Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead"

 Somewhere in my boxes of paper are my notes on reading Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. I knew of Mailer - who did not in the Seventies? - had tried reading the serialization of ancient Evenings in Playboy and did not get further than the first page (first paragraph?). But I had heard of his World War Two novel, it was available in the prison library, so I read it. I was left wondering why he was thought of as a great writer. I much preferred James Jones' The Thin Red Line; also read in prison.

 Rob Madole's Norman Mailer’s Ripe Garbage has this to say (amongst a whole of pertinent things) about Mailer's writing in The Naked and the Dead:

There’s a comic-strip flatness to the writing, it’s true, and a clotting reliance on adjectives, but in the stroboscopic energy of its attentiveness, the cinematic density of its visual data and rhythmic thickets of prose, there’s something undeniably arresting. Mailer was no virtuoso, but he possessed an assurance and keyboard-clacking bravado with his instrument that radiates on practically every page of the forty-eight books he published in his lifetime, whether bizarre stream-of-consciousness poetry collections like 1962’s Deaths for the Ladies or miscellanea gathered in self-consciously curated retrospectives like 2004’s Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969. To the same degree he was willing to live a life in extremis so long as it yielded workable writing material, he was also always prepared to launch himself into a solo, to push his narrating organ to its absolute limits even for the most insignificant occasions of public display. In his twilight years he liked to say he was driven by an inner “navigator,” and he charted his career’s course by going whichever direction the navigator perceived there to be “energy.” This translated into an aesthetic that, while lacking a certain quality of discrimination—in The Naked and the Dead, Mailer uses the word “gelid” four separate times—covered for it with verbal velocity and high-wire recklessness. At those sporadic moments when he’s at his crackling, self-advertising best—Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, The Executioner’s Song, extended stretches of The Naked and the Dead, smaller stretches of The Deer Park and Harlot’s Ghost—he does achieve something of the charisma of a whirling matador, nigh impossible to tear your eyes away from.

What I recall is feeling as if I had eaten something indigestible. I had read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five in high school, James Jones' From Here to Eternity about the same time or during college, and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 after law school, maybe as late as the Nineties. They had much to say about the horrors of life, especially army life, in ways that were original and with more feeling. Maybe there is a prize in being first to publish.

Mailer is troublesome to the extent we give him the influence given to Hemingway. I have not and cannot do this. Reading Madole's essay only convinces me of this. It also showed me I was quite right to have stopped reading Ancient Evenings.

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