The publishing industry excels at necrophilia, and this week there’s
a brand-new juicy corpse to plunder. By now, you’ve read
(or
ignored) all the Norman Mailer
obituaries you can possibly
stomach. Suffice it to say that The Naked and the Dead and
The Executioner’s Song—which is exactly the “nonfiction
novel” that Truman Capote failed to write with In Cold
Blood—are books that will last.
Soon, the post-Mailer books will start gushing forth. There’ll be
the requisite 1,500-page biography, possibly titled Mailer: A
Life, and memoirs by hangers-on, filled with scandalous backhands
and cash-
grubbing gossip, and probably be some
especially
bad novels stitched together from Mailer’s own half-hearted notes.
Authors aren’t allowed to die with dignity if there’s any chance of
money to be made.
There are precedents for this: At least three of Hemingway’s novels
have been released posthumously, and Harper Collins keeps dragging out
new Bukowski poetry with disturbing regularity. A good recent example
is Hunter S. Thompson. Just in time for Christmas, he’s the
subject of two new biographies. I can’t attest to their quality, but
one book that I have read is The Gonzo Way, by Thompson’s widow,
Anita. It’s an easy book to read—110 pages, one-and-a-half-spaced
type—but it’d be a lot more honest if every page was an
invoice for a half-penny’s worth of royalties to be paid to Ms.
Thompson.
The Gonzo Way is formatted like a business management how-to
book (like Jesus CEO or Buddha 9 to 5: The Eightfold Path to
Enlightening Your Workplace and Improving Your Bottom Line, and,
yes, those are both real titles) in that it includes easy-to-digest
universal lessons culled from Thompson’s life. Some examples: “It’s
Wrong When It Stops Being Fun” and “We Is the Most Important
Word in Politics.”
Still, Mailer and Thompson could’ve done worse. Anything
published after they died is clearly not their fault. Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, author of A Coney Island of the Mind (and not much
else) has produced his own pre-posthumous gimme-money book. It’s called
Poetry as Insurgent Art and it’s a collection of inspirational
clichés for young poets: “Poems are e-mails from the unknown
beyond cyberspace” and “Any child who can catch a firefly owns poetry.”
The greater lesson Ferlinghetti is teaching is “Grab the easy money
before your estate can suck your corpse dry.” Ferlinghetti probably
shat out Insurgent Art in an afternoon.
When Mailer needed cash, he wrote Tough Guys Don’t Dance in
two months. The book became one of his favorites. 