The young man went to war and became a novelist. But did he ever really come back?

When Norman Mailer was inducted into the Army, in March, 1944, he was a freshly married twenty-one-year-old Harvard graduate, a slight young man of five feet eight inches and a hundred and thirty-five pounds. In the previous few years, he had published some stories and written a play and two novels (one of them published, in a typescript facsimile, as “A Transit to Narcissus,” in 1978). Even as a student, he thought of himself as a professional writer, and from the day that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, in December, 1941, he had wanted to write a big book about the war. He was sent for basic training to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where many of the men were from Pennsylvania, the South, and the Upper Midwest. Mailer was from middle-class Jewish Brooklyn; he had landed in the great working-class Gentile world, and was eager to observe. He canvassed the recruits about their sex lives, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. (He discovered that many of them did not believe in foreplay.) Mailer knew that tough Jews served in the war, including criminals, louts, and bitterly determined, hardworking men, but he was without physical skills. He had never worked a thresher, or manhandled heavy goods into a truck, or tinkered with Dad’s jalopy.

In early January, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur landed with an enormous invasion force on Luzon, the largest of the Philippine islands; Mailer, after waiting in a troopship, went ashore a few weeks later. He was thrown as a rifleman into the 112th Cavalry Regiment, out of Texas. The 112th had been in combat in the Pacific for more than a year, and many men in the unit had died. Mailer described those who remained as a little crazy, and physically messed up—some with open ulcers from jungle rot. The Texans were joined by men from other parts of the country, some of them bar fighters and casual anti-Semites (not by theory but by habit). “I didn’t open my mouth for six months in that outfit,” he later said.

“The nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn”—that was the one image of himself that Mailer said was “absolutely insupportable.” It was insupportable because, for a while, it was true. A picture of him in uniform from early in his service shows a young man with soft lips, large ears, a gentle gaze. He did indeed write his big war book, “The Naked and the Dead,” and it presents a fascinating paradox. A tough, even pessimistic work, filled with sordid sensuality—muck and detestable odors; bodily discomforts and mutilations; the tedium, exhilarations, and cruelties of an army fighting in the jungle—it may also have been a book that only a nice Jewish boy could write. A nice Jewish boy, that is, in flight from his background.

It requires some effort to recall the young Mailer across the intervening years of turmoil. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, as doggedly as an earlier puny American, Theodore Roosevelt, Mailer transformed himself into a barrel-chested macho—a man six times married, the father of eight children and an adopted son, and the author of more than forty books, some of them American classics (“The Armies of the Night,” from 1968, and the supremely abundant and sympathetic “The Executioner’s Song,” a “true life novel,” from 1979), some of them clogged and nearly unreadable. Attentive and sweet-natured much of the time—his letters to friends and even to strangers are generously supportive—he also brawled and headbutted at parties. He was decked, hammered, billy-clubbed; his eye was gouged. He believed that physical courage was necessary equipment for a great writer (Hemingway was the model), and that Jewish men in particular had to overcome all sorts of weaknesses. “In the first week / of their life / male jews / are crucified,” he wrote in a poem. His recklessness encompassed an abominable act: at the end of a drunken party, in 1960, he twice stabbed Adele Morales, his second wife and the mother of two of his children. “I let God down,” Mailer later told Betsy Mailer, one of his daughters with Adele.

For good and for ill, that was the Mailer the world knew for more than fifty years. When he died, in 2007, at the age of eighty-four, his reputation was at a low ebb. His temperament and preoccupations seemed artifacts of a bygone and benighted era. And not without reason. His reactionary sexual politics, expressed at length in the rapturously composed but morally preposterous polemic “The Prisoner of Sex,” published in Harper’s, in 1971, have been at the center of searing critiques for a half century.

