Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  The favorite child of his mother, Barney was a compulsive gambler whose debts had caused his family considerable anguish. According to Barbara, the family finally gave her father “an ultimatum: go in the army or we will wash our hands of you.” World War I forced Barney to give up or at least curtail his betting in London; the United States was to be where he would redeem himself. The plan was simple: live with Anne and Dave (who were childless) until he found a professional position and a wife, then settle down. Shortly after Barney’s arrival, Anne caught the flu at the tail end of the pandemic of 1918–19. Reservations were made at Lakeview Lodge for her recuperation and in January 1920, Barney and the Kesslers took the train to Lakewood. Fan recounts the various circumstances of their first meeting three separate times in her memoir, written at the request of her son.

  The rug was rolled back, so we could have dancing Saturday night. Sunday afternoon we all took a walk to the Lake, and Monday morning just before leaving, Dad [Barney] and I found we were all alone in the living room. We were both shy, there was a pack of playing cards on the table and Dad said, “Let me show you some card tricks.” I thought he was very nice, polite and really handsome.

  Barney Mailer was also a fashion plate. His dress, if somewhat conservative, was tasteful. He wore pearl gray spats, carried gloves, an umbrella or cane, and wore a felt hat. In his photographs, he seems always to be dressed in a three-piece suit. His manners were refined, his accent intriguing, and his handwriting spidery and graceful. Unlike his son, whose unruly hair became a trademark, Barney’s hair was always neatly combed. He had a strong, slightly cleft chin and good features, and looked a bit like Donald Rumsfeld, his son said. With his round spectacles, he appeared slightly owlish. He did not look uneasy holding a martini or a deck of cards. Women found him attractive and he reciprocated; he had a roving eye. Mailer used words like “dapper,” “fussy,” and “punctilious” to describe his father; he also called him “an elegant, impoverished figure out of Chekhov,” who “was very English as only a South African can be.”

  Barney and Fan immediately struck up a correspondence. Barney wrote the first letter, as propriety dictated. His letters are courtly, self-conscious, and somewhat reserved; Fan’s are warmer, bolder; her infatuation was obvious. In June 1920, she told him that she loved him and he replied that she was too young to make this sort of statement. Without revealing his gambling addiction, he warned her of it obliquely, writing that she didn’t really know who he was. Fan was ready to take the next step; Barney was not ready. But in September he arranged for a visit to Long Branch. It was during this visit or shortly afterward that Barney brought up his vice. Mailer recalled his mother telling him the story: “Before they were married, he said to her, ‘I gamble.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘well, you won’t gamble after we’re married, I’m sure.’ And he said, ‘I guess not.’ ” When Barney met the extended family, they were impressed with him, although his Beau Brummel appearance and British accent puzzled them slightly. “I think it always pleased him,” Barbara wrote, “that he wasn’t readily taken for Jewish.” He had long ceased using his Jewish name, Yitzhak Benjamin, and in New York gambling circles his code name was “I. B. from Brooklyn,” as his son learned from his bookie decades later.

  Before Barney left in October 1920 for Milwaukee and a new accounting job with a large firm, he and Fan were unofficially engaged. The following spring, he was back in New York and the engagement became official. Barney found a job in the city, commuting from Long Branch, where they lived temporarily with her parents. Decades later, after Barney had died, she said that he “seemed to pick up gambling friends in New York. I was so naïve about gambling, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to lose hard earned money, money that was needed for daily life, money that furnished freedom to give one hope and ambition to climb the ladder of success.” But as a young woman (not as young as she pretended), Fan was elated for having made “a very favorable match,” as she described it, with a professional man. They were married by two rabbis on February 14, 1922, in Manhattan, with a hundred guests in attendance. After a week in Atlantic City, they returned to Long Branch. Barbara noted in her memoir, “Dad once confided to Norman that of all the women he’d known, Mother was the best.” By the beginning of May, Fan was pregnant.

