Across the pond

While I have been complaining of feeling like death’s door, laid low by the very trivial bug that is doing the rounds, two of my contemporaries have actually died. Within a couple of days of each other. And co-incidentally of the same final illness, kidney failure.  Both were swashbuckling risk-takers who might easily have managed to kill themselves years ago. In fact, they died quickly and relatively peacefully in bed.

Norman Mailer managed to make it to 84 despite his many excesses. And was writing prolifically up until the end. In 1960, when I was living in New York, he was challenging death by walking the parapet of his high rise Manhattan apartment while half pissed and by swapping punches in late night brawls with men bigger them him. He was pushing the boundaries in all sorts of directions, not all of them acts of high courage. He used a knife on one of his wives, nearly killing her, and beat up another so badly that she was lucky not be maimed.

Though there is universal agreement that The Naked and the Dead the war novel he wrote as a young man, is one of the best war novels of all time, there is less agreement about whether Mailer ranks with the greats of American literature. The long Guardian obituary by James Campbell makes the case for, demonstrating how in his fiction and in his outstanding journalism he was addressing the vital issues facing the Americans of his generation. The Guardian also carried the most pungent anti verdict, a short article by Joan Smith, who rates him as ‘a sexist, homophobic reactionary’. Her concluding sentence packs a punch which would have put Mohamed Ali out for the count:

More grand reactionary than great writer, Mailer was a faux-radical who used the taboo-breaking atmosphere of the 60s as cover for a career of lifelong self-promotion.

My own verdict is somewhere in the middle. Mailer’s political views were a mixture of reactionary and revolutionary. And as a writer he was deeply in the macho tradition of writers like Hemingway. But he was totally serious about pushing the boundaries of writing and experimenting. He pushed the notion of the stream of consciousness initiated by James Joyce and Henry Miller to further extremes. This involves temporarily suspending the critical faculty and allowing the pen to take dictation from the unconscious. This technique can produce a lot of rubbish but it led Mailer to new insights, and passages of beauty and wisdom. Some of the earliest efforts can be found in Cannibals and Christians.

John Gough, my cousin, who died on Monday aged 67, did not spend much time in his life reading books, let alone writing them. He was five years younger than me, the eldest child of my mother’s sister. He went to grammar school when I was at my most studious, discovering in the world of books, lives far more interesting than I could observe in Wolverhampton. John, by contrast, wanted to have a good time, to taste life, and in his own kind of way to push the boundaries. To be his own man and make his own mark.

He did OK, making himself a tidy sum as a speculative builder. Then came a recession and he promptly lost it all in one fell swoop. He went to Canada, made a fresh start and establishing a new life. Back in England some twenty years ago he was struck down by a massive heart attack. Which left him incapable of doing any more building work. But he never lost his zest for life and his ability to convey that zest to the people around him. Fortified from time to time by that glass of whisky, which he was not supposed to drink.  

Tonight, despite this dratted bug, I shall raise a glass of whisky myself and toast Norman Mailer and John Gough who both lived their lives to the full.