According to Norman
Nicholas Harman
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE SON by Norman Mailer
Abacus, £14, pp. 242
THE LAST PARTY by Adele Mailer
Blake, £16.99, pp. 380 Norman Mailer was born to compete. His friends blame his name: to be Male is fine, to be Malest would confirm his own belief, but if you are comparatively Mailer you must prove it. Maybe that is what has made an authentic New York Jewish intellectual pose as a pseudo-Irish bruiser, ever since, as a left-leaning young ex- soldier, he completed the Great American War Novel. To mark its highbrow creden- tials he picked a title from Eliot's The Waste Land, and to mark his fighting posture he picked the words Eliot attribut- ed to the bisexual Tiresias. Intellectuals, embarrassed by the cover, tend to handle The Naked and the Dead with distaste. But it still sells well to those who like that kind of thing, and is probably the best book they will ever read.
Fifty years on Mailer is still battling, with the chutzpah that is part of his enormous, uncomfortable talent. This time he goes into the ring not with Jesus Christ, a non- combatant, but with five formidable literary rivals. The proximate rival is Joseph Heller, author of that even Greater American War Novel, Catch 22, who rewrote, as God Knows, the Bible story of King David in modern Brooklyn dialect. The other four wrote lives of the most famous Jew of all. Mailer adds a fifth Gospel, according to Norman. Rome and Canterbury can hold onto their fatwas. You could hardly imag- ine a less Satanic set of verses.
Heller could plausibly make God and His supreme military commander trade insults across the newly occupied territories, like a pair of cab jocks in the New York canyons. That (for those not Orthodoxly Jewish) was legitimate fun, and added its own truth to the fierce old Hebrew legend. But you can't muck about with Jesus. The four real Gospels are, in the King James version, shining master- pieces of English prose, and in almost any version the most persuasive of all religious texts. Mailer, who probably missed them in his youth, has in his ripe years clearly been bowled over by them. Fussed, like any attentive reader, by the discrepancies between the Evangelists' various accounts, and by their omissions, misunderstandings and occasional crudities, he imagines how Christ himself might undo some of the knots tied by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
We did much the same at my school, when teachers of what was then called Divinity made us retell Bible stories in our own wretched prose. More recently, hordes of self-publicising Christians have cobbled together books or films suggesting a Jesus who was feminist, or homosexual, or knowingly fraudulent, or who screwed Mary Magdalene, or almost anything that could occur to minds driven potty by the colour supplements. Mailer, for once, is guilty of better taste. He avoids such vul- garities, and declines even the subtler temptations to explain away the miracles, or make the Devil the hero.
To be sure, there are blurry bits — he thinks Gadarene is a place, not an adjec- tive, fudges the Resurrection, and sinks now and then into half-timbered English. (`My garment was imbued with entreaties', for goodness' sake.) But on the whole, coming fresh to the Gospels, he respectful- ly comments on them. Faced with the finest of the poems, the 'Benedictions' in the Ser- mon on the Mount, he stops messing and echoes Matthew word for word.
Professional Christians might find his arguments interesting. Those who have never read the Gospels and wish to check out Mailer's sources might discover that they have missed a masterpiece, just as (according to the television people) viewers are stimulated to try the real Middlemarch after watching a travesty on their little screens. I, though, was brought up as an ordinary public-school Anglican — not to believe, but to enjoy, the Bible. Mailer's Gospel gives the originals no contest. Several of his books have been long, dull failures. This is his first short, dull one.
Now for his private life. It is fashionable to deplore intrusions into the bedrooms and yachts of the rich and famous. But they, and those around them, keep inviting us for a look, and we leap in as soon as the door is ajar. Mailer, the avid chronicler of American violence, was once notoriously violent himself. In 1962 he stabbed his wife with a three-inch penknife, near the heart. She almost died. He did time in a mental hospital, she in a physical one. The then Mrs Mailer (second out of six to date) now tells her unpleasant story. Mailer had more than his name and his drunkenness to keep him nasty in the home. First, he worked there, which is always tough for cohabitors — and like any good writer he worked hard and nervously, living in private as in public inside the American extremes that have been his subject-matter, heavyweight boxing to casual murder to the exploration of outer space. He, and she, got too drunk at parties, and he maddened the poor woman by stopping to make notes of new ideas when he should have been getting a taxi.
Adele Mailer was the sort of woman such men liked to be seen with, and some- times married, back in the simple Sixties. She was, she insists, an artist, making papier-mache models for smart Fifth Avenue stores. She was also, she equally insists, a hot Latin lover, as keen as Mailer on boasting about sex. In her book, though, the only talent she displays is for name- dropping. (One of her pre-Mailer lovers, for instance, was Jack Kerouac, a writer then quite famous, now deservedly forgot- ten.) Yet the stabbing for which she achieved her Warholic moment of fame is told plainly. They were drunk, she was taunting him, they had driven each other Crazy — no revelations, just an honest retelling of a squalid old tale. It probably did her good to write it down, but it would not do you much good to read it.
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