In response to criticism that that novel paints a bleak picture of humanity, he made the following comment shortly after publication.
Actually, it offers a good deal of hope. I intended it to be a parable about the movement of man through history. I tried to explore the outrageous proportions of cause and effect, of effort and recompense, in a sick society. The book finds man corrupted, confused to the point of helplessness, but it also finds that there are limits beyond which he cannot be pushed, and it finds that even in his corruption and sickness there are yearnings for a better world.
At the end, the men move off to a new island campaign. Soon they will be in the Philippines and six months later the war will be over. The reader gets the sense that while the campaign and the novel have been conclusive, and the men tested in the harshest ways without succumbing, they will now face new challenges. The Japanese on Anopopei have been vanquished, and American casualties have been comparatively light, but what lies ahead in the peacetime world is uncertain. The experience of being at war and writing about it led Mailer to develop a corollary to his antiwar belief, as Alfred Kazin has pointed out, one that would plague him ever after: “War may be the ultimate purpose of technological society.” This corollary would become the chief premise of his next novel.
Mailer made changes to the novel right to the end of September, when it was submitted to Raney at Rinehart. Both novelist and editor would continue working on it long-distance, as Mailer and Bea were leaving for Paris. On October 3, after a bon voyage party at 102 Pierre-pont, they boarded the RMS Queen Elizabeth for the crossing.
FOUR
PARIS AND HOLLYWOOD: PROMINENT AND EMPTY
The Mailers shivered through their first few weeks in Paris. They were staying at the Hôtel de l’Avenir, at 65 Rue Madam, on the Left Bank, not far from the Luxembourg Gardens. Their room, with a Murphy bed and a bathroom down the hall, cost one dollar a day. About the time that they began French classes at the Sorbonne, they moved a short distance to a three-room apartment at 11 Rue Bréa, a few blocks from the intersection of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail—a part of Paris that Hemingway knew well. The three-room apartment, for which they paid less than a dollar a day, had red wallpaper, an orange rug, and a bathtub in the kitchen. It was small, but warmer than the hotel, and the Sorbonne, where they began classes in early November, was only a short walk. His most vivid memory of his early months in Paris was walking the streets conjugating subjunctive verbs.
Along with several hundred other ex-GIs, the Mailers were enrolled in the Cours de Civilisation Française, concocted to garner American tuition dollars. It was essentially an introductory language course and attendance was not always taken. Nonetheless, the couple worked with moderate diligence on their French skills with the knowledge that the combined $180 a month from the GI Bill they received would cease if they flunked. They also had the Rinehart advance and a remnant of their wartime savings. They were comparatively well off in a city still exhausted from the war. There were electricity shortages and strikes, and everything was restrained and gloomy, as he wrote to Fig. “You get to longing pretty hard for America and its ballsy kind of noise and excitement,” he said. Lonely at first, they soon met several Americans: Mitchell Goodman and his English wife, the poet Denise Levertov, and a friend from Dunster House and the Advocate, Mark Linenthal, and his wife, Alice Adams, who later became a well-known New Yorker writer. Linenthal and Adams remained friends with Mailer over the years. They also met Stanley and Eileen Geist, expatriates who hosted an American salon. Geist graduated from Harvard the year Mailer entered, and had written a critical study of Melville while working as F. O. Matthiessen’s research assistant on American Renaissance, which of course interested Mailer. Geist read the manuscript of Naked and told him it wasn’t bad, perhaps the first comment he received on the novel from a professional critic. Mailer said he felt “ennobled” by this response.
