When Little, Brown senior editor Angus Cameron read it, he was impressed but troubled by the strong language. Raymond Everitt, executive vice president, had the same response. It went to the president, Alfred McIntyre, and he was insistent: a major expurgation would be required. It was decided to get an outside opinion from Bernard DeVoto, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian of the American West and a Mark Twain scholar. Adeline had heard that the literary guru had a foul mouth and she happily agreed to the choice.
Mailer also went along with De Voto, but offered more arguments for the novel. He was irritated. He wrote a long letter to Adeline pointing to the patrol’s attempt to climb Mount Anaka as the novel’s spine, and stating that it would first and foremost be “a piece of realism.” He made two more key points. First, the novel would be antiwar, although indirectly: “The terrible subtle evil of war on men is in every page.” Second, it would be “a romantic novel concerned with the extraordinary.” He continued.
There are going to be troubling terrifying glimpses of order in disorder, of a horror which may or may not lurk beneath the surface of things. Remember when Hennessey is killed, and Croft and Red and Martinez all have primitive glimpses of a structure behind things? That emotion will be recurrent although warped into the style of each man’s perceptions. It’s the old business of man constructing little tag-ends of a God for himself in his moral wilderness. In war, it’s more direct, more impacting on the senses—there is always a familiar unreality to everything you see and do, except for the occasional chilling moments when you feel as if you’re on the edge of a deeper knowledge.
His comment about the structure behind the Anopopei campaign, his rough-hewn sense that there was intentionality behind the pasteboard masks of things, was ignored by everyone at the time, and not really noticed by readers or critics after it was published. He told New York Times columnist Harvey Breit in 1951 that he was on “a mystic kick” when he wrote Naked and the Dead; the primary influence on the novel was Moby-Dick, he said. But the novel’s thick, textured realism, and the awesome power of nature, overwhelmed any recognition of the subtle intimations felt by Croft and others. Mailer did not forget, however, the transcendentalism he first encountered in Matthiessen’s American Renaissance. It would come to the fore a decade later.
DeVoto’s six-page critique, which Mailer received at the end of October, echoed what everyone at Little, Brown, including Adeline, had said. DeVoto did not question the verisimilitude of the obscenity; he questioned its effectiveness. He found the vernacular offensive and boring and said it would undercut any real consideration of the novel as a work of art. If published without severe pruning, he said, “it is certain to be prosecuted and suppressed in Massachusetts.” He allowed that it would be a mistake not to make an investment in Mailer, but that was all the enthusiasm he could muster. DeVoto made one further criticism: the general and his aide were the “least live characters” in the manuscript and needed to be reconceived, individualized.
In the face of these criticisms, all Little, Brown was willing to discuss was an option contract for a few hundred dollars. This meant that they could still reject the book out of hand after changes were made. Mailer wasn’t ready yet to break off negotiations, however, and told Adeline that he was definitely willing to write a new draft. In regard to Cummings and Hearn, he said, “DeVoto’s criticism is essentially sound.” He added that the option offered was a miserly hedging of the firm’s bet. Although he felt “weak and battered” by the rain of negative comments, he ended by saying that “the best part of the book is to come. There’s a chapter I’ve written since I’ve come home [from Massachusetts] which has about forty of the best pages ever written by an American. Sayonara, Norman.”
He was almost certainly referring to the longest, most vivid episode in the first third of the novel, the Japanese night attack at the river. Recon withstands a lengthy and intense assault, with Croft rallying his platoon each time it falters. Before the first wave attacks, the Japanese call, again and again, across the river:
“We you coming-to-get, Yank.”
He shivered terribly for a moment, and his hands seemed congealed on the machine gun. He could not bear the intense pressure in his head.
“We you coming-to-get Yank,” the voice screamed.
“COME AND GET ME YOU SONSOFBITCHES,” Croft roared. He shouted with every fiber of his body as though he plunged at an oaken door. There was no sound at all for perhaps ten seconds, nothing but the moonlight on the river and the taut rapt buzzing of the crickets. Then the voice spoke again. “Oh, we come, Yank, we come.”