Still, writers have a way of losing their labels. In the nineteen-forties, T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and George Orwell all wrote essays about Rudyard Kipling, retrieving what was aesthetically and emotionally satisfying from the bitter effusions of a rank imperialist and racist; some four decades later, Edward Said and other post-colonial critics and scholars continued the effort of defending the art embedded in the toxic mesh of Kipling’s attitudes. Mailer is a very different writer, but a similar kind of sorting out may be in the works, especially now that a major revival of interest in him has begun. The Library of America, which has brought out two volumes of Mailer’s writing from the sixties, is now reissuing “The Naked and the Dead,” in honor of Mailer’s hundredth birthday, on January 31st. The volume is edited by J. Michael Lennon, whose many-sided biography, “Norman Mailer: A Double Life” (2013), is by far the best that the author has received. Lennon has accompanied the novel’s text with a selection of the extraordinary letters that Mailer wrote from the battlefield to his first wife, Beatrice Silverman. Many additional projects devoted to Mailer are under way or have been proposed, including selections from his mid-fifties philosophical and erotic journal, a collection of his writings on democracy, a Showtime documentary, two TV series, and extended critical studies by Christopher Ricks and David Bromwich. In a new book, “Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer,” the British literary scholar and biographer Richard Bradford has produced an almost entirely negative portrait of a man whose life is “wonderfully grotesque,” and yet the book’s very existence attests to a more complicated reality. It would be naïve to suppose that the renewed attention on Mailer has nothing to do with the scandals attached to his name. It would also be naïve to pretend that he was not a great American writer.

Mailer’s father, Isaac (Barney) Mailer, was born near Vilnius, Lithuania, but moved with his family in 1900 to South Africa; he served in the British Army during the First World War. In America, he spoke with a punctilious English accent. In all, he was a strange bird—a mock Brit, a Jewish accountant, and a passionate gambler, frequently in debt. In 1922, Barney Mailer married Fanny Schneider. She had grown up in Long Branch, New Jersey, the daughter of a Lithuanian rabbi who never officially practiced in America. (According to a relative, the elder Schneider believed that “rabbis were shnorrers.”) At home in Crown Heights, just east of Prospect Park, Fanny, a loving, capable woman, raised Norman and his sister, Barbara, while managing a home-oil-delivery business by telephone. The Jewish-folkloric combination of a weak father and a strong mother evidently benefitted Fanny’s son, who drew power from the devotion of his parents, aunts, and uncles throughout his seventy-year writing career.

As a child, Norman was quiet and obedient, too preoccupied with his studies to spend much time among the neighborhood bonditts, with their pranks and their passion for stickball. On the way to school (Boys High, in Bedford-Stuyvesant), he kept his head down, avoiding fights with the local Italian and Irish street gangs, and with the local Jewish toughs as well. He built model airplanes, some of them extremely impressive, and spent his summers, with Barbara, in a resort hotel in Long Branch, run by one of his aunts. In a spare room, he would write fiction.

In September, 1939, Mailer showed up at Harvard in an outfit of orange-striped trousers, a gold jacket, and saddle shoes. He was sixteen, and found himself as ignorant about ruling-class undergraduates and the social rituals of the college as he was, five years later, about the habits of working-class Americans. The clothes were soon discarded, though some of his regular laundry was sent home, washed by the family’s Black maid, and mailed back. In his first year on campus, he ate dinner with other Jewish boys at the Harvard Union and began to feel his way around. Until the end of his sophomore year, he lived almost entirely within the protected boundaries of the American Jewish middle class.

At the time, Latin was a prerequisite for English majors at Harvard; Mailer had never studied it, so he became an engineering major, learning much that would serve him well when he reconstructed the liftoff of the Saturn V rocket in “Of a Fire on the Moon” (1970), his impassioned report on the Apollo 11 moon landing. His main occupation at school was reading, particularly the American realists he discovered as a freshman—James T. Farrell (the Studs Lonigan trilogy), John Dos Passos (the U.S.A. trilogy), John Steinbeck (“The Grapes of Wrath”). Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe came afterward, and Hemingway served as a (distant) spiritual mentor. Hemingway’s hunting, fishing, and boxing, his war exploits, his courageous and soulful physicality—boastful yet wounded—bore little resemblance to the habits of Crown Heights Jews. Mailer fell in love.

His own problem as a writer, he believed, was a lack of experience. Escaping from Harvard’s rich preppies and ambitious Jews, he rode the subway around Boston, taking notes on working-class behavior, clothes, and accents. In the summer after his sophomore year, he left his hotel room on the Jersey shore with just a few dollars in his pocket and hitchhiked his way down to North Carolina, sleeping outdoors at night. Voluntarily, and for only two weeks, he became that familiar Depression-era figure, a hobo. When he returned home, Fanny made him take off his clothes before coming inside.

