Two Writers Pass on: Levin and Mailer

We observed the passing of two renowned writers in the past few weeks. Norman Mailer and Ira Levin steered completely opposite courses in their successful quests for fame and fortune as authors, and consequently leave entirely different legacies. Levin generally avoided the limelight and you might not even recognize his name, as I did not initially. All questions of his significance end when I tell you that he wrote The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil, and Rosemary's Baby, all cult classics. Thanks to Levin, the term "Stepford wife" has entrenched itself in the American vernacular. Levin also achieved a number of stage successes with "Deathtrap," the longest-running thriller in Broadway history, among others. He also adapted "No Time for Sergeants" for the stage and thereby built the launchepad for the career of a Southern actor with prominent ears named Andy Griffith. Levin's work will outlive him by decades at least because he always strove to make his writing excellent and original. If writers should be remembered for their writing, readers will never forget Ira Levin.
Norman Mailer, by contrast, was a star who also wrote. His work was so much a product of his times that it is difficult to imagine many of his works outliving his generation. As I read his obituary in The Week, I realized that I had always known Norman Mailer the advocate for left-wing politics and founder of The Village Voice, but had not realized he was a novelist. To me, a young fellow born in 1980, I began reading forty years after Mailer wrote his star-maker, The Naked and the Dead. He wrote regularly during my lifetime, but none of his books gained major recognition across party lines. In his novels The Armies of the Night, The Executioner's Song, Oswald's Tale and Harlot's Ghost he blended real events of the 1960s with fiction in order to reinforce what Mailer identified as "larger truths." To date, I have not read anything by Norman Mailer, but college courses on American literature probably assign some of his works occasionally. My children will almost certainly not read any of his work because his liberal peers in academia will have passed on and no one else thinks Mailer was brilliant.
The critics were decidedly unable to agree which of his career lowlights was the lowest: Entertainment Weekly said Mailer's stabbing of his second wife caused him to hit rock bottom, but curiously did not mention the episode in which he was an accomplice to a murder. Jack Henry Abbott was a convicted murderer in prison who wrote to Norman Mailer, wooing him with tales of literary aspirations and asking him to sponsor his release. Abbott was wise to write to the founder of The Village Voice because the liberals all know better than the rest of us. They realize that criminals possess hearts of gold and society just got them into unfortunate circumstances that are not really their fault. Stupid conservatives think that people commit murder because they possess tempers capable of murder. Putting them in prison or executing them is not intended to punish them so much as to keep the rest of society safe from them. Anyway, the outcome after Norman Mailer sponsored his release was stupidly predictable: Jack Henry Abbott murdered a waiter a mere SIX WEEKS after his release from prison. Therefore, Norman Mailer's death makes all of us genuinely safer.
Levin's writing made him great because it was timeless and excellent. Mailer's Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Award honors will not help him when no one reads his writing anymore. Although the periodicals paid distinctly higher tributes to Mailer than Levin, it is clear who will enjoy a lengthy legacy.