Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Mailer went to Long Branch for the summer to write. Over the next ten weeks, holed up with his portable Remington in the Scarboro Hotel room provided by Aunt Beck, he wrote eight short stories, all of which he would submit the following year. This would be the pattern for three successive summers: write during the summer and bank the work for the fall, a routine that enabled him to tackle ever more ambitious projects. He also wanted to roam and gain experience, especially sexual experience, something that was hard to obtain in Long Branch where there were too many sharp-eyed cousins. In August he and a summer friend decided to hitchhike 125 miles to Scranton where, they had learned from college chums, there was an entire street of brothels. Mailer anticipated this experience in “Love Is Where You Find It” and captured it retrospectively in another short story, titled “Love-Buds,” written his senior year but never submitted as class work. In 2007 he referred to the experience as “the disaster of Scranton.” In the short story Eppy is Mailer.

  They set off with toothbrushes, clean underwear, chocolate bars and some apples, more like Huck and Tom than red-eyed Lotharios. Both are seventeen-year-old virgins and “privately, they were each convinced they would die without having known a woman.” The story ends this way:

  “How was it?” Eppy asked tentatively.

  “It was wonderful,” said Al.

  “Yeah, just wonderful.”

  “Were you able to do it?” Al squeeked.

  “No. Were you?”

  “No.”

  By the admission, each had somehow saved the honor of the other. Al let out a whoop of laughter, and Eppy pummeled him on the back. They laughed, they hugged one another, they jumped up and down on the city street beneath the light of a street lamp, and roared with laughter at themselves and each other.

  IN THE FALL of 1940, Mailer signed up for required courses in engineering, math, and physics and one full-year elective: English 1-A, a creative writing course taught by Robert Gorham Davis. An active communist and a member of Matthiessen’s clique, the WASPish Davis later wrote short stories for The New Yorker. Armed with his cache of stories written over the summer, Mailer impressed Davis, who was exactly the mentor he needed at this stage of his life, although their relationship almost foundered at its start. He submitted “He Was Her Man,” a 1,400-word story, and Davis selected it to read in part to the class of approximately fifty students. A businessman and his wife are staying at a resort hotel and when he leaves on a trip, she invites a bellboy to her room. The man returns unexpectedly and finds his wife in bed with him and shoots her in the back of her head. When another bellboy gets to the room, the first one having fled, he finds blood and brains splattered everywhere. After shooting his wife, the man shot himself. “I could make out where her eyes and mouth had been, but I wondered what had happened to her nose. I couldn’t guess whether it was smashed into the carpet, or if it was still floating around. I hoped it was in the ground, because stepping on it was certainly better than breathing it in.”

  At this point, the class broke up. “I can’t tell you how my back was scalded by the laughter,” Mailer said. But the next day Davis apologized to him, and the relationship was repaired and strengthened. He got a C– on the story, which Davis said in his written comments was “just a mash of brains and nausea.” Mailer remembered the grade to be an A–, but his error is clearly a tribute to the man who helped launch his writing career.

  In his sophomore year he read Thomas Wolfe and said that Wolfe “made the biggest dent,” although his influence was not apparent until later. He also read Saroyan, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. Sy Breslow said that Mailer kept a gin bottle on his mantel because he read that Hemingway drank it. Papa’s macho athleticism and his adventures in the Spanish Civil War were well known and he tried to emulate him. Friends remember the skinny kid from Brooklyn shadow boxing and pretending to be Rocky Graziano. His shyness began to fall away. Along with his friend Larry Weiss, who also lived in Claverly Hall, he tried out for the house football team. Mailer, who was a fan of contact sports, but not much of a participant, made the team, while Weiss did not. The team wore pads and uniforms, but only fourteen or fifteen players showed up for any one game and, except for the running backs, everyone played both offense and defense for the full forty-eight minutes. “I weighed 135 pounds then and played the line: running guard on offense, cannon fodder on defense. And I had fun.” Mailer talked proudly about playing house football at Harvard many times over the years; it was a significant milestone.