Croft pulled back the bolt on the machine gun, and rammed it home. His heart was still beating with frenzy. “Recon . . . RECON, UP ON THE LINE,” he shouted with all his strength. . . .
In the light of the flare the Japanese had the stark frozen quality of men revealed by a shaft of lightning. Croft no longer saw anything clearly; he could not have said at that moment where his hands ended and the machine gun began; he was lost in a vast moil of noise out of which individual screams and shouts etched in his mind for an instant. He could never have counted the Japanese who charged across the river; he knew only that his finger was rigid on the trigger bar. He could not have loosened it. In those few moments he felt no sense of danger. He just kept firing.
Mailer probed more deeply into the psyches of Sergeant Croft and General Cummings than he did with any of his other characters. DeVoto’s critique made him realize that his initial depiction of them was trammeled by their predetermined traits. They are the only two characters in the novel who believe that they can affect events, the only two who feel they have the inner sanction to act. Croft is best seen as Cummings’s demonic underling—what Fedallah is to Ahab—although the two never interact, or even meet.
Mailer was educated by Croft, much as Shakespeare drew on Brutus for Hamlet. Marion Faye, Mailer’s hipster hero for a post-Hiroshima world in The Deer Park, derives from Croft, as do Rojack in An American Dream and Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song, among others. He was profoundly fascinated by Croft because his Texas sergeant was trying to get to the bottom of his own violent and divided nature. “I hate everything which is not in myself,” Croft says at the end of his “Time Machine” episode. He despises everyone who is weak, phony, lazy, or undisciplined. Close to psychotic, he is the finest soldier in the outfit. Critic Robert Ehrlich points out that Croft’s portrait is in line with D. H. Lawrence’s description of the American psyche: “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”
Intellectually, Mailer disapproved of Croft’s violence but on another level found him to be the character for whom he had “the most secret admiration.” Croft is a test case; he wanted to see how he might channel his violence, and whether he could plumb it or sate it or even transcend it. As Alfred Kazin noted of the novel, “Killing and being killed become forms of intoxication that get people out of their usual selves—always a prime motive in Mailer.” Ostensibly, the assault on Mount Anaka is to determine whether there is a way to outflank the Japanese, but it soon becomes apparent that Croft’s crazy attempt is a way of satisfying the “crude unformed vision in his soul.” When he is driven off the mountain by the hornets, he is relieved to have found “a limit to his hunger,” but nevertheless feels that he has “missed some tantalizing revelation of himself. Of himself and much more. Of life. Everything.”
Except for the “Time Machine” episodes, the novel’s action is confined to the island. This locus provides tremendous narrative concentration. The reader knows that the island will eventually be taken. It must, historically, because the Japanese were defeated on one island before the Americans jumped to the next and the next. This focus also imposes a constrained time scheme; we know that Cummings’s island campaign will not stretch on endlessly. As on Prospero’s magical isle, the characters will arrive, be transformed, and depart.
Major General Edward Cummings invades Anopopei with a six-thousand-man force. Shaped like an ocarina, the island
is 150 miles long by fifty miles wide, tapering at the ends. The ocarina’s mouthpiece, a peninsula where Cummings lands his troops after naval and air bombardment, juts out about twenty miles from the northwest quadrant of the island, as depicted on the line drawing in every edition of the novel. Following the book’s title pages, this drawing is the first thing that readers encounter, which is Mailer’s way of emphasizing landscape as a defining circumstance in the novel. When we have finished Naked and the Dead, we know Mailer’s island as intimately as Prospero’s or Crusoe’s.
Anopopei, for Cummings, is a stepping-stone to the apex of political power in the semi-fascistic state he envisions the United States becoming. Such a state was Mailer’s nightmare; like many ex-GIs he worried that World War II would be followed by war with Russia. “General Cummings,” he said shortly after Naked was published, “articulates a kind of unconscious bent in the thinking of the Army brass and top rank politicians. He’s an archetype of the new man, the coming man, the one who’s really dangerous.” Winston Churchill gave his “Iron Curtain” speech the month before Mailer left Japan, and during the fifteen months he was writing the novel the Soviets were seizing power in Eastern Europe. The Cold War was under way. Mailer felt that “people in our government were leading us into war again. The last half [of Naked] was written on this nerve right in the pit of my stomach.”
