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an exclusive extract from Mailer's final book that begins with his thoughts
on the creator’s place in history
The first problem with this “uncommon” conversation is that its main elements
are so commonplace. The last time I spoke to Norman Mailer on the telephone
he was bawling at me in the carrying tones of the hard-of-hearing about his
1997 novel The Gospel According to the Son. “Jesus, Christopher,” he yelled,
“you have no idea what a real revolutionary this guy from Nazareth really
was.”
One has been hearing this sort of thing for years, originally from the
now-defunct “liberation theology” school and most recently in a dense
pamphlet from Terry Eagleton. And now here comes a load more of it, elicited
by the patient Mailer scholar Michael Lennon:
“Q: You said that dogs have souls.
A: Yes.
Q: Then I assume that both sides have enlisted them. What about the other
animals? Are you ready to say that some are on God’s side? Are the eagles
and the doves? The vultures and the snakes.
A: To enter these matters is equal to philosophical free fall.”
I’ll say it is. (One is tempted to say that it’s equivalent to barking.) But
more interesting is what Mailer goes on to add: “For instance, my belief in
God and the Devil comes, to a good extent, from the fact that the majority
of people, through all of recorded time, have believed in both evil spirits
and good ones and, finally, in a god and a devil accompanied by angels and
demons. If the majority has such beliefs, one does well to keep some respect
for such notions.”
Here the absorbing question — apart from that odd shift from the upper to the
lower case — is: did it take religion to get Mailer, of all people, to yearn
to blend in with the vast majority? (Lennon’s next question, however, occurs
as if nothing had happened. “Do you relate any of your ideas to modern
concepts of disease?” he blandly inquires.)
When people exclaim “My God”, it is, in fact, often a highly personal deity
(personal to them, I mean) that they are evoking. Individuals create gods in
their own image. Mailer, of course, would not be behindhand in the business
of confecting idiosyncratic gods to suit his own requirements. He is in
character in taking the chance to point this out early on, and in a highly
Mailerish way, too: “I can hear the obvious rejoinder: ‘There’s Norman
Mailer, an artist of dubious high rank looking to give himself honour,
nobility and importance by speaking of God as an artist.’ I’m perfectly
aware that that accusation is there to be brought in. All I say here may
indeed be no more than a projection of my own egotistical preferences.”
Oh, come on Norman, who is going to believe a thing like that? (Actually, the
word around certain parts of Brooklyn and Provincetown had been that Mailer
had finally succumbed this time, and really did think he was God after all.)
He is best on, of all subjects, the matter of heaven and hell. As he usefully
points out, moments of ecstasy or perfection in our lives are almost by
definition brief and transitory, “whereas we can be in hell for months, even
years; we can live in towering depression. Hell, therefore, is much more
available to human beings as a set of stages”.
Occasionally, there are glimpses of the ramifications of this subject in
Mailer’s other work. He tells us that he set the stage version of The Deer
Park in hell for the above reason. Lennon takes him up on religious echoes
in two of his novels — Ancient Evenings and An American Dream. The author
muses at some length on the question of suicide, alludes to The
Executioner’s Song and says that he believes the murderer Gary Gilmore
desired to die because he didn’t want his physical body to outlive his soul,
and was convinced that if he remained in prison his soul would indeed
expire. And he never misses a chance to work one of his favorite literary
tropes — the hatred of technology — into this cosmic discussion, referring
to it quite unironically as “the most advanced, extreme, and brilliant
creation of the Devil”.
It comes as no surprise to find Mailer embracing a form of Manicheanism,
pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent
stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of
this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct
possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the
late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become
rolled into one. “How can we not face up to the fact that if God is
All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.”
Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled “theologians”, whereas
it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers,
have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the
probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as “karmic
reassignment”) manages to fall slightly below the level of those
undergraduate talk sessions.The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in
closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: “ In
different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to
communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in
capitalism. (As was the Devil!)”
I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as
the author of Harlot’s Ghost and The Armies of the Night.
Game theory
Who but the sports-mad Mailer would liken the battle between God and the Devil
to a game of American football? The contest, for sure, has with own laws (so
that after God and the Devil “tackle a guy, they don’t kick him in the
head”), but each side is not above cheating — with God breaking the rules
occasionally by throwing in “a miracle”. Strangely, Mailer doesn’t mention
Jesus in this agonising analogy, but then the notion of the “super-sub” may
be an image too far even for him.
ON GOD: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer with Michael Lennon
Continuum £16.99 pp240
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
