In a 2004 essay called “Social Life, Literary Desires, Literary Corruption,” Norman Mailer examined what he thought was wrong with journalism. It’s been taken over by elites who have a lot of education but not any real-life experience. They have no ability to see into the “soul” of a subject.
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.”
The physical pain Mailer went through gave him a mesmerizing voice on the page. It’s why he could write about politics, boxing, war, women and sports and be perceptive about all of them. Who’s replaced him? Peter Baker? Ezra Klein? Matthew Continetti? It’s not a problem of left and right. They’re all boring.
Modern journalism discourages any sense of adventure or bravado. As I recently recounted in Splice, in 2022 I was hired by a conservative website, but when I insisted on writing about surfers, models, prostitutes and skateboarders as much as Capitol Hill, I ran into trouble—and was dismissed. The editor wanted a political “man in Washington.” Right, there aren’t enough reporters in D.C. I wanted to write about real people and encourage those people to also write. As Mailer once noted, “Not one major American athlete, CEO, politician, engineer, trade union official, surgeon, airline pilot, chess master, call girl, sea captain, teacher, bureaucrat, Mafioso, pimp, recidivist, physicist, rabbi, movie star, clergyman, or priest or nun has emerged as a major novelist since the Second World War.”
I find myself avoiding the mainstream media, and even the conservative media, to try and find something that has some toughness. Aside from Sarah Hartshorne, one of the coolest books I’ve read recently is Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by jazz musician Henry Threadgill. Threadgill grew up in Chicago and was playing jazz when he was drafted to go to Vietnam in 1967. The experience was hell, yet when he got back home he discovered that his sense of hearing was much more acute:
One of the main ways that war transforms you has to do with your sense of hearing. It’s partly an expansion of your aural palette, all the new stuff you become attuned to in the new environment: the sounds of helicopters and distant howitzer fire, sure, but also the ribald banter among the guys you serve with, or the voices of the Montagnards, or the unfamiliar patter of rain on a triple-canopy jungle, or the melodious cries of street-food vendors in Saigon hawking their goods. But it’s not simply a matter of hearing more—it makes you hear differently, too. You acquire a heightened sensitivity to sound. Your body learns quickly that listening can be a matter of life or death. Your ears start to pick up things you wouldn’t even have noticed back at home, because in the war missing the slightest signal at the wrong moment could get you killed. Your body learns to hear things with great precision even while you’re asleep, and to jolt you awake at any hint of a threat. For any artist, such a profound transformation of your understanding and perception can’t help finding its way into what you’re doing. It’s like I grew a set of antennae over there. When I returned, my reception equipment was different. And even if the war messed up my head in a million other ways at the same time—and even if I didn’t ask for any of it—I’d have to admit that that heightened sensitivity became one of the main things that shaped me into the composer I’ve become.
What a beautiful, Mailer-like passage—and how lucky we are that it wasn’t submitted to a place like Politico or Axios, where in the name of “smart brevity” it would’ve been revised, cut, neutered and smothered. Places like the Atlantic keep hiring more and more journalists, thousands of them drilling down into minutiae about Trump. It’s like the joke about the specialist. He knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing.
“No matter how much we read,” Mailer once wrote, “we tend to know too little of how the world works. The men who do the real work offer us no real writing, and the writers who explore the minds of such men approach from an intellectual stance that distorts their vision. You would not necessarily want a saint to try to write about a computer engineer, but you certainly would not search for the reverse. All too many saints, monsters, maniacs, mystics, and rock performers are being written about these days, however, by practitioners of journalism whose inner vision is usually graphed by routine parameters. Our continuing inability to comprehend the world is likely to continue.”
