore himself--were done by Mailer's friend Larry Schindler. A researcher named Jere Herzenberg appears to have done the organizing and outlining. Maybe that's part of the reason the book reads like nothing Mailer's written before or since.

The moral incoherence of the book, however, is reflective of Mailer's lifelong, naive obsession with violence. He devotes a few hundred words of Dick and Jane to the victims and hundreds of thousands to the creep.

In retrospect, it wasn't surprising that Mailer got taken for a ride by a murderer with a fancy prose style. Nor that the New York press delighted in ripping the author to shreds after his protege, jailhouse author Jack Abbott, knifed a young waiter to death on the eve of his own book's publication in 1981. Mailer had spent a lifetime asking for it. "If Abbott played Mailer like a violin," Rollyson comments shrewdly, "it was because Mailer had taught him to use the instrument."

it's hard for a man Mailer's age to impersonate a rebel, much less a sexual outlaw, in the age of Axl Rose, Madonna, and AIDS. The mass-market cult of MTV has made it all seem a bit passe anyway--just so much play-acting with disastrous personal and cultural consequences. Even so, Mailer remains a fascinating and enigmatic figure in spite of himself. There may even be a way for him to achieve the literary immortality he seeks. Mailer's unexpurgated autobiography could yet make him the Samuel Pepys of his age. If only his publisher could bribe him away from those God-awful novels.