His lack of sexual experience was particularly mortifying. “You bore a standard of shame,” he later said of himself and his friends. He at least lost his physical inhibitions. He played football in front of Dunster House, and loved the bone-jarring contact. At a Boston Symphony concert during his junior year, he met Beatrice (Bea) Silverman, a lively music major attending Boston University. She was argumentative, a passionate lefty, and a proto-feminist; she was also profane and, in the appreciative slang of the day, “earthy.” They carried on in the mattressed trunk of a Chevy given to Mailer by his uncle, and, at Dunster, they became known for their lovemaking in Mailer’s dorm room. Bea would talk dirty in front of his friends; they were both showing off. They got married in secret, in January, 1944. His draft notice arrived a week later.

What Mailer did in the war was not heroic. At first, working at headquarters on Luzon, he typed reports, laid wire, built a shower for officers. Humiliated and bored, he volunteered for a reconnaissance squad. He went on twenty-five patrols, many of them fifteen miles long, and he finally saw some combat: nothing much, as he admitted, but he knew what it was like to climb up a damp, rocky hill in the heat while burdened with a rifle, ammunition, grenades, two canteens, a steel helmet—perhaps forty pounds in all. His real mission was to see the worst and make an account of it. He wrote long letters to Bea (who had joined the Waves), some of which were detailed and harrowing. He was not just creating the book but creating himself as a man. In February, 1945, he entered a Japanese-held town that the Americans had overwhelmed with artillery and tanks. A letter to Bea chronicled what he saw:

Right before us was a destroyed Japanese armored half-track and a tank. The vehicles were still smoldering, and the driver of the half-track had half fallen out, his head which was crushed from one ear to the jaw lay reclining on the running board, and the pitiful remaining leg thrust tensely through the windshield. The other leg lay near his head on the ground, and a little smoke was still arising from his chest. Another Japanese lay on his back a short distance away with a great hole in his intestines which bunched out in a thick white cluster like a coiled white garden hose. . . .

After a half hour or so we descended to the road, and mounted the Jeep again. As we drove along the road the destruction was complete. Fragments of the corrugated steel from the warehouses had landed everywhere, and the wreckage formed almost a pattern on the road. Everything stunk, and everything, the road, the wreckage, the mutilated vehicles had become the two colors of conflagration—the rust red and the black. The whole vista was of destroyed earth and materiel—that battlefield looked like a hybrid between a junk-yard and a charnel house; it was perhaps the ugliest most dejecting sight I have ever seen. You wished acutely for rain, as the quick hand-maiden to time.

Some of the writing wound up in “The Naked and the Dead.” The impressions are fresh: war meant the destruction of the body’s unity, the collapse of physical structure, color, intactness.

After the Japanese surrendered, in August, 1945, Mailer became part of the American force occupying the home islands. He worked mainly as an Army cook, which he enjoyed. He attained the rank of sergeant, and sent his family a picture of himself in uniform looking much older than in the earlier photograph—now darkly handsome, with square shoulders and a full head of hair in the style of the actor John Garfield. Soon after that picture was taken, though, he got into a humiliating quarrel with a superior and turned in his stripes. He left the Army in 1946 as a private, after a little more than two years of service. He and Bea settled in Brooklyn and Provincetown. He wrote “The Naked and the Dead” at a rate of five thousand words a week, finishing in about fifteen months, including new and rewritten sections. The book received rave reviews and was an overnight best-seller, remaining on the Times list for more than a year. The Brooklyn Jewish boy was no longer abashed, no longer inadequate, and certainly no longer quiet.

In 1960, looking back on the book, Mailer described his state of mind in a letter to his friend Diana Trilling, the literary critic. “There is no meaning but the present,” he wrote. “So of course I could do The Naked and the Dead. I had no past to protect, no habits to hold on to, no style to defend. My infirmity is that I had no emotional memory.” This is an attempt at mythmaking. He sounds as if he were creating himself as he went along, though what he actually meant by “no emotional memory” was no memory he was proud of. Henry Roth, in “Call It Sleep” (1934), and Alfred Kazin, in “A Walker in the City” (1951), had done a great deal with the furtive behavior of a Jewish boy on the streets, but Mailer saw his childhood as something not to explore but to transcend. He drew heavily on the American realists, especially Dos Passos, in constructing his own version of wartime naturalism, piling up endless physical detail and moments of emotional suffering.

