Great artist, bad person. How does one go about separating an artist’s work from their personal life?
Consider Norman Mailer.
Anointed “the new Hemingway” after the publication of “The Naked and The Dead,” Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize twice – once for nonfiction with “The Armies of the Night” and once for fiction with “The Executioner’s Song.”
Mailer also had six wives. In 1960, after a night of heavy drinking at a party, he twice stabbed his second wife, Adele, with a knife, narrowly missing her heart. He was sent to the psych unit at Bellevue Hospital and released after 17 days. Later, he was put on trial for third-degree assault after Adele refused to press charges.
Thus opens Jeff Zimbalist’s feature documentary film, “How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer.” The film, part of this year’s Jewish Book & Arts Festival, will be screened on Monday, Nov. 11, at 7:30 p.m., in the Kaplan Theatre at the Evelyn Rubenstein JCC.
In making the film, Zimbalist had full access to Mailer’s family and their archive. We see the writer through intimate and never-before-seen footage, outtakes, audio recordings and interviews. The revealing portrait is often quite disturbing.
In “Advertisements for Myself,” Mailer wrote, “An author’s personality can help or hurt the attention readers give to his books. … I started as a generous but very spoiled boy and I seem to have turned into a slightly punch-drunk and ugly club fighter who can fight clean and fight dirty but likes to fight.”
Mailer believed one shouldn’t repress feelings, including violent and sexual impulses. “Nobody speaks their truth anymore,” he says in the film. “We’re becoming duller, more conventional, more unimaginative.”
The film is structured around Mailer’s rules for coming alive. These rules include:
• Don’t be a nice Jewish boy (Consider that Norman Mailer was born Nachem Malech Mailer)
• Be more wrong than you’re right
• Be willing to die for an idea
• Never let life get too safe
Mailer romanticized violence as a manifestation of genuine feelings. He saw violence as part of the human experience.
In considering whether one should separate an artist’s work from their personal life, some say we should assess an artwork based on its internal aesthetic merits alone. We shouldn’t bring anything from outside the artwork to bear on how we experience it.
Others argue that there is more to a book than its text, and there is more to a painting than the way its visual forms are put together on a canvas. There’s context, history and background.
Mailer was a deeply American – as opposed to Jewish – writer. In a contemporary America, where Jewish left-liberalism has come under attack from both the right and the left, it would be interesting to think about how Mailer would react.
“How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer” is well done and should spark lively post-film discussion. At the least, it will stimulate viewers, especially those who have never read Mailer, to pick up one of his books.
This post was originally published on here
