Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  All the Texans could ride, as the unit had originally been a horse cavalry unit with a reconnaissance mission and roots going back to engagements against Pancho Villa. For its first overseas assignment on the French island of New Caledonia, the troopers still had their horses, making it one of the last U.S. Army units to be deployed as a mounted force. A Texas historian described them as “a Texas regiment defending a French island from a Japanese aggressor while mounted on Australian horses.” The horses were impractical for jungle fighting, however, and the 112th became an infantry unit after it left New Caledonia, but the reconnaissance mission continued. When Mailer and twenty other replacements arrived, they learned that the 112th Cavalry was now part of the 112th Regimental Combat Team (RCT), along with the 148th Field Artillery. Because of his advanced training, he expected to be assigned to the 148th. But several weeks earlier, the 148th had received a group of infantrymen, trained them as artillerymen, and wasn’t about to give them up. As he put it, “So, the infantry replacements had been retrained as artillerymen, and we artillerymen found ourselves in the infantry. Typical Army SNAFU.” Disappointed at the time, he soon recognized how fortunate his happenstance infantry assignment had been.

  The invasion of Luzon began on January 9, 1945. The 112th arrived at Lingayen Gulf, Luzon, on the USS Monrovia (APA 31) and went ashore on January 27. The Sixth Army, under General Walter Krueger, was already on its way south to Manila, and the job of the 112th was to cover the left flank of the advance, which had bypassed many Japanese units, and guard supply lines from the beachhead. The 112th Mailer said, was a “trip-wire,” assigned to slow down any Japanese forces that attempted to attack the Sixth Army from the rear. The 1,200 men of the 112th were stretched out to the east of a north–south highway eighty miles long, as well as in observation posts in the hills beyond. Other units were involved in fighting on the outskirts of Manila with the 1st Cavalry Division, which entered Manila in early February. The Luzon campaign was huge. The Americans and the Japanese committed more troops than in any previous campaign. Each army had over a quarter million troops stationed on Luzon. But the Japanese were ill equipped and by the end, sick and starving. After Manila fell in early March, the fighting diminished throughout the spring and by July was all but over.

  In his first letter to Bea after arriving on Luzon, Mailer told her not to fret about his safety as he would always be between two and twenty miles behind the front lines, a disingenuous assurance in that there was no discernible front line for the 112th. But regimental headquarters company, where he had a typing assignment in the Intelligence and Operations section of Headquarters Troop (the Harvard pedigree), was of necessity removed from immediate danger, although the men assigned there kept their rifles next to their typewriters. His assignment was to type daily intelligence reports. For the moment, he was happy with the work because he had an inside view of how the campaign was unfolding. He was also for the first time working closely with officers. At one point, he was present when the commanding general of the RCT, Julian W. Cunningham, was discussing operations with a colonel.

  A self-taught typist, Mailer made many errors. He took pains to improve but to no avail, and he was reassigned to read manuals on interpreting aerial photographs with the possibility of getting a permanent assignment, but nothing came of it. He told Bea that it was “galling at times to be so utterly insignificant,” but the experience deepened his novelistic commitment. Then he was given the lowly job of building a shower for officers. He was, apparently, of little value where he was and toward the end of March was transferred to a communications platoon unrolling and repairing wire between outlying units and HQ.

  The advantage of the assignment was getting to observe small units of the 112th in villages, rice paddies, and on hilltops. There were large tracts of uncontested territory—no-man’s-land—and he rode far afield in a jeep laying wire and repairing breaks. As junior man in the platoon, Mailer had to squat on the fender with his carbine ready. The downside of the assignment was that occasionally the enemy would cut the wire and ambush the repair team. “Variety, darling,” he wrote to Bea, “is the only spice in army life, so I cannot gripe. And look at the training I’m getting for being a general. I’ll know my army.” He took copious notes and sent them to Bea four or five times a week. Perhaps a third of his letters are love letters, filled with erotic fantasies and plans, but the rest are experiential logs. His unflagging belief in his future greatness as a writer compensated in his mind for his serious lacks as a soldier.