  Each had a secret: Barney gambled and Fan lied about her age. Sometime after they were out of school and looking for husbands, Fan and her sisters lowered their ages. Prompted by the desire, if not the necessity, to find a suitable husband, they availed themselves of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity afforded to immigrants from faraway places. Aware that birth records in Russia were inaccessible, they felt secure in erasing a few years. Fan went so far as to claim in her memoir that she and Rose were born in this country. According to Barbara, Fan’s likely birth date is December 1891. She told Barney that she had been born in 1901. He probably never knew her true age. Fan gave a number of birth years, but never relented on her fundamental story that she was several years younger than Barney (born January 1891), even long after he died. Born within months of him, she outlived him by almost thirteen years. Her gravestone and the family Bible record the false dates.

  Fan’s deception was common in that era. Barney’s secret compulsion, one he clung to his entire life, was deeply hurtful. His gambling destroyed Fan’s blithe hopes for a carefree life, forced her to become the chief breadwinner, and caused severe tensions with the Kesslers. Mailer said that “the Kesslers felt guilty. They knew that they hadn’t really leveled; they had not warned her off. They were happy to get him married to her.” In retrospect, the only member of his family who was not completely appalled by Barney’s gambling was his son. In 1944, while undergoing basic training, Mailer ended a letter to his father, as follows: “As time goes by, I feel more and more like you, more and more your son. On outward things we are very different, but I think I understand and sympathize with you, better than any person I know.”

  He concluded that he was “lucky that my parents are so different, that I have had such a range of personality to draw on.” Shortly after his mother died, he described his parents. “My mother,” he said,

  was, if you will, the motor in the family, and without her I don’t know what would have happened to us. My mother had an iron heart. My mother was not unlike many other devoted, loving Jewish mothers. She had circles of loyalty. The first loyalty was her children. The second was her sisters, her family. The third loyalty was her husband. The fourth her cousins, the fifth, neighbors she’d known for 20 years. It was a nuclear family. And my mother was the center of it and my father was one of the electrons. I must say he was a most dapper electron. And women adored him because he had the gift of speaking to each woman as if she was the most important woman he’d ever spoken to. And he didn’t fake it. He adored women.

  In the early evening of January 30, 1923, Fan felt labor pains and was admitted to Monmouth Memorial Hospital. Dr. Slocum, the Schneider family physician, was summoned. A son was born at 7:04 A.M. on January 31, after Fan had been in labor for twelve hours. It was a difficult, breech birth. The baby’s Hebrew name, Nachum Melech, came from his grandmother Mailer’s brother, Nachum Melech Shapiro, who arrived in the United States in 1900. “Melech” means king in Hebrew, but his birth certificate says “Norman Kingsley Mailer.” Because Barney had not applied for citizenship when he married Fan, their son was legally a British citizen at birth. He chuckled when he learned of this circumstance many years later, joking that it might allow him to become “Sir Norman.” His parents became citizens in 1926.

  The Schneiders began to prosper in the hotel business during the boom-year summers of 1920–23. They purchased three large “cottages” on Ocean Avenue. The complex, overlooking the beach, was named “Kingsley Court” in honor of Norman. This success encouraged Fan and Barney to try their hand at what was now a burgeoning family business. Barney was still working in an accounting position in New York, but in 1924 he and Fan rented Kingsley Court from her pare
nts for $4,000 and operated it as a small hotel. They did the same the following summer and made a good profit.

  Norman was the darling of the clan, catered to by his parents, grandparents, three aunts, and three older female cousins, Osie, Adele, and Sylvia, plus Dave and Anne Kessler, who visited often. One summer day in 1925 when Norman was two and a half, Adele remembered, he locked himself in the bathroom and called out the third floor window, “Goodbye everybody forever.” Fan went into hysterics and called the fire department, but he let himself out before the firemen came. During the summers of the mid-1920s, he often left home in a huff. Adele said, “He’d get angry; he’d leave a note for his mother, ‘Goodbye forever,’ and he’d walk around the block. His temper would abate and he’d come back.” These tantrums are the first recorded instances of Mailer’s lifelong and pronounced impetuosity, and his impulse to dramatize.

