The gulf was hardly bridged and even Mailer’s most enthusiastic readers were disappointed. The novel is set in Brooklyn Heights and the narrator, Mickey Lovett, an amnesiac war veteran, whose roots are as cauterized as Mailer’s, lives in an attic room identical to the one where he wrote Naked and the Dead. Mrs. Guinevere, described by critic Philip Bufithis as “brazen, touchy, touching, trifling, pathetic and gamey . . . bewildered and bewildering,” is modeled on Mailer’s buxom, redheaded Irish landlady, whose curves, according to Norman Rosten, were hard to miss. McLeod’s political philosophy is derived root and branch from Malaquais, but his self-lacerating Irish wit, obsessive neatness, and “quinine tongue” came from Charlie Devlin. He later said that he put “Malaquais’ philosophy in Devlin’s body.” McLeod’s long-windedness also belongs to Malaquais, who could hold the floor for hours in debate. What completely destroyed any small chance the novel had for a sympathetic reception was timing: it was published on May 24, 1951, less than a year after the start of the Korean War, a period when anything that offered a socialistic alternative was abominated.
The anticommunist fervor of the time, and the novel’s mash-up of a plot, combined to produce the worst reviews he would ever receive. Consider: three ex-Trotskyites (Lovett, McLeod, and Lannie Madison, a mad Cassandra still in mourning for the murder of “the man with a beard”—Trotsky—by “the man with a pipe”—Stalin) and Hollingsworth, are all sexually and/or romantically linked with Mrs. Guinevere, who writes hilarious movie treatments about a doctor with “the biggest whang on him in the whole town, and maybe he don’t know it.” The five chief characters visit each other’s rooms at all hours to smoke countless cigarettes and talk about politics and history until the last third of the novel, where McLeod makes an interminable, polemical-hortatory confession speech, after which Hollingsworth offers him a slot in a protection program if he will surrender the unnamed but priceless object—Guinevere calls it a “thingamajig”—that he stole from the FBI office where he worked after giving up his job as one of Stalin’s hangmen. After much back-and-forth and gnashing of teeth, McLeod refuses, passes the revolutionary torch and the object to Lovett, and is shot by agents.
The uniformly strong praise that Mailer had received for the debates between Hearn and Cummings in Naked and the Dead led him to build his second novel around another debate, albeit a far more protracted one, between McLeod and Hollingsworth. One need only compare the symbolic power of the objects on which the respective plots turn—the hornet’s nest and the thingamajig—to see how Mailer, honorably and in places brilliantly, stumbled in his second outing. Nevertheless, Barbary Shore was an advance in one important way. He had begun to use language differently. In Naked, there are masterful descriptions of physical action, but there are also turgid and repetitive stretches, and his style is greatly dependent on Dos Passos, Farrell, and Thomas Wolfe. In his second novel, style became more important and he began to see prose as more than a conveyor of content. While he would always have reservations about style for its own sake, he now saw that style as a considered reflection of self was a great, if elusive, good. He would not fully achieve his characteristic style until several years later.
The completion of the final draft of the novel in January 1951 coincided with the breakup of the marriage. Bea was reading Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex and trying to write a book that Mailer said “would have been a precursor of Women’s Liberation” if she had finished it. She tried painting and gave it up. They had visitors but Bea was miserable. “Here I was with this darling little girl, the house was so gorgeous, and we had very interesting friends—writers and artists,” she said, but “I was a very depressed woman. It just wasn’t my bag to be the wife of a famous man without a life of my own.” At Mailer’s suggestion, she began to think about a career as a doctor, and eventually became a psychiatrist. He was similarly miserable. Later, he said that one reason the marriage fell apart was that Bea “was a very strong woman.”
She was perfectly prepared to go out and work for years in order to make enough money for me to stay at home and write a good many books. And if that happened, we probably would have been a happy couple of that sort, she the strong one, I the gentle one. Then what happened? I became successful so suddenly I got much more macho. My God, nothing like success for increasing the size of your muscle! I literally went from 140 to 180 pounds in one year—it wasn’t all fat, it was muscle. I suddenly felt like a strong man. That altered everything between us.
