Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  THE NOVEL MAY have ground to such an abrupt ending because the size of Mailer’s ambitions finally overpowered him. He was worn out by what he called the novel’s “ponderosities” and the tensions between Marxist and Freudian themes. Bea was also a large factor. He took the manuscript with him when he went on a ski trip with her to North Conway, New Hampshire, for a week in late December. The real purpose of the trip was a serious discussion of their future now that she was about to graduate and his army service was looming. Both of them were somewhat uncertain because they prized their freedom, but since Bea’s mother knew they were sleeping together she was nagging her to get married and not bring great shame on the family.

  Yeah, and suddenly I felt very bad. Like: I do love her, she’s so lovely, why am I so mean to her and so I said, “Let’s get married.” She smiled, looked a tiny bit, nodded her head. Years later, she told me she felt a moment of gloom when I asked her. (laughs). In any event, gloom, doom and happiness, whatever.

  On January 7, 1944, he and Bea were secretly married in a civil ceremony in Yonkers, New York. He gave her a twenty-five-cent silver Mexican ring. There was no honeymoon, no guests, no reception; she returned shortly afterward for graduation from Boston University.

  He was encouraged by a meeting at this time with a literary agent, Berta Kaslow of the William Morris Agency, who had written to him at the suggestion of Seaver. She became an enthusiastic admirer of Transit and after he went into the service sent it to a dozen publishers, albeit unsuccessfully. Still ambivalent, he again sought respite from his draft board. At his request, Seaver wrote a “To Whom It May Concern” letter attesting to Mailer’s talent and seeking an extension. He wrote to Seaver to thank him, adding that seeking a delay “occasions [in] me a great deal of soulsearching for I feel guilty when I think of some candy store owner torn from his loving children.” Sometime around the middle of the month, the draft notice arrived. Mailer responded on January 19 by submitting a formal request for a thirty- to forty-day delay, arguing that he was trying to finish “an important literary work” that contained “an attempt on my part to analyze some of the fundamental differences between the Fascist and democratic minds” that had “some relevance to the war effort.” His appeal was rejected and he was ordered to report for induction on March 27.

  According to Bea, Fan wanted the marriage annulled. “Fanny,” she said, “just didn’t want her little genius to be married.” Bea’s mother, Jenny Silverman, wasn’t entirely happy either; she had hoped Bea would marry a doctor. The opinion of the two fathers is not recorded; Fan and Jenny ruled their households. Ultimately, everyone came around when it was clear that the couple was committed, and on March 18 they were married again at her home in Chelsea. The families wanted, and got, a full Jewish service: a rabbi, a service under a chuppah, the reading of the Sheva Brachot (Seven Blessings), and the ceremonial breaking of the wineglass. Mailer despised the ritual. Writing to his mother months later to defend his sister’s relationship with a non-Jewish man, he said:

  Neither Barbara nor I feel very strongly about being Jews—I am neither proud nor ashamed. But what I am ashamed of, and to this day my face flushes when I think of it, was that disgraceful exhibition—my marriage ceremony. Ughh. And you insisted on it, and were wrong, as I think you realized that night. Certainly, it was hardly an encouragement for Barbara to marry a Jew; she was as nauseated by it as I.

  AFTER A WEEK at Camp Upton, where he took an army IQ test and scored 145, Mailer reported for basic training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, arriving in early April. Before he departed, Berta Kaslow sent him a telegram informing him that Robert N. Linscott, the top editor at Random House, felt after reading Transit that Mailer was a “potentially very important writer.” Mailer’s family, especially Fan, wrote to him weekly and he and Bea wrote to each other several times a week for the next two years. They had an extraordinary correspondence, over four hundred letters, erotic and literary, full of plans for the future. Shortly after he had departed, she joined the WAVES, went though officer training, was commissioned an ensign and assigned to Norfolk, Virginia. When the men in his unit learned of her rank, he was asked over and over whether he had to salute before they had sex. He grew weary of the joke.

