Norman Mailer - his own hill of beans

The photograph shows Gunter Grass and Norman Mailer together last year. Grass is bucolic and full of rude health, while Mailer is sliding towards the tomb that has now opened for him. The contrast is purely accidental, a thing of DNA and molecular shock and cosmic rays, but does seem to carry a small indecency. After he studied aeronautical engineering at Harvard, Mailer was drafted into the army in 1943, served in The Philippines, and turned the experience into The Naked and the Dead. Four years younger, Grass grew up under the Nazis, was conscripted into the labour corps at the age of 16, and ended up as an assistant tank gunner. His first novel, suffused by modern German history, was The Tin Drum, a pioneering work of magic realism.

He too became a literary lion, and used his writing and status as a platform to engage with Germany as it absorbed the guilt of Hitler and the Holocaust, and the nation’s bizarre, schizoid journey to acceptance, amnesia and the Osti wasteland. He emphasised the problem of the self in this with his own sad limitation - as we all know now, he was a member of the Waffen-SS and he hid the fact. His problem was not what he did, because he didn’t do anything, but the fact that he allowed a false history to go forward.

I suppose that story of Grass illuminates Mailer as well, and all of us. Mailer, in full cry, made a public idiot of himself several times - but he confessed his folly and took his lumps while Grass allowed his small, pathetic sin of omission to fester. We are such strange mixtures of idealism and venality.

But that is the kind of thing which Graham Greene would understand.

Most of the information here comes from Wikipedia.

(Update: surprisingly, the edition of A Fire on the Moon available in Australia was actually called Fire on the Moon.)