HOWZAT

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.

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