  While he was still in HQ Troop, the 112th engaged the Japanese in a small town on the highway to Manila. He went with some staff officers to see the aftermath. “It had a little bit of the spirit of an outing,” he wrote to Bea, “almost to the packing of sandwiches.” After a half hour ride, they neared the front and he noticed an odor that was “a good deal like faeces leavened with ripe garbage.” When he saw the dead Japanese, he was immediately reminded of “the ape-like charred bodies” in the Boston morgue after the gruesome Cocoanut Grove fire. The description he gave to Bea, which follows, was later used in Chapter 7 of Part Two of Naked and the Dead, an account of the search for enemy souvenirs on a battlefield by soldiers in a reconnaissance platoon. These were the first war dead that Mailer encountered.

  Another Japanese lay on his back a short distance away with a great hole in his intestines which bunched out in a thick white cluster like a coiled white garden hose. They were surrounded by the very red flesh of his belly, and it seemed curiously like the jettison of some excrement by a red flower. He had an anonymous pleasant face with small snubbed features, and he seemed quite rested in death. His legs had swollen and his buttocks so that they filled his pants tightly as if they were full stockings. Somehow he looked like a little ballet dancer with those curiously full perfect legs, but more like a doll whose stuffing had broken forth.

  The army on Luzon could not always come up with hot chow, but books seem to have been available, even new titles. In his early months, he read widely: Spengler in short bursts, each of which occasioned some reflection in a letter; Walter Benton’s anthology of love poems This Is My Beloved, which Bea also read; Robert Graves’s I, Claudius; and Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. He savored Strachey’s portrait of Cardinal Manning for its dissection of papal diplomacy and intrigue. The Catholic Church would continue to fascinate Mailer but, excepting Spengler, it was the work of Somerset Maugham that elicited the most commentary in his letters.

  He found Maugham’s 1941 novella Up at the Villa to be “an unguent for the psyche.” Set in Florence in the late 1930s, it is the story of Mary Panton, a young British widow juggling the attentions of three men. She has a one-night stand with one of them, a young Austrian fiddle player, who kills himself with her pistol when she rejects him. Complications ensue. One of the other suitors, a rich “waster” named Rowley Flint, is described as someone who is not “any better than he should be,” a remark that caused Mailer to reflect on the “perpetual oscillation” in himself between the kind of live-and-let-live attitude that would wink at Flint’s conduct and a countervailing view that saw

  man only as tragic and of large dimensions and universality; when all of his acts of love, so magnificent at the instant, do have permanence and dignity, an individuality as perfect as he believes. But curiously, somewhere in all the twisted crannies of my nature, the two have become mixed, for my good spirits come always from the cynical view, the abstention of judgment, and my depressions are deepest when I take the tragic view.

  Maugham’s tolerant cynicism made Mailer question his belief that everything was the product of inner drives and outer forces. Perhaps some people were demonstrably better and some obviously worse than they ought to be. Perhaps he could stretch himself. He later referred to Maugham’s line about Rowley in The Deer Park, where Sergius O’Shaugnessy derides it as equivalent to a view of the universe as “an elaborate clock.” Mailer’s Spinozan determinism, buttressed by Spengler’s sense of historic destin
y, would persist, however, through the writing of The Naked and the Dead.

  Barney was working in Washington, D.C., at the Office of Price Administration and Mailer wrote to him occasionally. But he wrote his mother and sister about once a week, knowing that Fan would start calling her congressman if she didn’t hear from him regularly. In one letter from Luzon, he told her that “there’s a wonderful quality in you like that of an unspoiled young girl who’s always looking eagerly and zestfully for what’s going to happen next.” Barbara has the same quality, he added, but it is “a more timid rather breathless facsimile.” When he had returned safely after the war and was sorting through his correspondence while writing Naked, he wrote a note on the letter: “At the time, I was in Luzon and probably believed my bullet was being made in some Japanese factory so thought I’d give the old girl something to keep.” Men in the 112th were being killed. The unit had 192 casualties during the Luzon campaign, including forty-one killed. In early February, he was awarded the Combat Infantryman’s Badge and began receiving combat pay.