  His virginity weighed heavy, especially after the Scranton disaster. As he wrote later, he had “accepted Lawrence’s thesis about untrammeled and illimitable rights and liberties and pleasures of sexual love,” but alas, alack, no partner was to be found. Phyllis Bradman came up to Cambridge once each semester, but he never progressed beyond first or second base with her, in Brooklyn parlance. At the end of his freshman year Harold Marantz had introduced him to a young woman who might solve his problem, as she had solved Marantz’s. Mailer began seeing her and resumed the seduction when he returned for sophomore year, traveling once a week to her home in Cambridge. “She was too plain to take out,” he said, “I would have been embarrassed.” After a few visits, he got to third base. “I remember I had not washed my hands, purposely. And I walked by one of my sleeping roommates, put my fingers under his nose and said, ‘Whiff that.’ That was exactly the level of our social discourse in those days.”

  The seduction went slowly. The woman’s mother hovered in the kitchen, listening and breaking in on their petting. Finally, one evening after several hours on the couch, it happened. “And now I was a man. And I paid a hell of a price because I didn’t like the girl. I felt for her, but I didn’t like her.” During the course of his visits, he had mentioned his literary interests and she reciprocated by giving him a novel she had written. He read it and saw that she had copied it, word for word, from a recent bestseller by Robert Nathan, Portrait of Jennie, a treacly fantasy. Asked for his opinion of her manuscript at their next meeting, he said, “Robert Nathan couldn’t have done better.” She replied, “Who’s he,” and said it so convincingly that he concluded she was a great actress. “That gave me a sense,” he said, “then limited—much greater now—of the depth of that poor girl’s need.”

  The second semester of his sophomore year began well. His grades improved, even in physics; he continued his friendly relationship with Robert Gorham Davis; and he was awarded a $150 scholarship for the term beginning in January, which took some pressure off the family’s finances. He made new non-Jewish friends, and began dating girls from the local colleges. He was also producing longer and more sophisticated stories, most of them revealing the influence of Hemingway. Over the weekend of February 8–9, he wrote a five-thousand-word story, “The Greatest Thing in the World.” The Advocate informed Mailer that the story was a suitable submission for his application, but probably would not be published. Davis also liked the story, saying it was the best he had received all year. Mailer relayed this information home with the announcement, “I simply can’t stand any of my engineering courses,” adding that he would discuss his dissatisfaction when he came home later in the month. But then his hopes dimmed. He wrote home to say that although the Advocate editors liked the story, “they’re a bunch of snobs, and Brooklyn may go against me.” He had reason to believe this; not many Jews had ever been selected for the magazine. Ultimately, however, his raw talent appealed to a majority of the Advocate board, especially those who deplored the cape-and-walking-stick crowd who had long dominated the magazine. Pete Barton led the new faction. (John Crockett and Bowden Broadwater, a “supernova of eccentricity” who later married Mary McCarthy, were the leaders of the aesthetes.) A week later Mailer was invited to be an editor on the magazine.

  As was customary, the new associates were told to write and present a sketch at the Advocate House initiation, where heavy drinking was de rigueur. Mailer and George Washington Goethals, one of his new WASP friends, wrote a lewd
parody of Hemingway’s latest novel, titled “For Whom the Balls Squall: Farewell to Qualms,” with a cast of four: Goethals as Martha Gets-Horned, David Roberts as Ernie the Hernia Kid, Mailer as I. Ram Soreloins, and John Elliott Jr. as Ariscrofules. The script is lost; only a playbill survives. It lists the players and notes that the play is “a little piece probing into copulation without population, or safety first.” Goethals recalled that he was wearing high heels and a snood and got “horned” with a large sausage wielded by I. Ram Soreloins.

