Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer
By Richard Bradford
Bloomsbury Caravel 2023 

Of all the misogynist men of letters who dominated the American literary landscape in the second half of the 20th century, Norman Mailer was always the most galling. There’s no denying that Truman Capote could occasionally craft a good sentence. Philip Roth was sometimes able to tailor a knowing dramatic scene. Very, very rarely, Kurt Vonnegut could approach an effective comic turn. It can at least be said that sometimes John Updike was bland enough to be harmless. In the first twenty years of his writing career, Gore Vidal could semi-regularly approximate genius, and at many points in his long career, Tom Wolfe could semi-regularly actually achieve it. 

But Mailer? Fresh from World War II, he wrote a very good novel – and then spent the next fifty years churning out garbage. The Naked and the Dead was a critically-acclaimed bestseller and very much deserved to be. And virtually nothing else Mailer wrote, book or periodical, fiction or nonfiction, was any good at all. 

And it’s no use starting off a pro forma consolation by pointing out that Mailer himself was 100% certain, from the very beginning, that he was an epochal literary figure … because that consolation typically continues by pointing out that this delusion made Mailer pathetic because nobody else shared it. But despite the bricks hurled by critics for decades, the delusion of Mailer’s literary significance has always been a shared phenomenon. And unlike with so many of his contemporaries, that delusion seems to be growing with time. If old book critics weren’t as stubborn as cockroaches, the induction of Mailer into the Library of America would have seen the lot of them off the stage.

This naturally meant biographies in addition to endless reprint canonization, and Richard Bradford’s book, Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer is the latest and the shortest (it’s a third the length of J. Michael Lennon’s 2013 book, for instance). Bradford has written a small shelf’s worth of author biographies – Larkin, Highsmith, Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, Orwell – and he has a penchant that’s incredibly refreshing in the 21st century because it’s so rare: he sometimes allows himself to dislike his subjects. 

This makes Tough Guy a bracing reading experience, because Norman Mailer was intensely easy to dislike, almost from the moment of his birth. He was abrasive, abusive, startlingly stupid, and – a note that’s sounded so often in Bradford’s book that you start to expect it’ll have a co-writing credit of its own – almost completely talentless. Bradford takes a muscular but briskly chronological approach to Mailer’s life and works, and each time his plow scrapes a stone in the field, some novel crapped out in a haze of pot and pills, some hectoring editorial understandable only to its author, some longer work of wrongheaded nonfiction, he stops to glare at the offending object. These are usually passages to prise out and keep. Bradford will use protracted plot-descriptions in order to let the books hang themselves, but his analyses are also superb, whether they’re damningly brief (“Almost hilariously terrible” about much of Ancient Evenings, for instance) or more musing, as when Bradford delves into Mailer’s motivation for writing his Holocaust novel, The Castle in the Forest:

Mailer’s shock tactic of introducing us to Hitler as an awful freak is misguided and revealing. He chose to write about Hitler because he had exhausted all other exhibitions of literary self-aggrandizement. He had done the son of God so now he must deal with the ‘agent of Satan’, and he probably expected John Milton to beam down expressions of admiration.

In addition to his own reflections on all of Mailer’s work, Bradford is also dutiful at checking in on the critical world’s reactions over the decades (it obviously took an enormous amount of work to research this book, although the thing wears its research lightly and works with bantam dispatch). In this the book mimics its subject, since although Mailer always affected a dismissive disdain for the critics, he doted on every syllable they wrote about him – and always rancorously, since idiots who think themselves geniuses always think themselves misunderstood geniuses. His publications were savaged for decades by Michiko Kakutani, and as Bradford makes clear, Mailer was still petulantly resentful of that fact even near the end of his life:

Michiko Kakutani was probably the most merciless literary critic in America from the late 1970s onwards. She undermined the esteem of members of the US cultural elite by writing reviews of their work that were brilliantly convincing cases for the prosecution, and Mailer was one of her regular hapless defendants. Interviewed by Douglas Brinkley in 2005, Mailer called her a ‘threefer … Asiatic, feminist, and, ah …’ He intended to say lesbian but a sudden influx of common sense caused him to recognize the danger of revealing himself as a homophobic as well as a racist. In any event nothing was publicly known of her sexuality and in a millisecond he caught a glimpse of a libel suit. 

But as Bradford hammers home over and over again in clear, utterly unsparing prose, Mailer’s rancor, his effortless ability to be a horrible person all times in all ways, extended to every part of his life. His wives, his idols, his mistresses, his publishers, his colleagues – all suffered from knowing Mailer, and virtually none of them ever liked him (about the colleagues, Bradford insightfully writes, “It was not that they fell out or became estranged, because anything faintly resembling friendship had been fraudulent in the first place”). Time and again throughout the book, there are scenarios that have preserved their ability to repulse and horrify:

Once, when they visited his parents’ empty apartment, he demanded that they must have sex on the living room floor, and then in [his parents’] bed. She was appalled but he insisted it would be fun, as he did when a man at a party asked if he would ‘lend’ Adele to him. Once more she found the prospect repulsive, having never even spoken to the debauchee before, but she went along with it because it ‘was part of being with Norman.’ If we extend this phrase to the way that sexual assault in today’s legislature is defined as ‘manipulating someone to witness or participate in any sexual acts’, ‘being with Norman’ in the 1950s was the equivalent of now living with a sexual abuser. Hipsterdom was, for some, a lazy hedonistic version of anarchism, but for Mailer it comes across more as a smokescreen for vileness.

It’s important to note that Bradford is not simply vengeful. On the exceedingly rare occasions when Mailer wrote well, he gets full credit for it in these pages. On the even rarer occasions when he behaved well (these are seriously almost nonexistent, but that’s not a biographer’s fault), he’s treated fairly. His sparse moments of brutal self-assessment are chalked up in his favor, and his final dying days are written with some actual tenderness. Tough Guy isn’t merely a hatchet job, although that weirdly persistent canonizing cadre of fans will no doubt take it that way. Norman Mailer would certainly have sued Richard Bradford over this book, and that should stand as its strongest recommendation.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.