There was no way to share his manuscript with Fig Gwaltney, who was in Arkansas attending college and trying to write novels. But they wrote to each other regularly during the ten months the Mailers were in Europe. Mailer always needed correspondents with whom he could be frank about his projects and problems. Fig was the first of these. Writing to him from the ship on October 7, he gave an unvarnished summary of his political views, which were exacerbated by his detestation of the red-baiting that was going on in the United States. Grossly inflated fears of communist influence and infiltration had prompted President Harry Truman, on March 21, 1947, to institute a Loyalty Program, which required all federal employees to swear they had never advocated or approved “the commission of acts of force or violence” that would “alter the form of the United States government.” Mailer wrote:
I’ve gone quite a bit to the Left since I’ve gotten out of the army. I’m a Jew Radical from New York now. And one of the areas of disagreement would be or perhaps would be—you may agree with me for all I know—that (1) we, that is, the leaders of the United States (I’m including the whole scurvy lot from the industrialists & state dept. to muff divers like Uncle Harry) want to go to war, and are doing everything in their power to bring us to war. And (2) I don’t think Russia is the villain it’s made out to be. I don’t know what the hell they’re like but when I find the worst fucking scum in the country (American Legion, Hearst press, etc.) going all out against them, I begin to doubt the whole works.
A few months after he got to Paris, in early 1948, he met someone who would school him in the quintessence of revolutionary socialism. Through the Geists, he was introduced to Jean Malaquais, a Polish Jew from Warsaw (born Wladimir Malacki) whose parents had presumably perished in the Holocaust. Fifteen years older than Mailer, he had fought with the Lenin International Column of POUM, an anti-Stalinist Communist Party, against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, was almost captured by the Germans as a French soldier, escaped and fled to Mexico in 1943, where he participated in the political debates of the émigré circle there. A short, wiry man who looked a bit like Picasso, Malaquais had left Warsaw in 1925 and after many travels found himself in France in the depths of the Depression. He was able to find work in the lead and silver mines of La Londe-les-Maures in Provence, where a polyglot crew of Europeans and Russians fleeing from totalitarian oppression worked as day laborers. Malaquais’ first book, Men from Nowhere (1939), described the workers’ horrific working conditions and rough camaraderie. It won the Prix Renaudot. Like another Polish emigrant, Joseph Conrad, Malaquais had taught himself to write with elegance in a nonnative language. He had moved to Paris in the mid-1930s and immersed himself in French literature at the Bibliothéque Saint-Geneviéve while working nights unloading crates in the marketplace, Les Halles, the “belly of Paris.”
“Morally and intellectually I was a tramp,” Malaquais said, “a companion of the dispossessed.” But he was also a sophisticated radical thinker who had been associated with writers such as André Gide and with Leon Trotsky (who praised Men from Nowhere). Proud and severe as only a stateless, formidably cultured Marxist intellectual could be, he had worked for years as a manual laborer. In a Preface to a reissue of Malaquais’ 1954 novel, The Joker, Mailer summed up his acumen:
Malaquais loathed formula, propaganda, or any variety of thinking which deprived a situation of its nuance. So he was capable of advancing a new thesis, anticipating your objections, stating them with clarity (like Freud disarming his critics) and then would overtake his own verification of your position in the return swing of the dialectic. He would do this with such power that when he argued, the veins in his forehead would throb as though to demonstrate that the human head was obliged to be the natural site if not the very phallus of Mind.
Malaquais, Mailer said, “had more influence upon my mind than anyone I ever knew from the time we had gotten well acquainted while he was translating The Naked and the Dead.” Mailer later recommended Malaquais for the year-long task—he had a good command of written English—and added $1,000 to the paltr
y $2,000 paid to Malaquais by Mailer’s French publisher, Albin Michel. By the time that the translation was completed in 1950, the two men had become fast friends. But their meetings the year before in Paris were sometimes testy. Mailer told Malaquais about his hopes for Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign as the Progressive Party nominee. Malaquais said that Mailer’s voluble comments resembled those of “a boy scout or a young Kibbutznik,” and proceeded to demolish Mailer’s notion that Wallace represented a legitimate peace movement, or “any kind of . . . incipient revolutionary starting point.” Malaquais told him that the communists would “exploit him and then they would drop him and cover him with dirt.” Mailer “disliked me very strongly,” according to Malaquais, especially when he told him that the Wallace campaign had been infiltrated by Stalinists. Unable to refute Malaquais, Mailer was yet unwilling to desert Wallace. At first he thought Malaquais was “an arrogant bastard. He was a little guy, very, very well knit and very determined and very superior, very haughty.” Things were cool between them until they met again in Brooklyn in the fall of 1948.