  A few days after the April 9 initiation he wrote home with the news that “The Greatest Thing” would be in the lead position in the April magazine. He also reported that he’d written eight thousand words of a “novelette.” The most important news was that “The Greatest Thing” had also been chosen to be submitted to the nationwide college contest sponsored by Story, a magazine of short fiction founded in 1931 by Whit Burnett and his wife, Martha Foley. The magazine published the early work of a number of Mailer’s contemporaries, including J. D. Salinger, Truman Capote, and Joseph Heller. Mailer felt his chances of winning were slight, but was nevertheless happy that his was one of two stories selected out of forty-five submitted by Harvard students. Davis, he learned, was one of the judges, along with two other professors, Mark Schorer and Howard Baker. A week after the April magazine’s publication, an editorial appeared in The Harvard Crimson—Mailer’s first review, in effect—praising the story for having “the emotional conviction of a nightmare.” It ended with an endorsement of the Advocate’s new direction, realism replacing the “artificialities and the polished sophistications” of the old Advocate. He sent a copy of the editorial home and Fan pasted it in the scrapbook of Harvard memorabilia she proudly kept. “It’s all happening too easy,” he wrote to his parents.

  Millie Brower, a friend from Long Branch, read the editorial when she came up for a weekend in early May 1941. Apparently she also read some of his writing because in a letter to her written after her visit, Mailer comments on “The Greatest Thing in the World,” which Millie passed on to a college friend, an editor at a college student newspaper. The friend criticized the story’s grammar and Mailer did not take the criticism well. “Please tell your friend to go take a hot-running fuck,” he wrote, and went on angrily for a full page, calling her “immature” and “a bore.” He links her with Bowden Broadwater, the Pegasus, or literary editor of the Advocate, whose picture had just appeared in a major story on Harvard in Life magazine. “Very cordially dislike him,” he wrote. “He writes very well, and bores me so much I can’t finish his stories. His grammar is perfect.” Mailer’s string of victories was stocking the medicine chest of his psyche with energy and frankness, as well as some angry defensiveness. “The nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn” who he later found to be “absolutely insupportable” would never entirely fade, but at this point he was in decline.

  On May 7, he was informed that he had been elected to the Signet Society, which unlike the Advocate, had its own building at 46 Dunster Street. The society’s members, now as then, are chosen on merit, unlike Harvard’s “final clubs,” which selected their members based on family ties and prep school affiliations. For the Signet, members of the college’s various publications were often chosen for some of the twenty-eight seats given to each class. Mailer ate lunches regularly at the society over the next two years and returned several times after graduation for reunions. For his initiation on May 20, he produced a second sketch parodying Hemingway. For this one, he borrowed from a recent Life article on the novelist that was accompanied by Robert Capa photographs of Papa in Sun Valley and Spain. The heavily illustrated, buttery piece notes that Hemingway rewrote some passages in For Whom the Bell Tolls sixty to seventy times “to achieve the precise feeling.” Mailer’s five-minute piece, which he delivered in a borrowed tuxedo, purports to contain excerpts from some of these rewrites; for example: “She was bare and nude and clear and cold and clear and tight and warm and hot, rich inside and richer insider . . . her breasts were square.” He always had great admiration for Hemingway as writer and man, and some reservations—his snobbery and his anti-intellectualism—but Papa, even after his 1961 suicide, was the measure Mailer used to gauge himself for nearly seventy years.

  Good news continued to pour in. As a new Advocate editor, he attended the magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary dinner on April 10 at the Harvard Club. That night he met Roy E. Larsen, the executive editor of Time, who had read “The Greatest Thing in the World.” He told Mailer he was impressed. Larsen then sent the story to a young editor at Rinehart, Theodore Amussen, who immediately sent his own congratulatory comments. He said he’d like to see more material, especially a novel, and Mailer wrote back saying he’d have one soon. He was working hard on a novella that would eventually be a full-length novel titled “No Percentage.”

