Saturday, May 17, 1997

Dissatisfied with the four Gospels, Norman Mailer produces his own account of the life of Jesus

By Paul Galloway / Chicago Tribune

At age 74, Norman Mailer has finally gotten around to writing about Jesus Christ, one of what seems a handful of prominent, larger-than-life personages that he had heretofore failed to dissect in his long, distinguished and sometimes roiling career.

But now that he has gotten around to it, he tackles the subject in his typically bold, defiant fashion.

Having read the four Gospels of the New Testament two years ago in their entirety for the first time since college, and having found them flawed by what he considered uneven writing, Mailer has produced his own account of the life, death and resurrection of the central figure of Christendom in his latest book, "The Gospel According to the Son" (Random House).

Although a number of novelists, noted and obscure, from Charles Dickens and George Moore to Leo Tolstoy and A.J. Langguth, have trod the same path, they have tended to do it in the third person.

Mailer's approach is unusual and possibly unique: to have Jesus tell his own story - in, of course, the author's words.

Explaining his decision in his publisher's in-house journal, Mailer said: "In the first person, there might be a vibrancy to it. Jesus would come alive as a character. I also felt - there's the real dare. What's the use of being a writer as old as I am if I still can't take a dare?"

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In Chicago recently, Mailer was accompanied by Norris Church, his tall, beauteous wife - his sixth. A former model from Arkansas to whom he has been married for 17 years, Norris is 26 years his junior - and looks it. Mailer's hair is white and sparse. Age, as it will, has softened his barrel-chested boxer's body. He moves heavily. His hearing is not keen, and cataracts are beginning to cloud his vision, although it's too early yet for corrective surgery.

But he still writes 250 days a year, in longhand, using No. 2 Eberhard pencils and pads of plain, white typing paper, as he has done for half a century.

And he retains a vitality and eloquence that make him an engaging speaker, which he demonstrated over the next 45 minutes.

His book, Mailer said, grew out of his admiration for the writings of Pope John Paul II, specifically an encycical encyclical of some years ago that decried the excesses of Western materialism and his 1995 book, "Crossing the Threhold Threshold of Hope."

The latter would prompt Mailer to re-read the four canonical Gospels, producing fascination and disappointment.

"I kept thinking this is a most extraordinary story. It's so good in places and so bad in others," he said. "In fact, it began to seem to me that the New Testament was a form of literary archipelago, in which the text runs from island to island of great remarks and parables by Jesus, and in between you have these flat passages of pedestrian writing."

He was convinced he could do better.

"I finally thought, 'I'd like to rewrite this,' staying very true to this story, this narrative, this myth, call it what you will, which is the keel of Western civilization, a story and a collection of sayings that people grow up with and live by."

He paused. "And as I started writing, I made one shift: I put it in the first person."

In doing so, he knew he was certain to be attacked by critics for his hubris, and when he created a style that was simple and evocative of the mildly archaic language of the King James Version, he knew he was inviting further fusillades.

"It may seem that I was looking for punishment, but what I wanted to do was capture the aspect of Jesus as a man," Mailer said. "The New Testament presents Jesus as the Son of God who incidentally happens to be a man, and as a non-observant Jew who had no knowledge of the divine and had hardly grown up with Christ or Christian theology, I wanted to reverse the emphasis, to see Jesus as a man who incidentally is the Son of God."

In Mailer's view, Jesus' divinity is something that, in effect, he was awarded by his Father. "It's rather exceptional to him. He's the Son of God, but he doesn't feel like the Son of God. He doesn't feel large enough.

"As the novel goes on, it's a process of Jesus' becoming larger and beginning to accept and understand and work and live with the role and worry about the role. I felt the first-person voice was right because you need the immediacy of some of his thinking and feeling and living through the cures, the miracles, the messages he receives from God and Satan, all that.

"After I had written the book, I realized that if I had tried to do it in the third person, it would have been offensive, sacrilegious, an ersatz gospel to people who care deeply about the New Testament, who are people I want very much to reach."

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If it seems that Mailer is a bit tardy in tackling the foundational story of Western thought, maybe it's because he has been quite busy over the last 49 years.

Indeed, it is difficult to think of another American writer who has played such an active role at the center of the public arena over such a prolonged period, reaping acclaim and notoriety in a protean swirl of ambition, passion, talent and dissipation.

At 25, Mailer would become a national sensation in the world of letters with "The Naked and the Dead," his immensely successful novel about World War II.

