By Peter Keough

A testament to the power of benignant narcissism.

How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer. Directed by Jeff Zimbalist. At the Coolidge Corner Theatre beginning August 16.

A scene from How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer featuring the man himself. Photo: Zeitgeist Films

Should Norman Mailer, who died in 2007 at 84, be regarded as a role model? The author of 40 books of fiction, nonfiction, and the gray area in between, he may have had more impact in defining the role of literature, art, and masculinity in shaping politics and culture than any other contemporary writer. On the other hand, his worst impulses of misogyny and egomania have since been distorted into the kind of tawdry, toxic politics that he would probably have despised.

Or would he? Had he lived and thrived to the present day would he have condemned the rise of the MAGA morons? Or like some other prominent writers of his era — David Mamet and Gay Talese come to mind — would he have been seduced by the movement and become an advocate?

Talese is one the many distinguished experts, friends, and family members (including some of his six wives and nine children — let’s see Trump try to compete with that) interviewed in Jeff Zimbalist’s provocative and illuminating documentary. But the political chaos that is Donald Trump — which Mailer in a sense prophesized and prefigured — does not directly figure in the film. Instead, it takes on the form of a series of life lessons, each titled with a quote or sentiment from the subject, ranging from “I: Don’t be a nice Jewish Boy” to “VI: Grow or pay the price for remaining the same.”

It begins with a biographical rehash probably familiar to most Mailer aficionados. Born in a middle-class, respectable Brooklyn family (though his father led a double life as a gambler), he was coddled and protected growing up. A brilliant student, he entered Harvard at 16, discovered he wanted to be a writer, was educated in art, sex, and politics by his first wife Beatrice Silverman, and saw an opportunity for a worthy subject for his talent when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

He vowed to write the great novel about World War II and to do so he enlisted in the Army. By his own admission, he was not a great soldier and was intimidated by the battle hardened soldiers from Texas in his unit whom he wanted to emulate (there are some early interviews with him in the film in which he affects a Southern drawl).

Norman Mailer —  his ambitions were not satisfied with mere symbolism or journalism or provocations on the Dick Cavett Show. Photo: Wiki Common

His combat experience was limited, but it was enough to inspire his debut The Naked and the Dead (1948). That would prove to be a sensational success, overwhelming the 25-year-old with instant celebrity, forcing him to reconfigure — and inflate — his ego to accommodate the new definitions of himself as an enfant terrible and genius that the adulation imposed on him.

But his two subsequent novels, Barbary Shore (1951) and Deer Park (1955), failed, as did his overtures to Hollywood. Mailer responded by doubling down on his tough-guy, wild man persona, engaging in a Rimbaud-like derangement of the senses (and of common sense) through booze and drugs and fistfights and orgies. This culminated in 1960 with an incident that would forever shadow his life — stabbing his second wife and the mother of two of his children, Adele Morales.

She survived. She didn’t press charges and Mailer was committed for 17 days to Bellevue.

The crime recalls that of William Burroughs killing his wife in 1951 in a drunken William Tell prank. Burroughs said he was driven to the act by “the Ugly Spirit.”  As Norman and Adele’s daughter Elizabeth Mailer recalls in the film, her father would later tell her, “I let God down.” Not to mention his wife.

However, within a few years Mailer would rebound with a masterpiece, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning The Armies of the Night (1968), a firsthand account (with Mailer referring to himself in the third person, a literary device he would often return to) of a massive anti-Vietnam War demonstration at the Pentagon in 1967. In the film Mailer reads in voice-over a passage that would eerily presage another, more deadly and diabolical assault on a government institution over five decades later:

“A mass of the citizenry — not much more than a mob — marched on a bastion which symbolized the military might of the Republic, marching not to capture it but to wound it symbolically.”

The key word here being “symbolically.”

Mailer would follow up this brilliant book with the equally eloquent and incisive Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), an account of the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1968, establishing credentials for punditry that he would display in endless talk show appearances.

But Mailer’s ambitions were not satisfied with mere symbolism or journalism or provocations on the Dick Cavett Show. He ran for mayor of New York City in 1969 with the sensible but quixotic platform of establishing the city as the 51st state. He came in second to last. He decided to tackle the film industry again and made a series of self-indulgent but occasionally brilliant features epitomized by Maidstone (1970), in which he plays a movie director who runs for President. The cast included ex-wives, mistresses, his current wife, his children, and Rip Torn. The latter apparently lost track of the blurred line between art and life when he assaulted Mailer with a hammer. In a scene that still shocks, the bloodied, shirtless Mailer wrestles with his assailant as his wife and young children watch in horror, weeping and screaming.

John Waters archly describes the making of Maidstone as “reality television before there was such a thing,” and as such Mailer might be seen pioneering the genre that gave a later reality TV star a boost to his career. But, despite such superficial similarities, after watching How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer one cannot imagine that Mailer would regard Trump with anything other than lacerating contempt. Not someone who wrote such masterpieces of empathy as The Executioners Song (1979), who thoroughly if belatedly confronted the consequences of actions that had brought grief to others, and who, despite recognizing and denouncing its failures, truly loved this country and the democracy that sustains it.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).