  In early April, he wrote Bea that he’d “been in a little combat, nothing very tremendous, but still one of the three or four ‘first experiences’ a man has.” While searching for a wire break in no-man’s-land, his unit of twenty soldiers ran into a Japanese patrol. Mailer stood guard with a few others at a creek crossing while the bulk of the patrol went ahead. Shots were fired in their direction and a tommy gun returned fire. Then the largest part of the American patrol returned and reported that ten Japanese had been killed. The American lieutenant in command brought back a shiny, bloody Samurai sword. Mailer reported that when the firing started what he felt was “not exactly fear—it was more, well, ‘awareness.’ But an awareness so acute that it approached pain and fear.” He became adept at carefully unpacking and recording his emotions in every circumstance while in the Philippines, and was able to harvest the nuances when he did the same for a dozen soldiers in Naked.

  During his time on Luzon, Barbara’s romance with his college buddy Jack Maher was percolating. Jack had joined the army but kept writing to her at Radcliffe. Mailer wrote to his mother more than once about their romance, which Fan still ferociously opposed. In late April Mailer wrote to Bea, who was now asked to intercede with Barney, who heretofore had sided with Fan on the unhappiness that would ensue if the romance continued. “You must make him realize,” he told Bea, “that he’ll have no intimacy with his daughter” if he tries to block her life decisions. Fan’s opposition to Barbara marrying a goy was granitic; she believed she was saving her love-struck daughter’s life by her interference. The romance continued long-distance, and shortly after Mailer returned from the war Fan overheard Barbara talking to him about Maher. With great bravura, Fan fell to the floor with a heart attack and would not get up to get help until Barbara agreed to break it off. Barbara caved in and did not see Maher again for almost sixty years. She remained angry with her mother—whose attack almost certainly was feigned—and their relations were strained for years. Fan’s victory, which marked the high-water mark of her control over the family, was Pyrrhic. Mailer told Barbara that she acted nobly.

  UPPERMOST IN HIS mind during this period, however, now that he had seen some combat, were plans for the “ridge novella.” Ideas for revising A Transit to Narcissus still came up in his letters, but as the spring wore on, the new project moved to the fore. He had heard about the mythic eight-day patrol undertaken by a 112th platoon across the upper Angat River in Leyte and his imagination, exercised by the veterans’ tales, began to see the novella structured around a long patrol. He thought about beginning it with soldiers on a boat watching a sunset, followed by a “birth allegory,” with the patrol moving through thick jungle brush to “emerge into sentience and then fear” as they glimpse the mountain, “ineffable ridge beyond ridge.” On April 24, a week after writing Bea of his plans for the novella, Mailer asked for a transfer to the Reconnaissance Platoon of HQ Troop.

  The next day, he explained to Bea that he had felt humiliated in his previous assignments. His transfer decision might be seen as “quixotic,” he said, but it was the only way to maintain his dignity. “You’re doing something when you go out on a patrol that you don’t do when you lay a mile of wire.” To allay her fears he said that Recon was no more dangerous than the wire job because the platoon’s job, some of it in enemy territory, was to gather information, not to fight. General Cunningham used Recon as his intelligence arm. Yes, he told Bea, the unit had lost men in previous campaigns, but on Luzon, it had so far experienced no casualties. He had already been on two patrols and the landscape, the heat, and the sweat added up to a good feeling, he said. Over the next three months, he would make at least twenty-five patrols, mainly in the area around the town of Antipolo, twenty miles south of Manila.

  He had read John Hersey’s Into the Valley and Harry Brown’s A Walk in the Sun before he arrived in the Philippines, and the idea for writing about a patrol originated with these books. But it was his time in Recon that solidified it. The patrols gave him time to think and plan. “A part of me was working on this long patrol. I even ended up in a reconnaissance outfit which I had asked to get into. A reconnaissance outfit, after all, tends to take long patrols. Art kept traducing life.” It was clear that the Japanese were going to be defeated and “none of us had the slightest desire to be killed in an action which could not even give a good marble of fact to the ponderous idiots who directed our fate.” Most platoon leaders, therefore, would not push into potentially dangerous areas unnecessarily. His sergeant asked his men if they saw any activity through field glasses and if the answer was no, he’d say, “Good, I don’t see none either. Let’s go back.” The platoon would report no enemy activity in the area and a red pin would go into the map. Mailer had already read War and Peace and remembered Tolstoy’s observation that every army moves on waves of ignorance and misinformation. Recon’s troopers often walked miles with their heads down. They would traverse rice paddies, walk through streambeds, climb over hills, and return at night “fifteen miles older in the feet, wet twice with rain and sweat.” It was grueling, but the novelistic gleanings were rich.