Through a “long leaky French winter,” he waited anxiously for reports on how Naked was faring at Rinehart. He was particularly concerned that Stanley Rinehart might want to cut the novel’s profanity. Finally, near the end of 1947, he heard from editor William Raney that Rinehart was in love with the novel. He relayed the good news to Barney in Warsaw, where his father had a position with the American Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish charity. “I have never heard such hosannas,” Mailer wrote. Rinehart intended to write a letter praising the novel to the book trade, a tactic he used only rarely. Much relieved, Mailer told his father that he planned to start a new novel immediately, and hoped to get a lot written “so that I won’t be scared if Naked and Dead gets a big reception.”
Before he began, he and Bea went on a skiing trip over the holidays in Saint-Cergue, Switzerland, and visited the cities of Ouchy, Geneva, and Lausanne. He came back with two ideas: one a novel about a rich young California man who spends a year abroad, supporting himself by carrying money between France and Switzerland for black marketers; the second about Jews in Europe, focusing on an American Jewish couple who work for the Marshall Plan. He also kicked around the possibility of writing what he called “a collective novel” about people he knew in New York. None of these ideas gained traction, and he began to fret. “Maybe I’m not scared,” he wrote to Barney. His inability to decide on a new novel, one that could take several years to complete, is understandable given the choices before him. He summed up his choices: “If my past had become empty as a theme, was I to write about Brooklyn streets, or my mother and father, or another war novel (The Naked and the Dead Go to Japan), or was I to do the book of the returning veteran when I had lived like a mole writing and rewriting seven hundred pages in those fifteen months?” So through the wet winter of 1947–48 he worked on his French verbs and waited to hear from Rinehart.
While waiting, he decided to read some non-American novels, although they jangled him as much as they inspired. Right after he had submitted Naked, he started reading E. M. Forster’s novels; in Paris he tackled Passage to India. He also read an unnamed work by Jean-Paul Sartre as well as Stendhal’s classic The Red and the Black, a novel that would have a large influence on him. He also read something by Evelyn Waugh, about which he wrote to Fig, grudgingly: “That English fairy can write, much as I hate to admit it.” The book that affected him most was Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, especially Sally Bowles, Isherwood’s charming, decadent floozy, who is oblivious to the rise of the Nazis. She would become the model for Mailer’s first memorable female character, Mrs. Guinevere, in his next novel.
When he did hear from Raney, the letter was vague about possible cuts. Mailer wrote back on January 23, and again the next day, saying he anticipated “emasculation” and, worse, that he would have no recourse because changes would be expensive to make after the galleys went to the printer. If that was the case, he would “have a shit hemorrhage.” Most distressing to him was his fear that Polack’s reply to Wyman’s question about whether there was a God (“If there is, he sure is a sonofabitch”), which he linked to Croft kicking over the hornet’s nest as manifestations of divine meddling, had been cut. “Without that line, it is no longer my book as far as I am concerned,” he said. He was willing to be overridden on the design of the book jacket, with its line drawing of a shell-shocked infantryman, and he was prepared to make other concessions, but he drew the line on Polack’s remark. He ended the second letter by noting that he wanted to rewrite a few passages and asked what revisions would cost, closing with “I remain suspended, Norman.”