  As a Harvard graduate, Mailer could easily have obtained a commission and a desk job, perhaps in intelligence, but he decided that being in the enlisted ranks would give him a far greater chance to observe. Although he told Columbia University professor Steven Marcus in 1963 that he was burned out after the dispiriting effort of writing Transit, he quickly recovered and began pondering the shape of his next novel. Before he departed, he told Bea that he intended to write “THE war novel” and shortly after he arrived at Fort Bragg on April 8, he wrote home to say that instead of keeping a journal, he would send home regular observations to Bea, a plan he kept to for the duration of his time in the army.

  Because of his engineering degree he was assigned to training for an assignment in artillery fire control. He found the math to be elementary. Even with calisthenics, rifle practice, and marching in addition to his artillery training, he found time to compile a lexicon of military slang for his parents. He provided detailed explanations for “goldbricker,” “chow,” “snafu,” and his favorite, “t.s.,” the army’s blunt, unsympathetic response to GI complaints. The obscene humor of the army resonated happily in Mailer and would be a staple in The Naked and the Dead. Twenty years later in The Armies of the Night, he recalled (writing about himself in the third person) the humor he discovered in the army.

  Mailer never felt more like an American than when he was naturally obscene—all the gifts of the American language came out in the happy play of obscenity upon concept, which enabled one to go back to concept again. What was magnificent about the word shit is that it enabled you to use the word noble: a skinny Southern cracker with a beatific smile on his face saying in the dawn in a Filipino rice paddy, “Man, I just managed to take me a noble shit.” Yeah, that was Mailer’s America.

  His platoon sergeant, Donald Mann, was a southerner (and later his physical model for Sergeant Croft in Naked), but most of his friends in basic training were New York Jews. One of his closest friends was Clifford Maskovsky. He kept an eye on Mailer because, as Maskovsky recalled, “He wasn’t that good at physical things.” Nor was he adept at inspections. A few weeks into basic, he was “gigged” for some infraction and his entire unit lost their weekend passes. “When it came to taking care of myself,” Mailer said, “I had little to offer next to the practical sense of an illiterate sharecropper.” One of his distractions was reading; another was taking notes on the sex lives of the other soldiers. Everyone knew he was a Harvard graduate, but he didn’t reveal his literary aspirations. A copy of Cross-Section arrived in late May, along with reviews of it in The New York Times Book Review and the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, but he doesn’t seem to have shown these around the barracks. Maskovsky said he never saw Mailer in an argument with an officer during basic, and Mailer recalled that he got through the war “with my lip buttoned.” There would be a notable blow up just before he was discharged, but for most of his twenty-five months of active duty, his reputation was that of a detached, quiet observer.

  In late May, he sent Bea his first extended piece of writing for later use, a description of a fierce rainstorm that hit his unit when they were on the firing range. The most notable detail that he used later is a tableaux of sodden GIs huddled in the uncertain lee of a truck singing “Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?” Every other letter to Bea contained some patch of observation—the rhythms of insect life on the square foot of ground before your face as you lay prone with your rifle, the “phaWhom” sound of dynamite exploding in the water, a comparison of the sound of a passing artillery shell with the slithering noise a snake makes in dry grass. His letters also contained comments on his reading. He praised Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, calling its author “one of the best novelists living today”; and found John Her
sey’s A Bell for Adano to be a “stinker.” Kaslow continued to pepper him with letters about Transit’s chances with various publishers and her enthusiasm deterred him from abandoning the novel. As late as April 1945, he wrote to Bea that he wanted to make a pile of money so that he could write “a twenty volume Transit that would out-Joyce James.”

  His letters also contained speculations about the nature of combat and, as the summer approached, eager anticipation of Bea’s visit to Fayetteville July 29–30. He scheduled the reunion to the minute. On the weekend before her visit he inspected the room, and checked to see if her train would be on time. All went according to plan. Bea arrived with a silver chain for his dog tags and they had a lusty thirty-two hours together.