THERE WERE SEVERAL meetings at Rinehart about Barbary Shore. They were not happy occasions, but trips were an excuse to leave Putney. Sometimes he brought Susan with him and stayed with his parents in Brooklyn. One evening in February 1951, he and Dan Wolf were deep into a bottle at the East 64th Street apartment that Mailer had borrowed. “Norman was making one of his big moves,” Wolf said. The breakup with Bea was impending and he could smell freedom. Wolf told him about a beautiful Spanish-Peruvian woman he knew named Adele Morales, an aspiring painter who made her living constructing papier-mâché displays for department store windows. She and Wolf had been lovers for a short time and Wolf’s friend Ed Fancher had more or less lived with her for three years. She was just coming off a brief affair with Jack Kerouac. Mailer was intrigued. It was late, but Wolf called her and invited her over for a drink. Mailer got on the phone and read her a quotation from Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. Monroe Stahr, the novel’s protagonist, is beginning an affair with Kathleen Moore, the ex-mistress of a king. He feels something stirring: “He listened inside himself as if something by an unknown composer, powerful and strange and strong, was about to be played for the first time.” Adele was moved and agreed to take a cab and meet him. “How could I know that Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer, and that cab ride would change my life forever?” she later wrote.
Because he was thinking about writing his next novel about Hollywood, it is almost impossible to imagine that The Last Tycoon did not give Mailer a push in that direction. His portrait of Charles Francis Eitel, the movie director protagonist of The Deer Park, clearly owes a debt to Fitzgerald’s Stahr. Several weeks earlier, he had written to George Landy, his agent, about getting him a screenwriting job in Hollywood. He would prefer something light, not a war film, he wrote. “A thriller, a western (Sam Croft is my credentials) and preferably a polish job, although I don’t care. Actually, I’ll take anything.” What he really wanted was a chance to get more material for the novel.
Experience for Mailer and many of his contemporaries—James Jones, Saul Bellow, William Styron, and Jack Kerouac, certainly—had a talismanic quality. Dust jackets of American novels from the 1930s to the early 1960s typically bragged about the author’s experiences as a short-order cook, reporter, fisherman, hobo, farmworker, and, after World War II, veteran. A college education wasn’t a drawback, but a working knowledge of Crane, London, Lewis, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and—the key figure—Thomas Wolfe was much more important. Coming from Boston or Philadelphia was suspect. Brooklyn or Chicago or Middletown, U.S.A., was much better. The idea was to rebel against mean-spirited Puritanism, do a hitch in the service and then bum around the country, working here and there, loafing and observing your soul, reading tattered copies of the Viking portable authors and writing lyrical but realistic prose about the view from boxcars as you rumbled through the great, mysterious American night. Then, as a matter of course, came discovery, publication, white-hot fame, Hollywood, and a long happily-ever-after. If no writer ever had such a storybook experience, Mailer and James Jones came closer than anyone else.
Mailer learned that a first novel by Jones was receiving the kind of intense publicity from Scribner’s that Naked and the Dead had received from Rinehart—the kind that Barbary Shore was not getting, as he ruefully noted. When he read the galleys of Jones’s From Here to Eternity, he was more than routinely impressed. “It knocked me down, almost knocked me out,” he said. “All the while I was reading it, I had a sinking feeling, ‘Well,
you’re no longer the most talented writer to come out of World War II. You’ve been replaced.’ ” He gave it a blurb.
It’s a big fist of a book with powerful virtues and serious faults, but if the very good is mixed with the sometimes bad, those qualities are inseparable from the author. Jones writes with a wry compassionate anger which is individual and borrows from no writer I know. I think his book is one of the best of the “war novels,” and in certain facets is perhaps the best.
They met soon afterward in New York and enjoyed each other’s company. “It always gave me a boost to know that Jim was in town,” Mailer said. They almost had to become friends, he said, because they shared unique experiences. Both were young and had written war novels set in the Pacific; both books enjoyed fantastic sales and reviews; both writers became famous overnight. “So in a certain sense,” Mailer said, “we felt like the touchdown twins.” Although it would be brief, his relationship with Jones would be the most intense male friendship of his life.
