The Spooky Art

by Norman Mailer

  But let me spell it out a bit: Originally, The Deer Park had been about a movie director and a girl with whom he had a bad affair, and it was told by a sensitive but faceless young man. In changing the young man, I saved the book from being minor, but put a disproportion upon it because my narrator became too interesting, and not enough happened to him in the second half of the book, and so it was to be expected that readers would be disappointed by this part of the novel.

  Before I was finished, I saw a way to write another book altogether. In what I had so far done, Sergius O’Shaugnessy was given an opportunity by a movie studio to sell the rights to his life and get a contract as an actor. After more than one complication, he finally refused the offer, lost the love of his movie star, Lulu, and went wandering by himself, off to become a writer. This episode had never been an important part of the book, but I could see that the new Sergius was capable of accepting the offer, and if he went to Hollywood and became a movie star himself, the possibilities were good, for in O’Shaugnessy I had a character who was ambitious yet, in his own way, moral, and with such a character one could travel deep into the paradoxes of the time.

  Well, I was not in shape to consider that book. With each week of work, bombed and sapped and charged and stoned with lush, with pot, with benny, saggy, coffee, and two packs a day, I was working live, and over-alert, and tiring into what felt like death, afraid all the way because I had achieved the worst of vicious circles in myself; I had gotten too tired, I was more tired than I had ever been in combat, and so as the weeks went on, and publication was delayed from June to August and then to October, there was only a worn-out part of me to keep protesting into the pillows of one drug and the pinch of the other that I ought to have the guts to stop the machine, to call back the galleys, to cease—to rest, to give myself another two years and write a book which would go a little further to the end of my particular night.

  But I had passed the point where I could stop. My anxiety had become too great. I did not know anything anymore. I did not have that clear sense of the way things work, which is what you need for the natural proportions of a long novel, and it is likely I would not have been writing a new book so much as arguing with the law. Of course another man might have had the stamina to write the new book and manage to be indifferent to everything else, but it was too much to ask of me. By then I was like a lover in a bad but uncontrollable affair; my woman was publication, and it would have cost too much to give her up before we were done. My imagination had been committed—to stop would leave half the psyche in limbo.

  Knowing, however, what I had failed to do, shame added momentum to the punishment of the drugs. By the last week or two, I had worn down so badly that with a dozen pieces still to be fixed, I was reduced to working hardly more than an hour a day. Like an old man, I would come up out of a Seconal stupor with four or five times the normal dose in my veins and drop into a chair to sit for hours. It was July, the heat was grim in New York, the last of the book had to be in by August 1. Putnam had been more than accommodating, but the vehicle of publication was on its way, and the book could not be postponed beyond the middle of October or it would miss all chance for a large fall sale. I would sit in a chair and watch a baseball game on television, or get up and go out in the heat to a drugstore for a sandwich and malted—it was my outing for the day: The walk would feel like a patrol in a tropical sun, and it was two blocks, no more. When I came back, I would lie down, my head would lose the outer wrappings of sedation, and with a crumb of Benzedrine, the first snake or two of thought would wind through my brain. I would go for some coffee—it was a trip to the kitchen, but when I came back I would have a scratch-board and pencil in hand. Watching some afternoon horror on television, the boredom of the performers coming through their tense hilarities with a bleakness to match my own, I would pick up the board, wait for the first sentence—like all working addicts I had come to an old man’s fine sense of inner timing—and then slowly, but picking up speed, the actions of the drugs hovering into collaboration like two ships passing in view of one another, I would work for an hour, not well but not badly either. (Pages 195 to 200 of the Putnam edition were written this way.) Then my mind would wear out, and new work was done for the day. I would sit around, watch more television, and try to rest my dulled mind, but by evening a riot of bad nerves was on me again, and at two in the morning I’d be having the manly debate of whether to try sleep with two double capsules or settle again for my need of three.

  Somehow I got the book done for the last deadline. Not perfectly—doing just the kind of editing and small rewriting I was doing, I could have used another two or three days, but I got it almost the way I wanted, and then I took my car up to the Cape and lay around in Provincetown with my wife, trying to mend, and indeed doing a fair job, because I came off sleeping pills and the marijuana and came part of the way back into that world which has the proportions of the ego. I picked up on The Magic Mountain, took it slowly, and lowered The Deer Park down to modest size in my brain. Which, events proved, was just as well.