“The Naked and the Dead” is set on the fictional island of Anopopei, an irregular kidney-shaped blob in the Pacific with trackless vegetation and withering wet heat—and also thousands of Japanese defenders, though they hardly figure in the novel. Mailer never tells us how the Anopopei campaign fits into the Americans’ strategy. The absence is intentional: strategy is left to officers, who, in Mailer’s estimate, are mainly self-important stiffs. What matters most in the book is the day-to-day lives of fourteen soldiers in a reconnaissance platoon, who find themselves trapped between the obsessions of two pathological egotists—the island commander, General Edward Cummings, a MacArthur-like military intellectual who thinks that men can be controlled only through fear (“the natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety,” he says), and, at the platoon level, Staff Sergeant Sam Croft, a nerveless warrior who “could not have said . . . where his hands ended and the machine gun began.” For Croft, killing seems a natural expression of his being. In a limited way, he’s intensely admirable. Writing to Bea, Mailer described his creation of Croft as “an archetype of all the dark, bitter, inarticulate, capable and brooding men that America spawns.” Capability meant a great deal to the young writer.

Mailer wrote a terrifying combat scene (armies firing across a river at night), but much of the novel chronicles the routine work of men at war: unloading supplies, building a road, cleaning weapons, “harsh eventless days” followed by such exertions as pulling 37-mm. anti-tank guns down a jungle path in darkness. (Seen in the light of a flare, “the guns had a slender articulated beauty like an insect reared back on its wire haunches.”) In the central action of the novel, General Cummings, eager to show off his tactical prowess, sends the platoon on a recon mission that turns out to be foolish, even superfluous, and Croft, ready to test himself, willingly carries it out, sacrificing men en route. He tries to take the platoon over the island’s big mountain, Anaka—which he thinks of as his mountain, as Ahab thinks of the whale. But the labor of ascending Anaka is far from exalting, and the men curse it the whole way. In the end, Croft’s mountain worship goes nowhere. Somewhere near the peak, he stumbles into a hornets’ nest, and the enraged insects cause the men to abandon their packs and rifles and scatter down the slope like children. Cummings’s regular infantry, under the command of a mediocre officer (Cummings is away), wipes out the remaining Japanese garrison.

When Mailer worked on the book, right after the war, jubilation was a large part of the national mood—a cheerfully militant atmosphere of gallant warriors and sleeves-rolled-up citizens fighting Fascism in “the good war.” During the war and just after, Hollywood movies portrayed the democratic unit—an ethnically mixed platoon or bomber crew—as a vessel of a great national cause. But Mailer writes without the slightest elation over American victory and Japanese defeat, and his platoon is less a common cause than a group of ornery, banged-up soldiers hoping to survive. Unlike Kipling, who overcame a miserable, bullied childhood in part by identifying with the strong (especially those of the British Empire), Mailer expressed contempt for powerful men bereft of human understanding. He was attracted to violence as an exploration of personal will, while despising authority in any institutional form.

The over-all emotion of the novel is one of futility. Accident, not strategy, rules. Cummings and Croft could be seen as incipient postwar American Fascists, highbrow and lowbrow, but both of them wind up stymied. The book asks, What is the point of endless effort and repetition? Is persistence life’s only meaning? The postwar celebratory mood was shadowed by disillusionment and absurdism. As Mailer was bringing out “The Naked and the Dead,” in 1948, Samuel Beckett was in Paris writing “Waiting for Godot.” As a war novel, Mailer’s book looks back to Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” (1895), with its confused, even incoherent battle scenes—all smoke and noise—and forward to Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” (1961), in which the war and Army bureaucracy are rendered as a malign joke, dissolving any possible purpose into contradiction.

Mailer wrote “The Naked and the Dead” in an omniscient floating third person, moving from the mind of one man to that of another. The coarseness of the soldiers’ thoughts and speech shocked some readers in 1948, though now it seems to us the way men in combat have always talked. As we discover in lengthy, bristling flashbacks, many of the men had been knocking around in Depression America, working on farms, in stores, in ordinary jobs, or not working much at all. Vaguely rebellious yet defeated, they are callous and cynical about women, and routinely contemptuous of “Yids” and “Izzies.” These hard-luck guys have little purpose in their lives. Lieutenant Hearn, a Harvard graduate like Mailer, appears, at first, to be the hero of the novel, a liberal in revolt against his wealthy family. But Hearn is unfocussed and diffident, pulled by his own narcissism into confrontations with General Cummings that will destroy him. This war book has some courageous fighters and some generous acts, but it has neither heroes nor innocents. Unlike “the youth” in “The Red Badge of Courage,” no one has any illusions to lose.