  Nearly every year one or another member of the family leased a new hotel, trying to find the right combination of variables for a windfall season. But profits were meager and Fan got discouraged. She became pregnant in the summer of 1926 and by the end of the season was drained. “I had no heart for the hotel business,” she wrote. “It was just devouring all my strength for nothing.” The birth of Barbara Jane on April 6, 1927, increased the load, as did her aging parents, whose health was declining rapidly. The stress of running a busy resort hotel and taking care of her small children made Fan “very, very upset,” according to Barbara. “Her parents were dying, and she realized my father was a gambler; she went to her doctor and told him, ‘I think I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.’ Dr. Slocum said, ‘Fanny, there’s nothing I can do for you. You’re going to have to pull yourself together.’ My mother said, ‘So I pulled myself together.’ ” Fan’s mother died on May 29, 1928, at the age of seventy. Shortly afterward, when Barbara was eighteen months old, and her brother five and a half, the Mailers moved to Brooklyn, while Rabbi Schneider moved in with his son Joe. In late November, the beloved patriarch died of heart disease and was eulogized at the synagogue he had helped to found.

  THE MAILERS SETTLED on Cortelyou Road, a few blocks from Flatbush Avenue. Norman, not yet six, began school in September at P.S. 181, a few blocks from their four-room apartment. Barney left early for work in Manhattan and Fan walked Norman the half mile through the lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood to school, leaving Barbara with a nurse, Agnes. As always, Fan was anxious about the goyim—many second-generation Irish and Italians lived nearby. Mailer completed grades one through four at P.S. 181 and his grades were uniformly excellent. His mother was the leader of a tribe of women who, throughout his childhood, coddled and praised him, catered to his whims and encouraged his individuality. His cousin Adele remembered that for Fan, “it was always Norman.” Barbara quickly recognized this reality but never showed any animosity or jealousy. There were no gaps in the circle of female affection surrounding the young prince.

  With the passing of her parents, Fan and Barney began living a different kind of life. They ceased observing Jewish dietary laws. Mailer recalled that his mother was not deeply religious. “She was observant,” he said. “There’s a difference.” Barney, he continued, “was pro-forma observant.” Barbara remembers her mother lighting the candles on the eve of the Sabbath. “I still have the image of Mother, her back to me, lighting the candles that sat on the antique cabinet and whispering a prayer in Hebrew. It was one more element in that adult world which baffled but protected me.” Her brother remembered his mother telling him that the Shekinah, a divine female embodiment of the spiritual, passed over the candles when they were lit. Often, he said, Fan had tears in her eyes.

  When he was seven or eight, with Fan’s encouragement, he began writing stories. One of the earliest surviving pieces, in six chapters of three to four hundred words each, is “The Adventures of Bob and Paul,” the story of twin brothers who survive perilous adventures. Another notable piece among the early juvenilia is a three-page how-to booklet, “Boxing Lessons.” It consists of a series of tips and observations about Mailer’s favorite sport. “When I land,” it begins, “every ounce of my weight goes into the punch. The timing of it I get by humming a tune and crashing in when I see an opening.” Boxing was a sport that he engaged in and wrote about for several decades, producing what are, arguably, some of the finest boxing narratives written by an American.

  The culmination, and the conclusion, of Mailer’s early writing career came early. During the winter of 1933–34, he finished reading the Princess of Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs and also became a devoted fan of the Buck Rogers show on the radio. Encouraged by his mother, he wrote a 35,000-word novel, “The Martian Invasion, A Story in Two Parts,” and dedicated it to “My mother, who always wanted me to write a good story.” “This novel filled two and a half paper notebooks,” he recalled. “You know the type, about 7 x 10. They had shiny blue covers, and they were, oh, only ten cents in those days, or a nickel. They ran to perhaps 100 pages each and I used to write on both sides.” The novel was written in a disciplined spurt during the summer of 1934 at one of the family’s hotels in Long Branch. Mailer’s bottomless fascination with war, violence, and suffering is on display in this adventure novel.