  Mailer did not yet have a plan for the war novel. All he knew was that it would be a combat novel. When he learned of the D-Day invasion in France, he wrote to Bea, “my first reaction was of disappointment—I wanted to be on the beach. Secretly and selfishly I had wanted the invasion to wait for me.” Later on, he recognized that being sent to the Pacific, as would happen, was fortunate in that the American hunger for power was palpable in places like the Philippines, but not in Europe. More important, to write about the war in France and Germany, it was necessary to have “a feeling for the culture of Europe and the collision of America upon it.” Irwin Shaw did this in The Young Lions, an ambitious novel that looked at the experience of both the German and American soldiers. Mailer wrote in 1959 that this novel’s “considerable merits” were flawed by Shaw’s lack of feeling for the continent’s past, a comment that reflects Mailer’s competitive nature in that period more than the shortcomings of Shaw’s novel, which was based on his war experience. Shaw landed at Normandy and a few days later greeted a chagrined Ernest Hemingway as he waded ashore.

  After completing his artillery training in early August, he had a ten-day furlough. He divided it between Brooklyn and Norfolk, and then boarded a train at Penn Station with his friend Clifford Maskovsky for the five-day trip to the West Coast and his next assignment at Fort Ord, California. The train took the northern route, via Chicago, which gave him the opportunity to feel insignificant in the great empty spaces of the prairie, the foothills, and finally the mountains. Writing from the King George Hotel in San Francisco, he recalled a conversation with his sister about William James’s observation that the fundamental human emotions come from nature:

  I can understand that—in the cities God is a reactionary, an anarchic & perverted symbol. In the west, in the heart of the prairie and the foothills and the sky God seems to be everywhere, he is the hills and the sky and the battle between light and darkness, he is all the thundering vast music ever written, and in the city he is nothing. He is the frenetic beat of tension, anxiety, city jazz. Nerves snapping, all the time.

  Mailer is often described as an urban writer. This is glib. From Naked and Why Are We in Vietnam? to The Executioner’s Song and Tough Guys Don’t Dance (not to mention his matchless renderings of the craters and pockmarks of the moonscape in Of a Fire on the Moon), his landscape descriptions crackle and pulse with energy and must be ranked among the best of postwar American writers. Diana Trilling observed, “The most dramatic moments in The Naked and the Dead are precipitated by intensities in nature,” which is to say that Mailer’s terrain is often an externalization of the thoughts, moods, and sometimes the unconscious promptings of his characters. Later on, his responses to nature will be filled with heartache at the Faustian destruction of the American wilderness, “that sad deep sweet beauteous mystery land of purple forests, and pink rock, and blue water, Indian haunts from Maine to the shore of Californ, all gutted, shit on, used and blasted.” Although he grew up in cities, his sensitivity to nature’s resonances must be counted as one of his most commanding skills.

  After spending a few days in San Francisco at the end of August, Mailer and Maskovsky took the bus to Fort Ord, some ninety miles south. He told his ever anxious mother that his artillery assignment would keep him well behind the front lines. Knowing Fan’s detestation of Hitler, he told her he was reading one of the first major biographies, Konrad Heiden’s The Führer: Hitler’s Rise to Power, which he found to be difficult but exciting (sixty years later, he reread it when researching his novel of young Hitler, The Castle in the Forest). Shortly after finishing the book, he began reading Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West and right away wrote to his sister to say it would become one of the most important books of his life. Spengler’s “immense thundering insight which takes all of history as its meat and rechops it as no man has ever done” excited him, gave him a sense of historical scope and flux that he had not encountered before. He was astonished by Spengler’s ability to seize the relationships among developments in widely separated fields—warfare, astronomy, architecture, medicine, agriculture, the arts, statecraft—and align them to reveal a culture’s tendencies, to show its movement in the inevitable cycle of development and decline, as well as to identify parallel cycles in other cultures. Always seeking the distinctive characteristics of a culture that were manifestations of its deep structure, its morphology, Spengler ranged with apparent ease through Egyptian, classical, Chinese, Hindu, Arab, and Western civilizations, commenting on, for example, the arcana of Egyptian breastplates, the nature of the tribunate in Rome, the advent of infinitesimal calculus, and the discovery of the circulation of the blood.