THE MAILERS RETURNED to Brooklyn in September and rented an apartment at 49 Remsen Street, just around the corner from his parents’ place on Pierrepont. During the negotiations with Little, Brown, Bea mentioned a Brooklyn Heights poet she had met during the war; his name was Norman Rosten and she thought he might be able to help get the novel published. Mailer met him on the street one day in October and they connected. Rosten had published two books with Rinehart, but didn’t take on any airs. Mailer described what he learned from Rosten: “You could be a published writer and still be comfortable.” It turned out that they both knew Arthur Miller. He lived in the same brownstone as Fan and Barney, and was writing a new play—The Death of a Salesman. When Miller and Mailer would bump into each other, Mailer said, “We would talk and then we’d go away, and I know he was thinking what I was, which was, ‘That other guy is never going to amount to anything.’ ” The paths of the three Brooklyn writers crossed many times in later years, and all three would become involved with Marilyn Monroe: Miller married her; Rosten became a confidant; Mailer wrote her biography.
Rosten suggested that Mailer meet his editor at Rinehart, Ted Amussen. Mailer, of course, knew Amussen from before the war, but had lost contact. In early November, the two Normans took the subway to Rinehart’s Manhattan offices, and Mailer gave Amussen his manuscript, now at least a hundred pages longer and including the firefight at the river. He also gave him a copy of Adeline’s ecstatic editorial report and told him, somewhat angrily, “If you give me a contract, you can have it.” Amussen ran into some opposition, but got the contract. It was Stanley Rinehart, the president and cofounder (with John Farrar) of the firm, who made the final decision, overriding his editor in chief, John Selby. Amussen told Rinehart that he’d be a “damn fool if you don’t sign it up.” A young editor named William Raney was supportive of Amussen, and became the editor that Mailer worked with most at the publishing house. Rinehart’s advance was $1,250, on the high side for a first novel.
Before the contract was signed, he had to attend a profanity conference. Amussen and Raney were there and the two Johns—as Mailer called them—Selby and Farrar. It is possible that Stanley Rinehart also attended. Mailer agreed to reduce the profanity to “the irreducible minimum,” which meant that an estimated one fifth of the obscene language would be cut, and the remaining, unwritten part of the novel would use “fug” and “shit” and “cock” and “pussy” in the same proportions. This reduction was deemed sufficient to placate Rinehart’s mother, the celebrated mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, who was on the firm’s board. Amussen left Rinehart to work at another publishing firm soon after the manuscript had been accepted and William Raney took over as Mailer’s chief contact.
In the summer of 1947, Mailer rented Rosten’s one-room garret studio at 20 Remsen Street. Bea was writing her novel in their apartment and he needed a quiet place to revise his, based in part on Raney’s critique. He also received feedback from family members—his sister, Cy Rembar and his sister, Osie, Dave and Anne, his parents, and, of course, Bea. Living at 20 Remsen was another literary man, Charles Devlin, who became the model for McLeod, one of the chief characters of Mailer’s second novel, Barbary Shore. “A saturnine Irishman,” as Mailer described him, Devlin had long, literary conversations with Mailer, who remembered him as “a dear friend.” Devlin read the manuscript of the novel when it was done and criticized it severely. “It’s a better book than I thought it would be, but you have no gift for metaphor,” he said. “Metaphor reveals a man’s character, and his true grasp of life. To the degree that you have no metaphor, you are an impoverished writer, and have lived no life.” He never forgot Devlin’s lecture and worked hard on his tropes ever after.
