Jews have never considered Norman Mailer one of their own as they have Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, the once pariah Philip Roth or even the skeptical Woody Allen. I think they are mistaken.
Mailer was a deeply religious writer. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Faulkner, he was concerned with God and the devil, good and evil. While not concerned with Jewish matters in general — he never visited Israel — he obsessed over the implications of the Holocaust.
It plays a prominent role in “Advertisements for Myself,” written in the mid-1950s, and in his final novel published earlier this year, “The Castle in the Forest,” which deals with the devil’s machinations in the birth of Hitler. This final novel probed the world almost the way a medieval mystic might. Writing it seemed to bring Mailer back to his Jewish roots, not in practice, but to an acknowledgement of his past in a way that embraced it with new warmth and understanding.
Mailer succinctly encapsulates his attitude toward Judaism in an interview he gave earlier this year to Nextbook.
When asked, “What role has your being Jewish played in your being a writer,” Mailer replies emphatically, “An enormous role.” He picks two aspects of the Jewish experience that influenced him — the sense of history that makes it “impossible to take anything for granted” and also the Jewish mind.
“We’re here to do all sorts of outrageous thinking, if you will … certainly incisive thinking,” Mailer said. “If the Jews brought anything to human nature, it’s that they developed the mind more than other people did.”
Mailer continues in the interview to bemoan the loss of this ability due to what he terms “cheap religious patriotism,” suggesting that Jews have become distracted by an obsessive, hard-line approach to Israel and anti-Semitism rather than staying focused on broader intellectual pursuits.
I first met Mailer in the spring of 1978. I began reading him in earnest while preparing for my doctorate at U.C. Santa Barbara. My field was American Jewish literature, in which Mailer plays a very small part, but soon I was so enthralled that his work took over my thesis.
In my thesis, I used the ideas of his contemporary, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel — that through performing mitzvahs, one comes to a fuller spiritual knowledge of oneself — to explore the mindset of Mailer’s protagonists.
Through a friend, I got Mailer’s home address and wrote to him about my ideas. He replied almost instantly, welcoming my theory, and so began our correspondence. Mailer did not like writing letters, and although they were brief, they encouraged further contact.
Eventually we met in New York. Ironically, we looked a little like each other: stocky Jewish types, about the same height with curly hair — his a grizzly version of mine. He greeted me warmly and I discovered that contrary to the newspaper reports, he had an ingratiating personality.
The rapport was instant. We spoke of many things, including his Jewish upbringing, his grandfather who was a rabbi and his distance from the faith, though he had never written anything negative about Judaism, as he had promised his mother he would not.
When the time came to part, Mailer told me he got a good feeling from my letters and now our conversation, and that “we would be friends for life.” He was true to his word. Our friendship lasted from that day until his death Nov. 10.
As happens over the years, when he moved to Provincetown, Mass., and I visited the East Coast less frequently, our contact dissipated, though at my birthday I always received one of his hand-drawn self-portraits.
Knowing that time was short, I went to L.A. in March when Mailer came to discuss “The Castle in the Forest.” By then he walked with two canes, was hard of hearing and could not see well. But his mind was as astute as ever.
Mailer spoke like he wrote — in ornate, somewhat opaque sentences, the ideas probing the psyche of America. He kept us enthralled for more than an hour. Afterward I went up to greet him.
“Hello Norman,” I said.
“Who is that?” he asked, like the aged Isaac when Jacob comes for a blessing.
“It’s Mashey,” I said, leaning in so he could see me clearer.
Mailer grabbed my arm and held on.
“Mashey, Mashey, how wonderful, how wonderful that you came,” he said. His eyes glistened with tears; mine did too.
Mashey Bernstein teaches in the writing program at U.C. Santa Barbara. He can be contacted at [email protected].