Norman Mailer's murderous misogyny
Imagine a novelist who hated black people with a deep, intense loathing. Imagine he reacted to the civil rights movement by writing a raving, howling book-length polemic saying it was “evil” and wanted to “destroy white people.” Imagine he took this loathing so far that one night, in a drunken drugged-up rage, he stabbed a black person in the stomach and nearly killed him, and was only let off because the black guy chose not to press charges.
What this novelist died, the first line of his obituaries – all of them, everywhere – would have described him as racist. Any praise for his novels – no matter how brilliant – would have been tempered with extreme discomfort.
Norman Mailer is that novelist – only his hatred was of women, and the obituaries have cheerfully glossed over it. His deep fear and loathing of women permeates his work. His book ‘The Prisoner of Sex’ is the most vicious and absurd attempt to puncture the fledgling feminist movement I’ve ever read: he accuses the feminist movement of wanting to “destroy men”, and more. And this hatred drove him to act. His second wife Adele Morales described in her memoir his cruel sexist abuse, how he pressed her into sex she didn’t want – and the night he stabbed her, nearly to death.
But hating women to the point of violently abusing and stabbing one of them is, it seems, still just one of those things we wave away if a man is talented. Misogyny is still something we choose not to see if it is accompanied by sparkle and wit. The obits deal with it in a throwaway line, or – worse – treat it as a laddish affectation, another reason to admire him. I’m not saying that having repulsive political values renders your artistic work void: T.S. Eliot. Ezra Pound, D.W. Griffiths, Leni Reifenstahl… there are plenty of great artists with foul politics. But we don’t gloss over it. We don’t act like Griffith’s deep racism is a laddish joke. And we shouldn’t act as if Mailer’s murderous misogyny is not a repulsive and revolting stain on his life.
You can comment on this article, and read the comments of others, here.