  A few weeks later we came back to the city, and I took some mescaline. Maybe one dies a little with the poison of mescaline in the blood. At the end of a long and private trip which no quick remark should try to describe, the book of The Deer Park floated into mind, and I sat up, reached through a pleasure garden of velveted light to find the tree of a pencil and the bed of a notebook, and brought them to union together. Then, out of some flesh in myself I had not yet known, with the words coming one by one, in separate steeps and falls, hip in their turnings, all cool with their flights, like the touch of being coming into other being, so the last six lines of my bloody book came to me, and I was done. And it was the only good writing I ever did directly from a drug, even if I paid for it with a hangover beyond measure.

  That way the novel received its last sentence, and if I had waited one more day it would have been too late, for in the next twenty-four hours, the printers began their cutting and binding. The book was out of my hands.

  Six weeks later, when The Deer Park came out, I was no longer feeling eighty years old but something like a vigorous, hysterical sixty-three—I was actually thirty-three—and I laughed like an old pirate at the indignation I had breezed into being. The important reviews broke about seven good and eleven bad, and the out-of-town reports were almost three-to-one bad to good, but I was not unhappy, because the good reviews were lively and the bad reviews were full of factual error.

  More interesting is the way reviews divided in the New York magazines and newspapers. Time, for example, was bad, Newsweek was good; Harper’s was terrible, but the Atlantic was adequate; the daily Times was very bad, the Sunday Times was good; the daily Herald Tribune gave a mark of zero, the Sunday Herald Tribune was better than good; Commentary was careful but complimentary, the Reporter was frantic; the Saturday Review was a scold, and Brendan Gill, writing for The New Yorker, put together a series of slaps and superlatives, which went partially like this:

  … a big, vigorous, rowdy, ill-shaped, and repellent book, so strong and so weak, so adroit and so fumbling, that only a writer of the greatest and most reckless talent could have flung it between covers.

  It’s one of the three or four lines I’ve thought perceptive in all the reviews of my books. That Malcolm Cowley used one of the same words in saying The Deer Park was “serious and reckless” is also, I think, interesting, for reckless the book was—and two critics, anyway, had the instinct to feel it.

  One note appeared in many reviews. The strongest statement of it was by John Hutchens in the daily New York Herald Tribune:

  … the original version reputedly was more or less rewritten and certain materials eliminated that were deemed too erotic for public consumption. And, with that, a book that might at least have made a certain reputation as a large shocker wound up as a cipher.…

  I was bothered to the point of writing a letter to the twenty-odd newspapers which reflected this idea. What bothered me was
that I could never really prove I had not “eliminated” the book. Over the years all too many readers would have some hazy impression that I had disemboweled large pieces of the best meat, perspiring in a coward’s sweat, a publisher’s directive in my ear. (For that matter, I still get an occasional letter which asks if it is possible to see the unbowdlerized Deer Park.) Part of the cost of touching the Rinehart galleys was to start those rumors, and in fact I was not altogether free of the accusation, as I have tried to show. Even the ten lines which so displeased Rinehart had been altered a bit; I had shown them once to a friend whose opinion I respected, and he remarked that while it was impossible to accept the sort of order Rinehart had laid down, still a phrase like the “fount of power” had a Victorian heaviness about it. Well, that was true, it was out of character for O’Shaugnessy’s new style, and so I altered it to the “thumb of power” and then other changes became desirable, and the curious are invited to compare the two versions of this particular passage,* but the mistake I made was to take a small aesthetic gain on those lines and lose a larger clarity about a principle.

  What more is there to say? The book moved fairly well. It climbed to seven and then to six on the New York Times best-seller list, stayed there for a week or two, and then slipped down. By Christmas, the tone of the Park and the Christmas spirit being not all that congenial, it was just about off the lists forever. It did well, however; it would have reached as high as three or two or even to number one if it had come out in June and then been measured against the low sales of summer, for it sold over fifty thousand copies after returns, which surprised a good many in publishing, as well as disappointing a few, including myself. I discovered that I had been poised for an enormous sale or a failure—a middling success was cruel to take. Week after week I kept waiting for the book to erupt into some dramatic change of pace which would send it up in sales instead of down, but that never happened. I was left with a draw, not busted, not made, and since I was empty at the time, worn-out with work, waiting for the quick transfusions of a generous success, the steady sales of the book left me deeply depressed. Having reshaped my words with an intensity of feeling I had not known before, I could not understand why others were not overcome with my sense of life, of sex, and of sadness. Like a starved revolutionary in a garret, I had compounded out of need and fever and vision and fear nothing less than a madman’s confidence in the identity of my being and the wants of all others, and it was a new dull load to lift and to bear, this knowledge that I had no magic so great as to hasten the time of the apocalypse but that instead I would be open like all others to the attritions of half-success and small failure. Something God-like in my confidence began to leave, and I was reduced in dimension if now less a boy. I knew I had failed to bid on the biggest hand I ever held.

