More than 20 years later, what Mailer describes has only grown worse. The most soulful and interesting piece of journalism I’ve read recently is the book You Wanna Be on Top?: A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America’s Next Top Model by Sarah Hartshorne. Hartshorne writes about her small town upbringing and the bad treatment and nasty personalities she found when she became a model. It’s more affecting than anything I’ve read in The Washington Post or New York Times in several years. Hartshorne is beautiful—and also tough. In her book, she talks about the book that encouraged her as a young girl to want to be a model: Of Women and Their Elegance—by Norman Mailer.
Mailer drew a correlation between physical toughness and great journalism. In his new book Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer, David Denby traces Mailer’s transformation from a needy Jewish kid in Brooklyn to a street-tough writer who thrived on combat and iconoclasm. Mailer was transformed during his service in World War II. As Denby puts it, “This American-style prophet brawled and head-butted at parties; at one time or another, he was decked, hammered, billy clubbed, his eye gouged, his ear bitten. He believed that physical courage was necessary equipment for a great writer (Hemingway was the model) and that Jewish men in particular had to overcome all sorts of weakness.”
For Mailer, “everything he could put his body and spirit through was a test. He was sure he needed to escape the traps not only of his soft middle-class Jewish background but also the traps of postwar America—the desire for ‘security,’ the endless consumerism, and what he took to be the country’s humiliating spiritual mediocrity. He had made himself into a novelist in the Pacific, and now he brought the war home. For the author of The Naked and the Dead, the truce never arrived.” Mailer “was fascinated by boxers, murderers, and spies.”