  On his application to Harvard Mailer noted that as a boy, encouraged by Fan and his aunts and cousins, he “used to write stories at the ‘drop-of-a-hat,’ ” but he also engaged in the usual activities of stickball, marbles, and roller skating. In the late fall of 1932, the family moved a couple of miles north to the mainly Jewish neighborhood of Crown Heights, where Norman finished fifth grade at P.S. 161. They lived in a four-story, ornamental brick apartment building at the corner of Albany and Crown Streets. Mailer described the neighborhood as “a quiet section of two-family houses and trees, a mile from Ebbets Field and Prospect Park.” He recalled that “in those days there was so little traffic we used to play touch football and roller hockey in the streets.” The houses had “small lawns in front, so small that when you were playing roller hockey, if you bodychecked somebody hard they’d go flying across the sidewalk, and you had to go scrambling up a lawn that was banked. If that ever happened to you you’d come out with fire in your eyes and your skates full of dirt.”

  Roller hockey was as physical as the somewhat delicate young Mailer ever got. Late in life, he told Christopher Hitchens that Jews “had to make certain basic distinctions very early in life. Would you fight if someone called you a dirty Jew, or wouldn’t you?” In the interview’s context, his question is rhetorical and unanswered, but other statements make it clear that the young Mailer shied away from violence. “I was a physical coward as a child,” he said in 1959, a statement supported by the recollections of childhood chums who said Mailer never got into fistfights and stayed close to home. One of them, Arnold Epstein, said, “He seemed to be on a shorter leash, more obedient, kind of quiet.” Epstein added that Mailer’s family “was very proper.” More testimony comes from Aaron Goldman, a summer chum of Mailer’s older cousin Cy Rembar, Beck’s son. He remembers Mailer during the summers of the early 1930s as a tearful, bookish momma’s boy who watched Cy play baseball and tennis in the recreation area behind the Scarboro Hotel. While the Crown Heights neighborhood was not particularly rough, it was not without hazard, as Mailer explained in 1980. “I grew up in a world where really I was cultivated. I was cultivated in the sense that my mother and father treated my sister and myself as very important people. We were the center of their universe and so it was the outside world that was difficult. You know, go out in the street and you know if you didn’t have friends you get beaten up. It was as simple as that. And so I was always terribly alert to the outside world. I took the inside world for granted. And I was free to indulge myself too, to change from one personality to another.” Barbara confirms the affirmation she and her brother felt: “Not only did we know that we were expected to be better and smarter than everyone else, we pretty much thought we were.” Fan was insistent on her children’s exceptiona
lism, but the unintended consequence was that Mailer had, as he later explained, “an ego that was lopsided.”

  The Crown Street apartment was a bastion where Mailer was spoiled and protected. Fan kept out most of the neighborhood boys, but another kind of trouble came home regularly with Barney. On rare occasions he would win at cards or on horse races. But more often, he would run up a debt with the bookies and try to win it back. When this failed, he would write a string of bad checks or embezzle from his employer (General Motors, for example) in an effort to recoup his losses. The crises accelerated when Barney lost his job and the debts—$5,000 to $10,000, vast sums during the Depression—soared. The bookies would begin calling on the telephone and Fan would become frantic. Invariably, the Kesslers would be summoned. “I’ve got criminal blood in me,” Mailer said later, adding that his father “would have gone to jail if it hadn’t been for my uncle, who would always bail him out and my father knew it.” He first became aware of Barney’s gambling because of his parents’ “terrible fights.” A day or so after a bad one, “Dave would come over with Anne and Anne would be crying. Everybody was stiff and tense all through the meal. Barbara and myself would be packed off to bed after dinner. I’d lie awake for hours listening to them argue.” Barney was cool in these clinches, Mailer said, and it was a bit of a comedy, but “a comedy on the edge of a cliff. Dave would get apoplectic. Dave died of asthma, finally, and I think my father was one of the people who gave it to him because Dave would blow gaskets in his brain to keep from strangling my father.” When Dave would verbally assault his brother-in-law, Barney would reply in his clipped British accent, “ ‘I don’t know Dave how you can speak to me in that fashion.’ At which point Dave’s asthma would deepen.”