  Sometimes patrols were accompanied by communist partisans, the Hukbalahap or Huks, who had fought the Japanese from the start. One day they found a dead Huk with a Japanese light machine gun in his arms. His Filipino comrades carried him away to their village and the Recon platoon went along. Mailer volunteered to carry the twenty-pound gun and, as he wrote Bea, immediately regretted it. He consulted his letter for the following, taken from a 1952 short story, “The Dead Gook.”

  The gun had a detestable odor. There was the smell of Japanese fish oil, and the smell of Luiz who had acquired the gun, the smell of a Filipino peasant which to Brody meant carabao flop and Philippine dust and Filipino food, an amalgam not unlike stale soya sauce. Worst of all, there was the odor of Luiz’ blood, a particularly sweet and intimate smell, fetid and suggesting to his nostrils that it was not completely dry. It was the smell of a man who had died, and it mingled with the fish oil and the soya sauce and the considerable stench of Brody’s own body and Brody’s own work-sweated clothes, until he thought he would gag.

  His most memorable patrol took place in mid-May. Colonel Philip Hooper, the CO of the 112th Cavalry and one of the few officers he admired, gave Recon an important assignment. According to an intelligence report, a unit of “crack Japanese marines,” perhaps as many as seventy, had infiltrated American lines. Recon, with its thirty men, was to find and destroy them. Most of the platoon carried a rifle, two bandoliers of ammunition, a cartridge belt of ammunition, two grenades, two canteens, C rations, and a helmet, about forty pounds. At 130 pounds, Mailer was in good shape at the time, although he was recovering from jaundice. Other men carried the machine gun, ammunition boxes containing 250 rounds, and the radio.

  The platoon was dropped off by jeeps and began walking. Soon they had to climb a five-hundred-foot hill. The footing was miserable; they ascended a
steep, slimy staircase of waist-high rocks covered with vegetation and surrounded by bamboo thickets with vicious thorns. Quickly, everyone was exhausted. “The most intense ecstasy I could imagine,” he said, “would have been to stop climbing.” The radio operator was gasping and nauseated. The machine gun crew fell behind. The remaining men, led by Lieutenant Horton, pushed on. Mailer discovered that “you can never plumb the last agony of exertion, there seems always a worse one beneath it.” Pride kept him from quitting. The men at the front of the column had the worst of it because they anticipated an ambush at every turn of the trail. After an hour of climbing, at the edge of total collapse, they were attacked. Someone in the front of the column kicked over a nest of hornets and the enraged insects buzzed and stung the entire line. The thrashing, frenzied platoon was cut in half. Mailer and the men in the lead made it to the top; the rest, including those with the machine gun, stumbled down to the valley.

  He ended his description of the ordeal to Bea by saying that the hornet patrol was “the kind of experience I never want to become a connoisseur of.” But, in fact, it is precisely what he became: a discriminating observer of war’s pains, pangs, fears, and throes. As one commentator on Naked and the Dead observed, “No other writer on war has so devastatingly caught the depths of physical tiredness.” The climactic chapter in which Sergeant Croft attempts to drive his platoon over Mount Anaka becomes an odyssey of fear, exhaustion, and death. Croft kicks the football-sized hornet’s nest, derailing Recon’s mission to determine if the Japanese could be attacked from the rear. Driven off the mountain, Croft’s platoon, like Horton’s, collapsed on the muddy ground, twitching. As they rested, it began raining, which brought some relief. Horton radioed back to HQ saying the platoon had hit a hornet’s nest and was returning. The duty officer who got the message said, “What the hell did Horton mean by all of that? Is he speaking of a literal or a metaphorical hornet’s nest?” Like other great naturalistic writers—Zola, Crane, Steinbeck—Mailer in Naked and the Dead presents a natural world that is uncaring, unyielding, implacable, and, occasionally, beautiful.