Norman Mailer: ‘God told me not to pay for coffee’
The great American novelist was a wildly eccentric believer who claimed that God personally instructed him to ignore society's petty injunctions, says Matt Thorne
21 March 2008

Norman Mailer

In a characteristic display of bravado Norman Mailer's first posthumous publication (I have a feeling there may be more to come) is a collection of his thoughts on the Creator.

The impetus behind the book, however, has not come from Mailer himself, but instead from Michael Lennon, an English professor who wrote a book on Mailer's cosmology in the early 1980s, believing that understanding the author's idiosyncratic beliefs is important for serious readers of his work.

Lennon's conviction was strengthened when he read Mailer's final novel, The Castle in the Forest, in which Mailer invested his characters with his own beliefs about the tripartite division of power in our solar system among God, the devil, and humanity. Lennon was subsequently invited by the author to play a role in a staged reading of George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell. Mailer directed the production and took the part of Don Juan; his wife, the novelist Norris Church Mailer, played Dona Ana with Mailer's former rival Gore Vidal as the devil.

Michael Lennon then met Mailer over a three-year period between 2003 and 2006 and engaged him in the "uncommon conversation" that fills this slim volume. Mailer's only proviso was that he didn't see the questions beforehand, so that the dialogue remained "improvisational".

Improvisational it is. As Mailer confesses in his introduction, he is "obviously ignorant of most of the intellections required of a competent theologian". His justification for the book is that he spent 50 years (after 30 years of atheism) contemplating the nature of God.

Repelled by theological volumes due to his belief that they were "undernourished in their appetite for inquiry, and full of ideological dicta", his approach to religious inquiry is instead that of a novelist.

His religious thoughts, he believes, are similar to those of "process theologians", the school of thought which rejects the metaphysics that privilege "being" over "becoming". By page three, Mailer has also rejected advanced physics. A page later he contradicts himself by arguing that thinking about the ultimate Creator is too large for his speculations while at the same time confessing that he believes God created the world we live in and is in constant conflict with the devil.

He dismisses organised religion and says that he sees God as the greatest artist, "a better novelist than the novelists", believing that worms, frogs and vermin are his failed experiments. He wonders whether flush toilets are an improvement in existence, believes that the Enlightenment led to fascism, argues that technology is the devil's invention and that it's possible he's upset by nuclear bombs because they might wipe out his beloved computers.

Mailer's notion of the devil is inspired by Milton. But he also imagines God and the devil competing within us in a manner similar to teams playing professional (American) football. He thinks that our mission might be to travel out across the stars, not in spaceships but by our spirits - although, of course, we will have to watch out for black holes. He doesn't believe in heaven, but does believe in reincarnation and wants to come back as a black athlete.

Lennon suggests to Mailer that if there is any pathway to formal religion open in his mind, given his beliefs, it should be to Catholicism. Mailer replies that he feels more open to Catholicism than any other formal religion, and that he is able to believe in transubstantiation in the Mass, but cannot accept the omnipotence of God. Lennon continues to persuade him, pointing out that Catholics were quick to embrace the notion of evolution when fundamentalist Protestants could not. Mailer responds to this by saying he believes that dogs have souls, and that some dogs are more human than many humans. He claims that the Catholic Church "may be the most complex and powerful and manipulative and intricate power system in history" and that Andy Warhol is the modern equivalent to Baudelaire.

He equates St Thomas Aquinas to Hemingway and believes that the best answer to "the rigours of modern society" is liquor or pot. He also describes the Catholic Church as "a study not just of immense human wisdom but of applied skill at manoeuvring our thoughts around the most non-navigable corners". He makes some other negative comments about the Catholic Church that are too offensive to repeat here.

Among the stranger parts of the book is a barmy anecdote of how Mailer went to an all-night diner after trying (and failing) to pick up a woman in a bar and ordered a doughnut and coffee, then heard God telling him to leave without paying. He believes God told him: "Just walk out of there. Don't pay for the coffee. They'll survive, and this will be good for you."

Apparently, God wanted Mailer to steal the food so that he could ignore society's petty injunctions on how to behave and become a "wild man." This seems worryingly close to a murderer's explanation that "the voices made me do it", especially given Mailer's involvement in the release of the recidivist Jack Henry Abbott.

Mailer believes God would prompt him to steal but doesn't listen to other people's prayers. He thinks the concept of limbo is silly and that God wants us to develop our telepathic powers. He suggests that the best way to understand intelligent design is to imagine Henry James, Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller coming into a room with cow waste on their head and how these three men might respond to this situation given their respective prose styles, a non sequitur that makes no sense and which Lennon thankfully doesn't pursue. And so on, for 215 increasingly ridiculous pages. Woody Allen once noted that his excitement at appearing alongside Norman Mailer in Jean-Luc Godard's film adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear evaporated when he realised what a silly project he was involved in.

When it comes to silly projects, Godard's film has nothing on On God, which enjoys the distinction of being truly the barmiest of Mailer's many barmy books.

On God: An Uncommon
Conversation by Norman Mailer, Continuum £16.99