Apparently, his volley of “howls and sulks,” as he called them, acted as a purge because over the next two weeks he wrote the first fifty pages of “Mrs. Guinevere,” the beginning of which centered on an ex-burlesque queen of the same name who runs a boardinghouse in Brooklyn Heights. In her self-absorption and flirtatiousness, she resembles Sally Bowles. Bea was writing a new novel about Russian immigrants, but she spent more time playing the piano in their apartment and enjoying Paris. The Mailers now had a fairly wide range of acquaintances, including some poor French artists. One was so destitute that Mailer and Bea, and Barbara when she arrived, took painting lessons from him. In early February, Raney wrote again to say he was coming to Paris, but did not say when the galleys would arrive. Mailer wrote him back a single-spaced, three-page, margin-less letter in which he went through all of his concerns. He made his points reasonably, emphasizing that he is burning no bridges and hopes to maintain his friendship with Raney, and includes tips on things to see during Raney’s upcoming visit. After recounting the history of the manuscript in regard to obscenity at both Little, Brown and Rinehart, he got to the heart of his argument about why profanity was integral to Naked, saying it was not merely for authenticity;
It is a tone which creates a sub-stratum of mood for the whole thing, and there is a limit to how much can be cut out without altering its context completely, and making the dialogue cute and “tough,” and placing the most disgusting kind of emphasis on it. I refer you to abortions like “A Walk in the Sun,” or any number of unmentionable plays where a laugh is aroused because someone roars, “Damn” or “Hell” or “Bastard.” There is a psychological process to reading where the reader’s attention sinks to a second cruising level, and there profanity does not strike him directly providing attention is not called to it by its spacing. He will notice it in time no more than articles and prepositions, and it will affect him the way it should affect him, an element in war experience.
He also questioned the decision-making process at Rinehart, and asks for a full list of profanity changes. He also wants to know if any substitutions for “fug” have been made. Finally, he complained about the infantryman drawing on the jacket, which he described as a sentimental, Ernie Pyle version of combat fatigue (Mailer missed entirely the appeal of the now iconic sketch of a GI by Joseph Karov, riddled with what appear to be bullet holes). His insistence on authentic speech—vocabulary and cadence—and the details of book design, both of which he belabors mightily to Raney, would become abiding concerns over the course of his career.
As his sister later pointed out, even as Mailer was agonizing over his next book and Rinehart’s actions, he “always had an aura that projected a love of life.” In all but the worst circumstances, “he had an ability to have a good time, and good times meshed with everything else,” she said, adding that he was especially animated and full of play. “We took ourselves very seriously while we were there, but we were really playing.” This European sojourn may have been the longest vacation of Mailer’s life.
On February 26 page proofs arrived. He found to his great relief that there were no significant deletions or changes. He wrote back to Raney on March 1 that he had “no bitch” and apologized for all his complaining. The number of swear words dropped was not great and in one place at least, he said, the change, “cr
ap” for “shit,” was for the better. He included a list of over a hundred small corrections and a few changes and offered to pay for them. Considerably relieved, he and Bea left on March 6 for a week’s skiing in the French Alps, near the town of Valloire. Upon their return to Paris, Mailer wrote letters on St. Patrick’s Day to Barney in Poland and Fan and Barbara in Brooklyn about the family reunion planned for the end of April. Barney was to join Norman and Bea in Paris and they would drive to the port of Cherbourg to pick up Barbara and Fan. They would be driving a 6 chevaux Peugeot, purchased for $1,100 with a loan from Fan to be paid out of anticipated royalties. Both letters were as sunny as Paris, which had warmed up considerably. “Around dusk, with everyone in the outdoor cafes,” he said, “you get some awful happy feelings.” All was well at Rinehart, he informed them, and the first printing of Naked would be 25,000 copies, a big press run for a first novel. The date of publication was set for May 13 at a price of $4.50 (changed later to May 6 and $4, considered high). He and Bea were planning to drive to Barcelona and Madrid in April, and later to Italy. The winter of discontent was over.
In her memoir of her first visit to Europe, Mailer’s sister explains that the trip to Spain came as a result of the contacts her brother and Bea had made with a group of anti-Franco Spanish students and refugees. The Spaniards convinced the Mailers to assist them in extracting a couple of their friends from a prison work camp in Spain.
Norman Mailer Page 13