National Book Award Winner Colum McCann celebrates the style of the multifaceted Norman Mailer, and praises Larry Schiller for setting up a Writers Colony in his late, great friend’s name

If it’s true, as Ralph Waldo Emerson says, that all history can be resolved in the biography of a few stout and earnest people, then surely the writer Norman Mailer would be a candidate, even if an unwilling one. Mailer was witness, creator, participant, author and all-round handyman of so much of the mechanics of the 20th century. It was the most and least human of times, and Mailer oversaw them with a jacked-up eye. He participated in, and mediated over, so much of the glory and the shabby horror, from the Second World War to the Apollo moonshot to the depths of the Cold War to the execution of Gary Gilmore to the sad derailing of Marilyn Monroe.

If ever there was a man with his finger on the pulse, it was Mailer, pushing the wrong way through swinging doors. He wrote as if his very life depended on it, and often it did. He wanted to be at the heart of whatever was important and, as such, he knew his own importance.

Like many great men and women, there was a simultaneous selfishness and selflessness at the core of what Mailer was doing as he stepped into everybody else’s world, then back to his own, which he had often shattered. But through it all Mailer had style – maybe not a strict sartorial style, but a style of language, a style of living, a style of seeing and, ultimately, a style of giving. Mailer was known as one of the most generous writers of his time: he would write long letters to unknown writers who wanted advice on the smallest of details, he held people up to prevent them falling, he scaffolded, he encouraged, and even on his deathbed he is rumoured to have edited manuscripts for strangers.

Mailer kept himself in the world. Maybe part of it was because he needed to be loved, but a deeper part of it was that he loved the world. It was, after all, the only one he had and, goddammit, he might as well enjoy it.

Part of the echo of Mailer’s charisma was on display in New York in October on the occasion of the gala benefit for the newly created Norman Mailer Writers Colony, the brainchild of Larry Schiller, Mailer’s longtime friend and collaborator.

Schiller is a Renaissance man – photographer, producer, director, renowned interviewer – and he used his considerable skills and charm to pull together a who’s who of the New York literary world in the fancy midtown restaurant Cipriani. The occasion was graced by Norris Church Mailer and all of the extended Mailer clan. Tina Brown and David Remnick hosted, two great brains clicking together to celebrate the panoply of lives that Mailer influenced, while Calvin Trillin was MC for the night, backed up by Doris Kearns Goodwin. In the course of the evening, Toni Morrison stepped up to receive a lifetime achievement award, and Jean Halberstam, wife of the late David Halberstam, received an award on her late husband’s behalf. Don DeLillo was there, within a stone’s throw of Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, Jhumpa Lahiri, William Kennedy, Gay Talese, Michael Cunningham, Francine Prose, Jeffrey Eugenides, Oliver Stone, John Waters and countless others from the literary world.

The essence of Schiller’s mission is not just to celebrate the flash and dash, or the hyper-hyphens of Mailer’s life. He has opened the Mailer house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, to aspiring and talented writers and scholars from all over the world. He has also set up a series of national awards for college and high-school students. The $5,000 high-school award went to a young writer from Alabama, Emily Swanagin, who was charmingly elegant and nervous as she announced that she had never had “this much attention before”. The $10,000 college writing award went to John Gilmore, a senior at Utah State University. A shiver went through the crowd as the award was announced, with some people wondering if he was perhaps related to Gary Gilmore of Executioner’s Song fame. It turned out that he wasn’t, but nothing would have surprised the audience, given that the ghost of Mailer was hanging around, knocking over the bellinis and looking for a serious Scotch.

The aim of it all is that, by keeping Mailer alive, you can preserve an endangered species: the art of writing. In this sense, the project gets to the essence of great storytelling, which Mailer knew was one of the last few democratic dignities. Everyone has a story and everyone can tell one. And then the stories themselves can transform us, taking us into another day, another time, another place. Mailer was aware that allowing a voice to rise up from the dark was the freshest difference that the novelist or the poet or the playwright could make, allowing for stories to move on and for life to become, in fact, endless.

Schiller’s idea is to be kaleidoscopic in using the Mailer name. It comes quickly on the heels of Mailer’s death, while his presence still hovers, so it seems as if the New Jersey-born boy is everywhere. It could be considered vain, or sentimental, or “in your face”, but Schiller wants to make us witness to the many facets of Mailer since he knows that without witness there is not very much. By opening up Mailer’s name, he brings it out from the realm of the gone but at the same time he gives the name to others. Schiller knows that a whole generation of new writers – ones who push the edge, and perhaps even become the edge – will emerge from the Mailer awards. The best way to keep a name alive is to allow the name to keep changing.

It’s a strange and vibrantly optimistic idea, especially in today’s economy, but appropriate for a writer as deeply layered as any in recent times. Mailer is out there. His books are coming alive again. His house doors are open. He is digging in his pockets to help out younger writers. He is lending his name to the name of others. He is brash and brazen and renewed. He was even hanging around at the end of the New York gig, wondering why it all finished so early and nudging up towards the bar to refresh his glass, while at the same time he was in the car back to Provincetown, while at the same time he was running off down 42nd Street at a clip, while yet another Norman was deep in his Brooklyn study, ignoring all the hullabaloo, getting the real work done.

- Irish writer Colum McCann won the National Book Award with his novel Let The Great World Spin

• Schiller’s Thrillers

Tags: marilyn monroe, national book award, norman mailer, schiller

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