“Mailer saw his life as an experiment, one undertaken to balance the opposites and incompatibles in his character and exploit them in his art.”

One of the 20th century’s brightest literary lights, Norman Mailer continues to compete for the limelight posthumously, almost as though he has yet to run out of words. He speaks through the mediumistic presence of his authorized biographer and chair of the Mailer Review, J. Michael Lennon. Lennon states, “Besides Mailer, I believe I am the only one to have read all his correspondence.” And that is no mean feat.

SELECTED LETTERS OF NORMAN MAILER comprises 714 messages from Mailer to a plethora of correspondents: editors and reviewers, family and friends, poets, lovers, children, politicians and pugilists. Lennon siphoned the letters from a vast store, and painstakingly arranged them in chronological order (1940 to 2007), allowing us to see Mailer change (and not change) in significant ways over his run on the world stage. Given his prolific epistolary output, it’s worth noting that Mailer hated to write letters.

"SELECTED LETTERS OF NORMAN MAILER comprises 714 messages from Mailer to a plethora of correspondents: editors and reviewers, family and friends, poets, lovers, children, politicians and pugilists."

This is the sort of book that one will want to be able to say one has read, but it will be a bumpy journey, even for Mailer’s admirers. Many selections so lack sizzle as to make one wonder why they were included, while others are more than worthy of their place on the dais. A lengthy speculation to Hillary Clinton on strategies for Bill’s 1992 campaign should be perused by any serious student of American politics, then and now: “…He ought to consider saying that if elected, he will dedicate…the next four years to bringing whites and blacks, blacks and whites, together…he will have arrived at that point by speaking of the two fears that paralyze hope in America --- the fear of joblessness and the fear of crime.” But why serve up this scintillating slice of brain food alongside a few-sentence note to Thomas Pynchon just to say, “We’ll have to meet another time”?

And yet, the hasty scribbles aside, there is something stellar about the man who leaps out of the letters. He did not quake at inviting Fidel Castro to a dialogue (via a proposed interview in Vanity Fair). He chatted with biting wit and brassy four-letter words to the luminaries of his era: Allen Ginsberg, Lillian Hellman, Saul Bellow (“Kurt Vonnegut mentioned to me that you’d like a letter…”), Alberto Moravia, Alfred A, Knopf, Bill Clinton, Marlon Brando, James Jones, Yoko and John (to try to finagle a benefit concert appearance for a marijuana dealer in jail on what Mailer was convinced were framed-up charges)…and to some incarcerated killers, who, for Mailer, ever cocksure and combative, held a lurid fascination.

In later years, Mailer would write to a friend, “You know, I never had a monstrous ego.” Perhaps “monstrous” goes a bit too far, but this collection makes it clear that Mailer generally led with his chutzpah and waited for others to fall in line. Whether any single game was won or lost, he played them all through with bravado.