De Mortuis nil nisi bonom

I have barely recovered from the hagiographic obituaries that Arthur Miller's death invoked. Now, Norman Mailer has passed. Thankfully, Roger Kimball has beaten the New York Times Review of Books to the punch.

No one combined critical regard, popular celebrity, and radical chic politics with quite the same insouciance as did Mailer. From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania. Although he modeled his persona on some of the less attractive features of Ernest Hemingway—booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads—he managed to update that pathetic, shopworn machismo with some significant postwar embellishments: reefer, radicalism, and Reich, for starters. The glittering example of Mailer’s commercial success was obviously the cynosure that many aspiring writers set out to follow: his neat trick was to combine cachet with large amounts of cash.

It's a fantastic tear at a man who deserves it.

Hat-tip: Instapundit

Posted by jk at November 10, 2007 6:15 PM