Norman Mailer: A Double Life by J Michael Lennon – review

After the 1948 publication of The Naked and the Dead (the bestselling novel that the British Labour attorney general Hartley Shawcross described in the House as "filthy, lewd and revolting" and George Orwell called "the best book of the last war yet"), Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was in the public eye (and often sticking his finger in it) for the best part of 60 years. Having nursed an outsize ego and written several books a thousand pages long, he'd have thought it appropriate that his literary executor and archivist, Professor J Michael Lennon, should have come up with a 900-page authorised biography nearly as frank as the subject himself.

Lennon gives us a riveting blow-by-blow account of a vigorous life that involved six wives, nine children, more mistresses than Leporello could have recalled, more than 40 books and more than 700 interviews. The blows ranged through the metaphorical ones Mailer handed out to presidents whose performances offended him (most particularly Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon) and the actual ones inflicted on various wives (he nearly knifed one to death and threatened to throw another out of an upstairs window) to the notorious blowjob in the 1955 novel The Deer Park, something of a first in mainstream fiction and a blow for freedom of speech.

Mailer was fascinated by the early days of great men (in old age he wrote about both Picasso's and Hitler's), and his own upbringing helps explain the contradictions of his career. A highly intelligent outsider, he was the only son of relatively well-off Jewish immigrants. His mother, Fan, the daughter of a distinguished rabbi, came directly to New Jersey from Lithuania, knocking a decade off her age as a teenager. From her he inherited confidence and ambition, and received unconditional love. His father, Barney, arrived in New York via South Africa and service in the first world war. Trained as an accountant, Barney was still a British citizen when Norman was born. Barney was a dapper figure with an English accent, whose gambling led him into debt and larceny. From him his son inherited his risk-taking, as well as his taste for three-piece pinstriped suits.

Norman grew up during the depression in Brooklyn, and became a top student with a special interest in technology, particularly aeronautical engineering. A voracious reader, he moved in his teens from the realists James T Farrell, John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos to the men who became his lifelong heroes, DH Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway.

He became a secular Jew and a socialist: in a provocative bar mitzvah speech he made favourable references to Marx and Spinoza, and attacked the Nazi menace. A boyhood friend remembers him as "a tearful, bookish mother's boy", picked on by tough Irish-American neighbours; before entering his teens he'd written a pamphlet on boxing, his lifelong passion, that anticipates his predilection for violence.

Around the time he enrolled at the formidably Waspish Harvard, he had "formed the desire to be a major writer". When the US entered the war in late 1941, he decided that the Pacific campaign would be the source of the great American war novel, and that serving as a private in the infantry rather than as a deskbound intelligence officer would provide the right angle from which to view it. Thus by choice he became a rifleman in a regiment of redneck Texans. Fighting with a reconnaissance platoon during the liberation of the Philippines, after a period observing the top brass at regimental headquarters, offered the experience that shaped The Naked and the Dead. Oddly enough, that brutally realistic, highly political novel corresponded closely to the war as he had imagined it in his student fiction.

Like many writers who enjoyed early success, Mailer found the fame, wealth and expectations his first novel brought him hard to cope with. Especially as, following in the steps of Hemingway, he saw himself increasingly as a public figure and viewed his life as a series of contests with both his illustrious predecessors and his gifted contemporary rivals.

In this he never changed. He created a personal philosophy to clarify his attitude to history and society, to explain his conduct and America's position in the world, and to underpin his fiction. He had absorbed the heady worldview of Spengler's The Decline of the West as a student, then moved on to Freud and Marx, and attached himself to a variety of mentors. He was fascinated by power and those who wielded it, yet distrusted it. He always regarded himself as a man of the left but constantly refined his particular strand of individualism, initially calling himself a libertarian socialist and later a left-conservative. But in the 1960s he insisted that he didn't care how people described him, "but please don't ever call me a liberal".

He was an atheist who believed that God needed man more than mankind needed God, and that God was engaged in a battle that the devil might win. Such terms as dualism, antimony, dichotomies, contradictions and opposites are everywhere in a biography that has the subtitle A Double Life. Mailer believed that most people have two conflicting figures fighting within them and seeking reconciliation. The most significant pairing is the saint and the psychopath, and indeed this was the working title for his mammoth biography of the double murderer Gary Gilmore, which was eventually published as The Executioner's Song. It could also describe the gifted writer and criminal Jack Abbott, who went on to commit another murder after Mailer had quixotically supported his parole.

During the conformist 1950s, along with C Wright Mills, JK Galbraith and Herbert Marcuse, Mailer provided the intellectual fuel for the explosive 1960s. He became a witty, provocative participant in public debates and one of that new breed, the highbrow TV celebrity. He helped create the personal style of writing that became known as the new journalism: his Esquire articles on the 1960 presidential election may even have contributed to the victory of his existential hero, Jack Kennedy. But it was a difficult time for Mailer, as his wild behaviour under the influence of drink and drugs reached a climax in what was always known in his family as "the Trouble" – the night in 1960 when he stabbed his wife Adele, almost fatally, with a penknife. "Your recent history indicates that you cannot distinguish fact from reality," said the magistrate who committed him to Bellevue psychiatric hospital. He might well have been commenting on Mailer's view of fact and fiction in literature.

Mailer's reputation never quite recovered from the assault on his wife. It was neither forgotten nor wholly forgiven, and, along with the hostility he'd excited among feminists, it probably denied him the Nobel prize. The 60s were, however, a major decade in his writing career, with the Vietnam war providing the sharpest focus he ever had for his social and political criticism. This culminated in the award of the 1969 Pulitzer prize to what is arguably his greatest book, The Armies of the Night, an account of his involvement in the 1967 antiwar demonstration in Washington, subtitled History As a Novel; the Novel As History.

Lennon's book remains fascinating, but the second half is less challenging. Mailer's blockbusters sold well but added little to his reputation. The ex-wives became part of his tribal family. His children managed successful careers without imitating his eccentricities. His outrageous behaviour continued unabated, but the impish gleam in his eye got bigger. His last days, when he became a Whitmanesque sage and unofficial guardian of the national conscience, are deeply moving. Walking with two sticks, listening with two hearing aids, seeing with great difficulty, troubled by his heart and an abused liver, Mailer faced death with stoical dignity.