  This praise certainly encouraged him, but nothing fortified him more than the thunderbolts that arrived at the beginning of June. First, Professor Davis wrote to him to congratulate him for winning the national Story magazine contest. Then, a telegram from Whit Burnett arrived at the Advocate with the same news. It was followed a few days later by a formal letter from Burnett to Mailer at the Advocate offices, forwarded by a nonplussed John Crockett, stating that the story was the unanimous choice of the judges. It would be published by Story in the fall, Burnett told him, adding that the Story Press, affiliated with publisher J. B. Lippincott, would be eager to consider any novel he might submit. “Probably nothing has happened in the years I’ve been writing which changed my life as much,” Mailer wrote in 1959. “The far-away, all-powerful and fabulous world of New York publishing—which, of course, I saw through Thomas Wolfe’s eyes—had said ‘yes’ to me.” That summer the $100 prize money from Story arrived, proof positive to Fan and Barney of the genius of their son. The airplane models that hung in the apartment on Crown Street were no longer the preamble to his life’s work. Now he was a writer.

  BY LATE JUNE Mailer had set up shop at the Scarboro. Before he arrived, he had written 45,000 words of “No Percentage” and was no longer referring to it as a novelette. The Schneider clan, of course, was aware of all that had happened at Harvard and gave their prodigy even more deference. Fan and Barney came down on weekends, and in between she wrote encouraging notes: “How is the writing coming along, honey? Put all the feeling you possess into it and it has to be good. When you were a tiny infant every time I nursed you, I would whisper a little prayer in your ear, ‘Please God, make him a great man some day.’ This is a secret between you and me, sonny. Take care of yourself. Love, Mother.” Word came to Long Branch a few weeks later that Fan had to go in the hospital in Brooklyn for an undisclosed operation, which turned out to be a hysterectomy. No details were mentioned in the flurry of notes and letters among the family, and when he wrote to his mother at the end of July he merely said that he hoped she was feeling better (she recovered quickly). But this comes at the end of his letter; he leads off by announcing that he has written another fourteen thousand words of “No Percentage.”

  Initially, he had intended the novel to be set entirely in Brooklyn and the Jersey Shore. His plan was to focus on the romantic problems of Robert Branstein, a twenty-one-year-old arts graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. But after winning the Story contest, and with Amussen eager to see a full-length work, he decided to expand it by one third and add an additional setting. As recast, the novel opens with Branstein back home in Crown Heights. He has a wealthy blond girlfriend, Sheila Wexler, who lives with her parents in the penthouse of the tallest building in the neighborhood. Her father, Sherman, a powerful and devious figure, has links to organized crime, much like Barney Kelly in Mailer’s 1965 novel, An American Dream. The gorgeous, vacuous Sheila satisfies all of Branstein’s sexual needs, but he yearns for involvement in some altruistic cause. Her father attempts to blackmail him into the marriage, using some incriminating evidence he has on Branstein’s father. There is a good deal of violence, including the most s
triking scene in the entire novel, a bloody altercation between Sherman Wexler and Branstein’s grandfather Abram. At this point, Mailer broke off, recognizing Robert had to get away again and undergo a testing. Around the beginning of August, he mailed off part one to Theodore Amussen at Rinehart and then set off on a hitchhiking trip.

  Going on the road was a crucial experience for Mailer, a leap from the family safety net. He said the idea came from Dos Passos, whose U.S.A. has many stories of bumming around the country. He also hoped his trip would give him the wherewithal to make his protagonist more dynamic. In two weeks he hitchhiked over 1,200 miles, slept almost every night outside, and pushed himself to his limits. He got as far south as New Bern, North Carolina, before turning back. He hitch-hiked through numerous sleepy southern towns. In Danville, Virginia, he went to a whorehouse. This time he was up for the occasion, but found it unsatisfying. He told his friends how he lost his virginity to an old prostitute named Lila, protecting the identity of the Cambridge woman. Two days later he arrived home hungry, dirty, and broke. After a few days of rest and Fan’s cooking, he returned to the Scarboro to finish the novel.