HE AND ADELE were immediately attracted when they met that first night. After Dan Wolf went to sleep, they made love. In the morning, Adele had an impulse to leave, but then she recalled the “incredible explosion” of the night before, and wanted “this half-stranger all over again, his sweet-smelling body and his beautiful cock inside me.” She decided it was not a one-night stand. “What I gave and took was not to be discarded with last night’s drinks. He was happy, I could see it in his face, and so was I.” His recollection was much the same: “It was intense on the first night, very. Very. It was a memorable first night.”
I’d had a few affairs while I was with Bea, but almost always these affairs, the sexuality was sort of analogous to my own, in other words, you could pump it up, you could tone it down, you could control it. It was very much under one’s control. With Adele, there was this feeling that it was never under her control. There was a power that took her over. And so it was the first passion I’d really encountered. And mind you, a lot of people [would] say, “What? There he was, what was his age?” Most people don’t realize there’s very few passionate women in the world. Especially in modern times, I don’t know about ancient times, or medieval times or the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment. But by now, given the double impact of religious orthodoxy and civilization itself, a great many women see sex as something that is best controlled. And so that was the startling element in the relationship with Adele.
The affair was headlong; his marriage was over. By the end of March, he and Bea had agreed to separate and sell the house in Putney. He sublet the 64th Street apartment and was spending the majority of his time there, with Adele sleeping over regularly.
All during this time, he was mulling his idea for a Hollywood novel, but didn’t want to begin it until Barbary Shore came out and he had absorbed the blows that he was anticipating. In the meantime, he needed to work. In January, he had done a longish piece, “The Meaning of Western Defense,” written in “the third-rate Eighteenth Brumaire style” of Marx, for an English symposium on the West’s military preparedness against a possible Soviet attack. Mounting a strong defense would only enrage the Russians, he argued, ergo, “Western Defense has the ultimate and abominable meaning of Western annihilation.” A month later, he again confirmed his anti-Stalinist Marxism when, in answer to a question about the nature of his humanism, he said he was an atheistic humanist, and added that “the particular equipment of writers like myself, to wit, Marx and Freud, are more of a cross than a crutch when it comes to embodying what one has learned from them in one’s work,” a point made less gently in the reviews of Barbary Shore.
The Mailer and Silverman families learned of the split in April when Mailer wrote to Dave and Anne to announce it. “We had a good marriage,” he said, “but now it is best we part.” They divided the money in the bank, and Bea went to Mexico with a new boyfriend, Steve Sánchez, a student at the New School she had met through Dan Wolf. Susan, who was not yet two, would remain for a time in Brooklyn with Fan and Barney. While Mailer was absorbed with Adele, he still had time to answer a letter from Lois Wilson, who had asked him to come to San Francisco for a visit. He said that he found himself “liking you immensely, maybe even loving you a little,” and would “love to have your round sweet ass under my hands.” But, he concluded, “I find it not possible to love two or three girls at once.” Adele had captured him.
Neither Mailer nor his editors at Rinehart were prepared for the almost unrelieved nastiness of the reviews, which ran ten to one unfavorable. Time labeled the novel “small-beer Nineteen Eighty-Four” and called the novel “paceless, tasteless and graceless,” a phrase that became etched on the tablets of Mailer’s memory. Anthony West in The New Yorker said that the novel had “a monolithic, flawless badness, like Mussolini’s play about Napoleon.” Even the tepid praise of leftist critics like Irving Howe and Harvey Swados was mixed with negatives. The novel’s overelaborated political debate and dithering plot pleased no one, although some of the characters—Mrs. Guinevere, especially—were found to be imaginatively drawn. The British reviews, coming after the book’s publication by Jonathan Cape in January 1952, were slightly better. V. S. Pritchett praised it, saying that Mailer was “the most interesting American novelist to appear since the war.” In some of the reviews, in both the United States and England, there was some tentative cheering for a novelist trying to break new ground. Trying to make lemonade out of lemons, someone at Rinehart had the idea of running excerpts from the best and the worst reviews side by side. It was a technique that Mailer would rely on for the remainder of his career, usually with excerpts that he personally chose. In the case of Barbary Shore, it may have helped a bit: the novel did make the bestseller list for three weeks after it was published on May 24. Jones’s From Here to Eternity had made number one two months earlier and remained in first place for a month after Mailer’s novel had disappeared. The success of From Here to Eternity would give Mailer the desire to write a new novel that would top Jones.