  Diana Trilling once observed that Mailer’s “mind is peculiarly violable by idea, even by ideology.” Spengler’s study is perhaps the clearest instance of this susceptibility. In 1944, not yet having read Nietzsche, nor much Marx, he was ravished by Spengler’s ideas about the Faustian desire in the West to achieve the Godhead, to strive for the divine, even if it led to death. Spengler saw the past as an organism. Every culture moved through stages of flowering, decadence, ossification, death, and rebirth. Mailer’s pronounced preference for the organic over the analytic, for metaphor over measure, has its origin in The Decline of the West. An invincible dualist, Spengler based many of his arguments on the superiority of the second term in a set of paired opposites—causality-destiny, space-time, nature-history, thought-will. He distrusted the rational scientist (Darwin was his negative hero), while admiring the forceful, intuitive artist (Goethe was his positive hero). Whatever the roots of Mailer’s own dichotomous thinking, Spengler deepened the cleft. Within two weeks of his letter to his sister, he was writing to Bea about a new idea for a novella with “a ridge or peak as symbol” of “the higher aspirations of man, the craving for the secret, the core of life, (or as Spengler might say—the Faustian need) for power and particularly for Godhead and the vanquishing of death.”

  ON NOVEMBER 7 he cast his first vote, an absentee ballot for FDR. A week later he completed his fire control training and after three weeks at Camp Stoneman, the West Coast embarkation center, shipped out on the USS Sea Barb. He sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge on December 6, almost three years to the day after Pearl Harbor. In October, the Japanese had experienced catastrophic naval losses in the Battle of Leyte Gulf and were about to be defeated on Leyte Island. Southern Europe had fallen to the Allies, who had invaded France and were pushing into Germany. The Battle of the Bulge was being fought as Mailer’s ship crossed the Pacific, and planning was under way for the invasion of Luzon, the main island of the Philippine archipelago, where the capital of Manila was located. On all fronts, the tide was finally starting to turn, although the Axis Powers were offering ferocious resistance.

  He spent most of his time on deck writing letters and watching the water and sky. It was a quiet crossing. He wrote Bea that he was at peace with himself and believed that he would survive the war—a soothing lie he repeated many times—in part because of his artillery assignment. “Without you,” he wrote, “I should have been an insolent unhappy youth forever jousting with the dark shadows of my vanity.” As he sunned himself during the long transparent days, he went over the “ridge novella” in his mind and began to populate it with so
ldiers he had known, although except for Sergeant Mann, none of them would be used in Naked and the Dead. Instead, he would draw on the men from a unit as yet unknown to him: the 112th Cavalry Regiment, a National Guard unit out of Fort Bliss, Texas.

  Created in 1921 mainly with men from North Texas, the 112th was federalized in November 1940 and served over five years on active duty, with 434 days of combat. After a hot, gloomy Christmas anchored in Hollandia Bay, New Guinea, on the Sea Barb, Mailer joined the unit on Leyte on December 29, 1944. It had received many replacements, but as he remembered much later, “the aristocracy of the outfit were these old Texas boys, most of them privates who had been busted down a number of times.” He continued:

  They’d been overseas for three years at this point; they’d been allowed to keep their own sidearms. They had handkerchiefs tied around their heads, and they all had jungle rot, these open ulcers on the skin the size of fingernails that they had been painting with iodine. They just stared at us and sharpened their knives. It was like Deliverance. I didn’t open my mouth for six months in that outfit. They were all crazy.