Norman Mailer

"Mailer had always thought it senseless to undertake an attack unless you made certain it was printed, for otherwise you were left with a determined enemy who was an unmarked man, and therefore able to repay you at leisure and by the lift of an eyebrow."

When I saw Norman Mailer speak at Harvard earlier this year, he was awfully frail. When he canceled his scheduled part in October's New Yorker Festival, it seemed ominous. And when Philip Roth's new book suggested that Mailer was next to go, it sounded likely. Well, now it looks like the foreshadowing wasn't just hokum. Mailer's gone, and with him he takes a giant chunk of literary heart.

Whatever his personal flaws were (and there were many, as the ex-wives and various stabbees could tell you), he was always fierce. Self-aggrandizing and obnoxious, sure. But he never shied from doing anything in print that he wanted to do. And up until last February at least, he was still prodding, prodding, prodding, trying to goad people into reacting to him as entertainingly as possible. It's like he never stopped being the Mailer of Armies of the Night (always one of my favorites), pissing off as many people as necessary to get to the exact intersection of politics and literary theater. We're losing the guys willing to do this without publicists, without focus groups. The mid-20th century writers were never meant to keep this energy up forever, but it still hurts to see it all dying, bit by bit.