News of Norman Mailer’s death greeted me this morning as I went trawling for reports related to my wife’s new job. ( I don’t believe that Mailer ever appeared in the pages of Reader’s Digest, though I could be wrong.) I’ve written far too many obituaries in this space but most of the famous dead people I have known or seen have been younger, often dead for no good reason. Mailer was 84 and by anybody’s measuring had lived a very full life.

I remember being a freshman in high school and carrying around a copy of Cannibals and Christians, hoping to impress somebody in Auburn, California. I couldn’t make head nor tails of much of it, being unfamiliar with most of the writers and politicians he was lancing within its pages, but I do remember reading a rather combative interview he conducted with himself and thinking, “I didn’t know you could do that!”

Years later I could always start a brawl in San Francisco just by mentioning that I liked some of his books and his pugnacious attitude. I was living with some hippies in the Haight and they had a long list of things posted in the kitchen that you weren’t supposed to buy at the store (Nestles products, Del Monte, Dupont, other fascist brands) and I think there was an invisible list somewhere of writers we weren’t supposed to read, either. Mailer was on top of that list, largely because of attitude towards women’s liberation and his prejudices against homosexuality.

But what I admired was the way he confronted his critics — broken bottle in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other — that often showed a greater sense of humor than that of his enemies. When his second novel was excoriated by critics he took out a full page ad in the New York Times trumpeting the negative reviews (“A bunch of bums!” — Bosley Crowther). He criticized the Broadway production of Waiting for Godot before he actually saw it in his column in the Village Voice. After seeing the production, and being knocked out, he rode downtown in the back of a cab and glumly acknowledged his wife of the moment when she said, “Baby, you blew it.” He took another full page out (this in the Voice, I believe) saying how wrong he was and how great was Beckett.

I have forced my students to read Armies of the Night, and tried to show them how brave it was to allow yourself to look like such a fool, as he does through most of his weekend in Washington. And how getting yourself arrested to aid the nascent anti-war cause, doubly difficult for a member of the “greatest generation” who served in the South Pacific during WWII, when you could be enjoying a nice cocktail party back in Manhattan, was an act of courage of Thoreau-like proportions. He may have been cross-eyed at times but he had vision: he could look out across a political rally for JFK and see America’s past, back to the buffalo on the plain, as clearly as he saw the winos in the park gaping at the prince. And he didn’t need drugs to do it (though he didn’t mind them when he found them).

When we moved to Brooklyn Heights in the early nineties I used to spy him occasionally near the Promenade. He complained when the old coffee shop on Montague and Hicks became a modern yuppie brunch place, with five dollar cappucinos, and seemed to perpetually scowl.

Peg and I ran into him one night when we were leaving a friend’s apartment next door to his house on Columbia Heights. It was raining sideways, gale force winds blowing water up under out umbrellas and coats as we ran like babies from the storm. And there came Mailer: no umbrella, no coat, soaked to the skin, looking like some cross between Picasso and Popeye, and he was frowning at us in our discombobulation. He was vanishing breed, like those buffalo, and we will not see his like again.