Bad Acts and a Checkered Past
by Cindy Layton
After Random House declined a proposal to publish a compilation of some of Norman Mailer’s political essays, Michael Mailer, the son of the famed author, wrote this response which appeared in The Boston Globe.
The younger Mailer muses that Random House passed because of the publisher’s
fear of controversy rather than any actual offense.
He speculates,
hearsay about concerns from cultural critics who let my father’s checkered past — dueling with the 1970s women’s movement, stabbing his wife Adele with a penknife in 1960 — jaundice their view of future publications…
Mailer believes
authors committing bad acts does not invalidate their cultural legacies. Their work should be judged by what they wrote.
In other words, his father’s transgressions are not sufficient basis for Random House to distance itself from the work.
Or, as he describes it, canceling his father.
It’s an interesting question to pose. In the hierarchy of values which takes precedence: the author’s notable body of work expanding over a lengthy period, establishing for him a cultural legacy or, the author’s incidents of violence, and views, written and otherwise, that perpetuate an acceptance of violence and male superiority?
First, let’s read into these word choices.
My father’s checkered past.
A checkered past brings to mind a person who spent too much time at the casino, someone who dabbled in grifting or was notoriously unfaithful. A checkered past is a vague reference to something that may or may not include an actual offense.
Stabbing his wife with a penknife.
While this is a factual description it declines to note the penknife severed her pericardium and nearly killed her. This was Norman Mailer’s reported response at the time:
“Mailer addressed the shocked guests standing over Morales's prostrate body: "Don't touch her. Let the bitch die."[i]
Should that “jaundice” anyone’s view? For much of his career it didn’t. This incident was widely characterized as the result of the author’s artistic nature.
The event is paired with his father’s other checkered past
dueling with the 1970s women’s movement
which suggests a level of equivalency and minimizes the scale of it. Michael Mailer makes the case that attempted murder should take a backstage to the historical and cultural significance of his father’s work. His many writings, even those on the status of women, should never be viewed in a context in which he gravely injures his wife in an act of domestic violence.
Still he was canceled.
Michael Mailer informs the reader that the project was revived by, (surprise!) Skyhorse,
a publisher that seems to relish controversy (they published Woody Allen’s memoir after it was dropped by Hachette following staff protests, and Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth after W.W. Norton dropped it following accusations against Bailey of sexual assault and misconduct.*
He continues -
The United States has spent the last few years eating its own. It needs to stop trying to cancel great writers like Philip Roth (for misogyny and bad relations with women), John Updike (ditto), Saul Bellow (the same again), William Styron (cultural appropriation), and, yes, my father, Norman Mailer, all of whom made essential contributions for the best part of half a century to our cultural vibrancy,..
His lengthy list of authors accused of misogyny, etc., reads like the detention list from high school. Roth, Updike, Bellow, and Mailer, shrouded in their own rarified air, should be heralded for their contributions with a footnote annotation as to their indiscretions and “bad relationships with women.”
The cultural legacy and the bad acts are entwined if the bearer of such legacy is one whose business uses words to influence others. Sometimes the writing justifies the bad act. Sometimes the writing is the bad act. Michael Mailer himself notes this when he references “dueling with the women’s movement,” a nod to Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex from 1971.
Depending on where one stands on the dividing line of who is harmed by all of this will influence one’s perspective. If you’re in the men’s club of white American writers whose back list may not stand the scrutiny of the “woke mob,” due to your bad relationships with women then you’re clearly on one side. Miller tells us it’s a big club so take pride in that, I guess.
If you’re the estate of such an author, it’s in your interest to have the work stand on its own and not be paired with “bad acts.”
If you’re Random House maybe you’ve made the assessment that the marketplace of books, which is what you deal in, is not based on a political principle, but on an economic one, and it won’t support the rehashing of an author with a “checkered past” enough to justify the effort.
Who is served by unearthing notions from past decades about biology-as-destiny, aggressive masculinity, and the inferiority of others? Perhaps 2022 is casting a harsh glow on this rat pack of writers and their bad acts, but the least prominent consideration in these calculations is the impact of the violence, and the espoused ideas about violence, on actual people.
* I wrote about Blake Bailey in this earlier post:
https://www.actsofrevision.com/home/times-up-publishing-world-1
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabbing_of_Adele_Morales_by_Norman_Mailer#cite_note-video2010-4