Mailer had hoped that Malaquais, to whom the novel is dedicated, would find some merit in the book. After all, he and Malaquais belonged to “a party of two,” on the left wing of Trotskyism. “I took up that position with great relief because it was an island,” Mailer said. “You really could be against everything, but with an inner purity of soul.” But his mentor was also a critic of exacting standards, and he found fault. “It’s a political tract, not a novel,” Malaquais said. “You don’t make a novel with political themes or you have to be a genius. I didn’t like the book and I told Norman so.” But he did not give his opinion until almost two months after the book and the reviews appeared. Malaquais said he had not written earlier because he didn’t know what address to use. Mailer responded by noting that Malaquais could have found it easily enough: “But I rather suspect that your most infuriating vice—the pomp and false dignity of a third rate Central American diplomat came to the fore—and you probably thought, ‘I, Jean Malaquais, do not write a letter to be forwarded like a common beggar.’ ” The reviews angered and depressed him, he told Malaquais. He called the reviewers “first-rate cocksuckers,” and ended defiantly, “Fuck them. If I’m any good, I’ll last no matter what they write, and if I’m not any good, it doesn’t matter.” He began to wonder for the first time since his sophomore year at Harvard if he was really a writer, and if he shouldn’t consider other occupations. He signed his letter, “The Misunderstood Genius.” The fall of 1951 was one of the low points of his life.
He had recently rented a loft at 85 Monroe Street between the Brooklyn Bridge and Grand Street on the Lower East Side. It was a tough neighborhood and he used to carry a roll of quarters in each hand when walking home at night, his version of brass knuckles. One hundred feet long, twenty-five wide, and four flights up, the loft cost $30 a month. Such a loft, with rows of windows overlooking the East River, would be where Sergius O’Shaugnessy lives and runs his bullfighting school in his 1958 short story “The Time of Her Time.” From March to
mid-June, Mailer divided his time between the loft and the sublet apartment on 64th Street. Until the Putney house sold the following spring, he let Jean and Galy use it. Adele thought Mailer handled the reviews well, but saw “an underlying anger and depression.” He bought her new clothes, a lot of black velvet, she recalled, and took her to a party where she met Charlie Chaplin, who told her she was beautiful. She said she got a good idea of what Bea had gone through at parties. “Women flirted with him, boldly,” Adele said, “as if I wasn’t there.”
To prepare for the Hollywood novel, he decided he needed to go there again. Mickey Knox was driving to Hollywood to see his girlfriend, Lois Andrews, and Mailer joined him, planning to see Lois Wilson. Years later, he said he had another reason for going. He wasn’t ready to commit to Adele and was “looking for action”—women. When they got close to California, Mailer asked if they could detour so he could see the resort town of Palm Springs, where Hollywood stars and moguls often vacationed. Knox said that they spent only about twenty minutes in the town and then got back on the highway. When he read The Deer Park a few years later, he saw that Mailer had caught the town’s architecture, landscape, and character with amazing accuracy.
In Hollywood, he and Knox rented an apartment on North Vine, where Mailer saw old friends. Knox introduced him to Andrews, whom he used as a model for Dorothea O’Faye in The Deer Park. He took notes, and soaked up all he could over the two weeks he was there, but was unable to find any studio work. Shortly after he arrived, he spent a night in bed with two women and told Adele about it in a letter. She was upset and retaliated by going to bed with a man and his wife. She wrote to Mailer about it and when he returned in mid-July, they fought. She told him that she had done it out of jealousy. As so often happened, they made up in bed. “Later,” she said, “he told me he had walked around for so many years feeling dead inside, feeling nothing, but I had changed that.” Within two weeks of his return, they decided to have a party in the Monroe Street loft so Adele could meet all his friends.
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