He since has published nearly 40 other volumes of fiction, essays and journalism, receiving a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction for "The Armies of the Night" (1969), a National Book Award for "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" (1968), and a Pultizer Pulitzer Prize for fiction for "The Executioner's Song" (1980).

The topics about which he has written have ranged from the space program and feminism to boxing and ancient Egypt; the people he has profiled have included Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, Lee Harvey Oswald and Pablo Picasso.

He co-founded the Village Voice in 1955; seriously injured his second wife in 1960 by stabbing her while he was drunk; marched on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War in 1967; ran for mayor of New York City in 1969 with newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin as running mate on a platform of making the city the 51st state; fathered nine children; wrote, produced, directed and/or acted in three independent films; and wrote and directed "Tough Guys Don't Dance," a 1987 studio release starring Ryan O'Neal.

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As Mailer predicted, "The Gospel According to the Son" has suffered vicious hits from some critics, although the reviews have varied widely between praise and disapproval, with most of the negative notices spewing forth from professional reviewers rather than fellow authors.

Newsweek, for example, not only ridiculed Mailer's first-person voice as "manifestly batty" but also added three years to his age. Time called the book "a dubious and ultimately failed enterprise." And a staff reviewer for the weekday New York Times declared it "silly, self-important and at times comical."

But three respected novelists who are students of the Bible commended Mailer's writing style and first-person voice while primarily faulting only his faithful adherence to the structure and spirit of the canonical accounts.

In the New York Review of Books, Frank Kermode finds Mailer's gospel to be a "clever" and "superior rendering."

Reynolds Price, in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, finds Mailer's interpretation "carefully weighed and clearly written," declaring his "excess of self-effacement" robbed readers of "the flares of his lifelong narrative brilliance."

A review by John Updike in The New Yorker salutes the "neo-Biblical dignity" of Mailer's "quietly penetrating" tone, concluding that Mailer's gospel would probably be acceptable to "(Mailer's) Baptist father-in-law," which, as it happens, proved correct.

"My father-in-law is a deacon in the Freewill Baptist Church in Atkins, Ark., which is Norris' hometown," Mailer said. "Norris told me he couldn't possibly like the book, that it's not for him.

"Instead, what happened is he read it, and he said, 'Well, you know, there's a lot I don't agree with, but you know, I found it kind of interesting because, after all, Jesus was doing things besides what's in the New Testament, and you've got some of that in your book.' "

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It's likely that Christians such as Mailer's father-in-law, who believe the Bible to be infallible, would be troubled when Mailer's Jesus accuses the writers of the four Gospels of "much exaggeration," of putting words in his mouth that "I never uttered," and for describing him "as gentle when I was pale with rage."

Mailer's Jesus asserts: "Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. ... I would hope to remain closer to the truth. Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were seeking to enlarge their fold."

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In addition to an interview with this newspaper and his appearance at Barbara's Bookstore in Chicago, Mailer also sat down for a taping of WGN-TV's "Extension 720" with Milt Rosenberg, the University of Chicago psychology professor who is the program's host and who probed Mailer for an assessment of his Jesus.

"I was struck by how existential Jesus' life was," Mailer said during the taping WGN. "That is, how insecure. How the part that was a man couldn't know at any moment what was going to happen next. It seemed to me, even by some of the internal evidence, a little of it, in the New Testament, that his closeness to God varied.

"So the feeling I had about Jesus is what a difficult life, what a noble life, and I had never written about a person I considered noble before.

"I found him immensely interesting as a protagonist. There's something wonderful about him. When you're a novelist, you tend to pick protagonists who keep you a little bit comfortable. Either you're superior to them morally or physically or in various other ways.

"Here I was dealing with a man whose moral nature was vastly superior to my own, and it was a comfort for me to remember what Christians are always saying is that Jesus is in all of us. And I thought, well, if he's in all of us, then maybe I've got my 5 percent, which would be enough for me as a novelist to have an insight into him."

In retrospect, Mailer said, his book was informed by a political motive.

"This country is in a race to become the leader of global capitalism, and if we don't watch out we're going to prove that Marx was right - that once it becomes dominant in human affairs, money leaches out every moral value," Mailer said.

"So, I thought, 'Let's go back to the message of Jesus.' What he is saying over and over again in the Gospels is that the corporate men of Mammon (an Aramaic word for wealth) are evil. And as far as I'm concerned, they are now running this country. It just seemed to me this book might be a way of reminding people that there is something else in existence besides making money."

(c) 1997, Chicago Tribune.

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