Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost

In 1959, Norman Mailer aired an ambition in Advertisements for Myself which he must have known and intended that the literary world would never let him for­get: to “try to hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters” (477). Since then, Mailer has written many books, several of them massive in size and scope, which his detractors have rejected as failed attempts to fulfill this promise. Writing in the New York Times Book Review on The Executioner’s Song, Joan Didion described this critical phenomenon best when she forcefully insisted: It is one of those testimonies to the tenacity of self-regard in the literary life that large numbers of people remain persuaded that Norman Mailer is no better than their reading of him. They condescend to him, they dismiss his most origi­nal work in favour of the more literal and predictable rhythms of The Armies of the Night; they regard The Naked and the Dead as a promise later broken and every book since as a quick turn for his creditors, a stalling action, a spangled substitute, tarted up to deceive, for the “big book” he cannot write. In fact, he has written this “big book” at least three times now. He wrote it the first time in 1955 with The Deer Park and he wrote it a second time in 1965 with An American Dream and he wrote it a third time in 1967 with Why Are We in Vietnam? and now, with The Executioner’s Song, he has probably written it a fourth. (Didion)

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