A recently published collection of some 700 of Norman Mailer’s letters (selected out of many thousands) suggests that the famed author was the sort of person who always had something to prove. It also contains some scattered yet revealing discussions of Jewish identity, and how Mailer felt it shaped him as a writer. Adam Kirsch writes:
[I]t is in a 1960 letter to [Diana] Trilling that Mailer gives the other longest explanation of what Jewishness meant to him. As a writer, Mailer grants, he lacks “definition,” he is given to posturing and role-playing. Yet “it must be remembered,” he insists, “that he is a Jew and that being a major novelist is not a natural activity for a Jew.” (Note the passing insistence that what he is is a “major” novelist—a certainty that may, of course, conceal a deep insecurity.)
Mailer goes on to sketch an ambitious theory of the history of the novel, according to which the classic 19th-century novel was devoted to the “roots” of society: “the novel came into existence . . . as the avatar of society at the moment society developed roots too subtle for the historian to trace.” At this stage, however, the Jews of Western Europe were only recently emancipated; they had no deep social roots, and so they were unable to be either the heroes or the authors of novels. Major Jewish novelists could not emerge until after World War II, because by then “the 20th century had ripped up all the roots.” The Jew, in his homelessness and insecurity, was now a representative figure: “he never had the genteel security of relaxing in a habit . . . the Jew was always a bloody schizophrenic, his parlor manners greasy and his aspiration incandescent. . . . But now the world was schizophrenic. H-bombs and PTA committees. The Jew—those who were left—could be the first to swim the divided waters.”
Read more on Tablet: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/187696/norman-mailer-letters