  The proper end to this account is the advertisement I took in The Village Voice. It was bought in November 1955, a month after publication, it was put together by me and paid for by me, and it was my way I now suppose of saying good-bye to the pleasure of a quick triumph, of making my apologies for the bad flaws in the bravest effort I had yet pulled out of myself, and certainly for declaring to the world (in a small way, mean pity) that I no longer gave a sick dog’s drop for the wisdom, the reliability, and the authority of the public’s literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.

  Besides, I had the tender notion—believe it if you will—that the ad might after all do its work and excite some people to buy the book.

  BEST-SELLERS

  Now that this once-outsized lust in me for large sales has settled into more reasonable expectations, I may as well offer some later thoughts on the subject.

  Writing a best-seller with conscious intent to do so is, after all, a state of mind that is not without comparison to the act of marrying for money only to discover that the absence of love is more onerous than anticipated. When a putative and modest writer of best-sellers finally becomes professional enough to write a winner, he or she thinks that a great feat has been brought off, even as a man void of love (and money) will see a wealthy marriage as a splendid union.

  The ideal, and as you get older you do try to get closer to the ideal, is to write only what interests you. It will prove of interest to others or it won’t, but if you try to steer your way into success, you shouldn’t be a serious writer. Rather, you will do well to study the tricks of consistent best-seller authors while being certain to stay away from anything that’s well written. Reading good books could poison your satisfaction at having pulled off a bestseller. I don’t think Jackie Susann went to bed with Rainer Maria Rilke on her night table.

  Today, large literary canvases are usually left to best-selling novelists. They will have a cast of forty or fifty characters, and stories that traverse fifty to a hundred years. They’ll have several world wars, plus startling changes in the lives of several families. They do all that to keep their book moving. What usually characterizes these novels is that nothing is in them that you haven’t come across before. Most good writers tend these days to work on smaller canvases. Then, at least, you have the confidence that what you’re doing has some fictional truth. That’s reasonable. At least you’re contributing to knowledge rather than adding to the sludge of the culture. Of course, that can make it more difficult to take on a large topic. At the moment the only great writer who can handle forty or fifty characters and three or four decades is García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude is an amazing work. He succeeds in doing it, but how, I don’t know. In my Egyptian novel, it took me ten pages to go around a bend in the Nile.

  It’s counterproductive to think, I’m going to put this in because it will sell copies. Usually, that doesn’t work. There is an integrity to best-sellerdom—it is the best book that the author is capable of writing at that time. He or she believes in the book. That’s one reason it’s a best-seller. Stephen King was a desperately clumsy and repetitive writer when he started, but best-seller book readers responded to his sincerity. That was present on every badly written page. The popularity of bad writing is analogous to the enjoyment of fast food.

  I must say King has improved in style since he started. Hopefully, his readers also have, but that is not as certain.

  A best-seller strategy is to keep cooking up new ingredients for the story. But beware! Plot is equal to a drug. It can stimulate a novelist into hordes of narrative energy, and will certainly keep a reader on the page, but sooner or later, plot presents its bill, and dire exigencies come down upon the writer. The author who is over-burdened with plot is sometimes obliged to enter the character’s mind in order to keep things clear.

  Right here is where it all bogs down. A reader’s confidence in what he is reading will be subtly betrayed or even squandered should a novelist choose to enter the mind of a character but fail to bequeath the indispensable gift that the reader can now know more about the character than before. The internal monologues are usually routine and insist on telling us what we know already. There is almost no signature quality of mind.

  Of course, the damage is limited, since the internal ruminations of the characters in most mega-best-sellers are about what you would expect. Mega-best-seller readers want to be able to read and read and read—they do not want to ponder any truly unexpected revelations. Reality might lie out there, but that is not why they are reading.

  Editing tends to make best-sellers read more like each other. As one instance, few best-sellers don’t suffer from a spate of adjectives. For when a writer can’t find the nuance of an experience, he usually loads up with adjectives. That tells the reader what to think. This goes along with a tendency in publishing houses to get the emphasis on entertainment at all costs. Of course, a pervasive weariness could come into us because of the rate at which we are being entertained.