Olivia Rutigliano — editor at CrimeReads and Lit Hub, Columbia-trained historian of Victorian mass entertainment, and, since January, a member of the Society’s Executive Board — has asked her readers a question that sounds at first like a parlor game: “What Do Norman Mailer and Charles Dickens Have in Common?” Anyone who watched her spend six weeks this spring walking a sold-out Rosenbach seminar through Bleak House will suspect the question is not a joke, and it isn’t.
She clears the easy answers out of the way in a sentence — the bad histories with women, the sentences that travel for miles before finding a period, the books that appeared both serially and whole — and goes after something harder. Each man was a novelist with his hand in the journalism of his own moment; each addressed a mass public directly rather than from a height. Her closing formulation is that both worked to build an informed citizenry by “engaging with them directly, as their peers.”
The load-bearing evidence is the periodicals. Dickens founded Household Words in 1850 and All the Year Round in 1859, cheap weeklies that mixed a plain-talking tone with real reporting. Mailer put up money and lent his name to The Village Voice with Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher in October 1955, on the same theory: informality and inquiry, priced for everybody. It is a good pairing, and the essay is right that this — not the celebrity, not the pugnacity — is where the two careers rhyme.
Where I would press is on the size of the two proprietorships. Dickens edited his weeklies for twenty years, until his death in 1870; his son kept All the Year Round going another quarter century. He commissioned Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins for them, and he ran his own Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations through them. He owned the press, set the contents, and signed the masthead. Mailer’s tenure at the Voice was rather shorter. He wrote “Quickly: A Column for Slow Readers” for roughly four months in 1956, quit in a fury over the paper’s typographical errors, and subsided into a silent partnership. He never again ran a magazine, and he never really tried.
What he did instead is the more interesting half of the comparison. Everything that made Mailer a public writer ran in somebody else’s magazine: “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” in Esquire in 1960, The Armies of the Night filling most of an issue of Harper’s in March 1968, Of a Fire on the Moon serialized in Life. He was the most powerful freelancer in America, which is a different thing from being a proprietor. Dickens solved the problem of addressing a mass audience by building the channel. Mailer solved it by building a self that could be carried into any channel and remain unmistakably his — “Mailer” in the third person in Armies, the Reporter in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Aquarius at the Cape and on the Moon. Boz was a name on a masthead. Aquarius was a portable one.
That difference explains the thing Rutigliano is actually after. Both men needed a way to stand next to the reader rather than above him, and both understood that the way to do it was structural, not tonal — you cannot condescend your way out of condescension. Dickens got there by owning a twopenny weekly. Mailer got there by writing himself into the story as a fallible, vain, frequently ridiculous participant, which is the same maneuver performed with a persona instead of a printing press. It is why the Voice mattered to him less as a business than as a proof of concept, and why the mayoral run and the Pentagon march and the Town Hall debate all belong on the same list as the books.
This is Rutigliano’s second turn with Mailer for CrimeReads, after “The Ghosts of Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” and it is a welcome sign of what her seat on the Board is likely to bring: a reader who knows the nineteenth-century machinery of serial publication well enough to see what Mailer was improvising a replacement for. The Society has spent a long time arguing about whether Mailer was a novelist who did journalism or a journalist who wrote novels. Rutigliano’s answer, by way of Dickens, is that the question is badly put — the man was a publisher of himself, and the distinction he cared about was never genre but access.