An unpublished, impecunious writer of the James T. Farrell school, Devlin was a good editor. Mailer hired him for a month at $50 a week to edit Naked because he was running up against a deadline. The manuscript was originally due in August, now had to be turned in by the end of September to meet Rinehart’s publication date of May 1948, and Mailer and Bea planned to go to Europe as soon as the manuscript was submitted. Devlin was “sometimes cruel in his criticism,” Mailer said, yet they got along. When Mailer was in the throes of writing The Deer Park in 1953, he wrote to Devlin and recalled their back-and-forth: “Oh, for the good old days of Naked when Bob Hope Devlin used to say to Mailer Colonna, ‘You can’t use that four hundred pages—they’re no good,’ and Norman Colonna would say cheerfully, ‘I can’t?’ (Quick look at his watch.) ‘I have three days before I go to Europe. Okay, boys, tear her down.’ Thrommmp!” Mailer’s confidence was such, he said, that if the novel needed “the Shah of Brat-mah-phur to make an entrance, I’d run to the library, read fifty pages on Hindu philosophy, and come back ready to enter the Shah’s mind.” Unlike his next two novels, Naked was easy to write.
Buttressed by his letters to Bea, his four-by-six cards, his charts, and vivid memories of Luzon, Mailer surged along, completing one draft and starting on another. This last draft, which he said was “a bonus,” was almost a hundred pages longer and included the nuanced ideological debates between the general and his aide. His style shifted in these scenes, became “less forceful and more articulated.” The last thing he wrote was the scene in which a humiliated Lieutenant Hearn is ordered to pick up a crushed cigarette the general has thrown down. He does but is still reassigned to take over Recon platoon from Croft. Without these additions, he said, Naked and the Dead “would have been considered an interesting war novel, with some good scenes.” He wrote four days a week, five hours a day, producing about thirty typed pages a week. In the mornings, he would usually read a few pages of Anna Karenina before starting; in the afternoons, he would prime himself with a can of beer.
Mailer’s family was around the corner and he was able to take days off to go to the beach or to a baseball game. Jackie Robinson was playing his first season as a Dodger, and Mailer said it was the most exciting year Brooklyn fans could remember. Occasionally, he would meet with a group of writers at the Manhattan apartment of Millie Brower, his old friend from Long Branch, where works in progress were read aloud. He hired Millie’s husband, Harvey Anhalt, to type a clean copy of the Naked manuscript, after the changes suggested by Devlin had been made, paying him $150 for the nine-hundred-plus-page monster. On New Year’s Eve, Barbara gave a party at her parents’ apartment. Among those attending were Alison Lurie, her college classmate. She was amazed to see how jolly Mailer was; most of the writers she knew were anxious and unhappy. Barbara said that her brother’s success “seemed to me at the time both miraculous and totally expected.”
Someti
me in the weeks before the party, he took a break from writing to make a film. He had seen two of Fritz Lang’s classic films, M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, before he was drafted, and after the war he saw a number of surrealist films, such as Jean Cocteau’s Blood of the Poet, at the Museum of Modern Art. Over the course of a week, Mailer and Harvey Anhalt made an eleven-minute, silent, experimental film, shot with a camera bought by Dave Kessler. According to film critic Michael Chaiken, who helped restore the untitled film, it is quite well done for an amateur effort. Chaiken says Mailer makes use of “several in-camera tricks: lap dissolves, stop motion, irising of the lens. Also, thematically, it’s fairly bold for its time. A young, middle class girl, played by Millie Brower, is held in a trance state of dread over an unwanted pregnancy as she contemplates abortion. The repressive atmosphere of her domestic life is brought into relief by her inability to connect to her family who sit at the dinner table and eat robotically.” It was the beginning of a filmmaking career that would resume in 1967, when Mailer made the first of three more experimental films.
At some point in the writing of Naked and the Dead, he and Bea attended an adult education class that discussed all the major theories of history. The professor said at one point, “I think we Jews have a separate theory of history which I would call the catastrophic theory of history.” It was a form of history, he said, “that the Jews knew all too well.” While Mailer was long past the point of specifically applying the theory to Naked, it definitely resonated with him, as he wrote in a 1997 letter. The conclusion of Naked might be seen as a manifestation of this theory, although the endurance and sacrifice shown by the men in the platoon qualifies the impact of the suffering in the last quarter of the novel.
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