For all Mailer’s hard knowledge of failure, his prose is little like that of his hero, Hemingway. It is not spare, stoic, and flowingly lyrical (from “A Farewell to Arms”: “Late in the afternoon the rain stopped and from out number two post I saw the bare wet autumn country with clouds over the tops of the hills and the straw screening over the roads wet and dripping”) but abrupt, obsessional, and grimly material. Mailer, describing men attempting to carry a wounded buddy on a stretcher back to safety, unleashes the enduring achievement of the book, his portrayal of the male body at the outer edge of fatigue:

Through the afternoon the litter-bearers continued on their march. About two o’clock it began to rain, and the ground quickly became muddy. The rain at first was a relief; they welcomed it on their blazing flesh, wriggled their toes in the slosh that permeated their boots. The wetness of their clothing was pleasurable. They enjoyed being cold for a few minutes. But as the rain continued the ground became too soft, and their uniforms cleaved uncomfortably to their bodies. Their feet began to slip in the mud, their shoes became weighted with muck and stuck in the ground with each step. They were too fagged to notice the difference immediately, their bodies had quickly resumed the stupor of the march, but by half an hour they had slowed down almost to a halt. Their legs had lost almost all puissance; for minutes they would stand virtually in place, unable to co-ordinate their thighs and feet to move forward. . . . The sun came out again, inflamed the wet kunai grass and dried the earth whose moisture rose in sluggish clouds of mist. The men gasped, took deep useless breaths of the leaden wet air, and shambled forward grunting and sobbing, their arms slowly and inevitably bending toward the ground.

On a bad day, a soldier will know every wretchedness of skin, lungs, arms, legs, bowels, kidneys. “The Naked and the Dead” is repetitive but at times very moving; the men carrying the stretcher reach a state, beyond exhaustion, in which “they were reduced to the lowest common denominator of their existence,” and meet it with acceptance. As Mailer’s letters to Bea reveal, he was shocked by the corrupted materiality of jungle war: the spilling corpses, the breakdown of physical integrity. But his writing about the living male body amounts to a full-throated humanist response: the body under stress is heroic, living in its wholeness, with consciousness remaining intact, even when vibrating with pain.

At the same time, “The Naked and the Dead” is surprisingly delicate in feeling. The rare moments of solidarity among the men give way to scraped emotions and anger, followed by distance and bitter hurt. The two Jews in the platoon, Roth and Goldstein, struggle especially hard for dignity—an obvious point of concern for Mailer, who had his own anxieties to resolve. Roth has been to City College in New York (the home of New York Jews in the thirties); he’s married, but he’s not getting anywhere. An irritable guy, he’s snobby, morose, and too weak to survive—clearly Mailer’s disapproving version of himself. Mailer endowed Goldstein with greater physical and moral strength. Like some earlier Jewish writers, Mailer saw virtue in a life of physical activity and advanced moral adventure: what Max Nordau, at the Zionist Congress in 1898, called Muskeljudentum, or “muscular Judaism”—a disavowal of endless study and effete intellection. Goldstein, along with a very serious Christian, attempts to carry the wounded soldier out of the jungle. As a boy, Goldstein heard his grandfather talk of Jewish suffering in the back of the family’s candy store in Brooklyn. It meant nothing to him at the time, but when he’s bearing the stretcher the words of the medieval sage Judah Halevi jump into his head: “Israel is the heart of all nations.” Goldstein’s consciousness as a Jew keeps him from letting go, for, if he fails, the men will think badly not just of him but of all Jews. In the character of Goldstein, Mailer’s fear that he was not tough enough for the Army ends in a portrait of formidable endurance.

The enormous success of “The Naked and the Dead” left Mailer uneasy. He had no idea how he was going to live up to it. Seemingly on top of the world at twenty-five, he feared many things. In his novel, the Harvard-educated liberal allows himself to be trapped by power. Mailer, in his own eyes, needed to escape the traps not only of his soft middle-class Jewish background but also of postwar America—the desire for “security,” the endless consumerism, and what he took to be the country’s humiliating spiritual mediocrity. It’s as if he were still in the jungle, pulling artillery through the night. He had made himself into a novelist in the Pacific, and now he brought the war home, fighting on two fronts—against what he disliked in himself and against those menaces of the nineteen-fifties, “conformity” and “adjustment.” He acted out his rebellion in a continual performance with phallus, fists, booze, and sustained ass-in-chair writing sessions—a pressure at times noble, at times foolish, and certainly rough on other people as well as on himself. He became an egotist of a peculiarly self-afflicting sort, both calculating and spontaneous, provoking many blows, all of them deserved, all of them welcomed. For the author of “The Naked and the Dead,” the truce never arrived.