Scanning the Bookshelf

Street art acquired a new level of legitimacy during the last presidential election with the embrace of Shepard Fairey's Obama images. Back in the 1970s, when graffiti artists were first "writing" on subway cars and walls, precious few people regarded them as artists. Most saw them as criminals. But one prominent writer argued their case in an insightful, eloquent and sometimes soaringly poetic essay for a book containing Jon Naar's photographs. The book, published in 1974, was "The Faith of Graffiti" and the essay was by Norman Mailer.

A new edition (It Books, $19.99) reminds just how good an essayist, journalist and critic Mailer could be. Delving into the psychology of this kind of artist, Mailer wrote: "At night, the walls of cars sit there like the mechanical beast of omnibus possessed of soul. ... What a presence. What a consecutive set of iron sleeping beasts down all the corrals of the yard, and the graffiti writers stealthy as the near-to-silent sound of their movements working up and down the lines of cars, some darting in to squiggle a little toy of a name on 20 cars — their nerve has no larger surge — others embarking on the first or their hundred-and-first masterpiece, daring the full enterprise of an hour of living with this tension after all the other hours of waiting. ... "

No matter what your position on the moral efficacy of street art, there's no denying the power of this prose. Mailer, who died in 2007, always thought of himself as a novelist first, from the time of his major critical and commercial success with his first novel, "The Naked and the Dead," in 1948. And he was a pioneer in the transfer of prose in the style of a novel to the world of journalism — which became known as New Journalism — along with Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and others. But it was probably as a public intellectual and literary celebrity that he was best known, feuding with Gore Vidal on television, running for mayor of New York or making a splash with his coverage of the 1968 political convention, "Miami and the Siege of Chicago."

Mailer could be pugnacious and obnoxiously macho, but he backed up his celebrityhood with substance, as "The Faith of Graffiti" reveals. His writings often displayed remarkable powers of observation about the workings of American society, which is what made his coverage of political conventions better than virtually anyone else's. He could apply a novelist's observations about character, place and social dynamics to political events. His greatest moment, in that arena, was probably his 1967 book about a massive march against the Vietnam War in the nation's capital, "The Armies of the Night," which carried the great subtitle "History as a Novel, the Novel as History."

This hybrid of journalism, fiction, autobiography and history earned him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. In it, he turned himself into a kind of comic hero of his nonfiction novel, writing of himself in the third person (with a stated nod to the most famous autobiography told in the third person, "The Education of Henry Adams"). He depicted himself as a kind of wise fool, who was "an egotist of the most startling misproportions, outrageously and often unhappily self-assertive, yet in command of a detachment classic in its severity."

"Armies" brings the people and the atmosphere of the anti-war movement alive.

It captures the spirit of the movement in all its complexity, as a coalition of numerous personalities and points of view — and does so in a way no straightforward history could.

In "Armies" and elsewhere, Mailer generally depicted himself as a man prone to excesses, a writer in the romantic mold who championed radical individualism — the source of his admiration for the street artist. And critics and the mass media were in agreement on that, too. But the relationship between a famous writer's image and the person who lives day to day can be a complex thing, as a new memoir, Dwayne Raymond's "Mornings With Mailer: Recollections of a Friendship" (Harper Perennial, $13.99), shows us in its charming and poignant way.

In 2003, Mailer hired Raymond — who, like the writer, was a longtime resident of Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod — to be a kind of research and all-around assistant. Raymond was making his living waiting tables, but had previously worked in various capacities as a writer and editor. Mailer needed help with what turned out to be voluminous research for his novel about the young Hitler, "The Castle in the Forest." Published the year that Mailer died, it was his first major work of fiction in more than 10 years and turned out to be one of Mailer's best.

He became more than an assistant, cooking meals for Mailer and his sixth wife, Norris Church Mailer, whom he married in 1980. And Raymond became a close confidant of the family, embraced by Mailer's nine children as well.

Raymond intermittently points to the gap between the Mailer he had known about and the Mailer he came to know. He raises this issue in relation to himself, since Raymond is openly gay and had read that Mailer had antipathy toward gays. On this, he writes, "Norman was anything but bigoted, and as far from homophobic as a man could be. It forever amazed me that such untruths about him prevail. If anything, Norman was the consummate male because he had no apprehension about gay men. ... He was gentle about my relationship with Thomas. ..." And, Thomas, who is a carpenter, ends up doing work for the Mailers, too.

From a firsthand observer like Raymond, you get a view of a writer you simply don't from a more formal biography. There was the obsessive nature of Mailer's research for a book. He had Raymond help him track down hundreds of books on topics for "The Castle in the Forest," from every aspect of Hitler's life to the care of honeybees. Then, there was Mailer's happy marriage to Norris and his deep attachment to all of his children (eight biological, one adopted).

A telling segment of the book details his decision to appear in TV's "The Gilmore Girls" in an episode for which a part was written for him, simply because it would help his son's career as an actor. When the offer came, Raymond writes, "Norman wrestled with the idea for a day of two, and finally agreed to do it, on the condition that his son Stephen, a fine and accomplished actor, be cast in the part opposite him, as a reporter interviewing 'Norman Mailer,' and that the TV executives agree to pay Stephen as much as they paid Norman." They agreed to his terms.

Mailer was quick to use his fame, as Raymond points out, if it would help one of his children. He may have had an outsized ego, but the Mailer that emerges from these pages isn't someone fixated on himself. His last years seem to have been relatively mellow ones, too — perhaps happier ones than those when he was at the height of his literary celebrity.

To find out more about Robert L. Pincus and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM