According to Malaquais, about fifty people came to the party. He and Galy had driven down from Vermont, and Fig and Ecey had come all the way from Arkansas. Dan Wolf was there and several actors attended, including Montgomery Clift, Kevin McCarthy, Marlon Brando, and Rita Moreno, who came with Brando. Lillian Hellman came, and also a young southern novelist named Calder Willingham, art dealer Richard Bellamy, and other of Adele’s friends from her painting classes. Adele said the party was “a mingling of personalities, painters, beat poets, writers, actors, critics, a lot of brains, sex appeal, beautiful women, and extra men, good talk against a background of laughter, the clinking of ice cubes in glasses and jazz on the radio.” The party went well until about two A.M. when four or five local thugs crashed in. They were looking for a woman who had said something negative to them on the street, a guest at the party. Mailer tried to reason with them to no avail; one of them had a hammer and Mailer took two whacks to the head. He was staggering and bleeding, but still able to fight, he said later. Adele screamed and chased the gang out. Mailer wore a bandage on his head for a time and told his mother he’d gotten hurt in a taxicab accident. After that night, Adele was terrified of the neighborhood and wanted to give up the Monroe Street loft.
In August, they went to Provincetown and stayed in a seaside apartment on Commercial Street. Because of her painter friends, Adele was as well known as Mailer. He took part in a Provincetown Art Association panel on censorship with Dwight Macdonald, Willem de Kooning, and Edmund Wilson, the esteemed literary critic and friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, who summered in nearby Truro. At the time, Mailer said, Wilson “was the nearest thing to Jehovah” in his mind. Dwight Macdonald had nude beach parties in Truro (later satirized by Saul Bellow in his 1975 novel, Humboldt’s Gift), and Adele remembers “the sight of paunchy, aging bodies, sipping martinis, engaged in conversations as if they were fully dressed.” Macdonald, she said, “with his white goatee, a long string bean of a body, and his cute little pot belly,” was a sight. For a month, Adele painted and he worked on The Deer Park. After Labor Day, they returned to New York and moved to a “grim apartment, renovated in battleship grey” at 14 Pitt Street in Manhattan, not far from the Williamsburg Bridge. For his living space, Mailer alternated between beat-up bohemian lofts and handsome country houses.
Shortly after moving in, he was cheered by a letter from a young novelist, Vance Bourjaily, who wrote to him with praise for Barbary Shore and comments about the difficulties of writing second novels. Mailer had read about Bourjaily’s 1947 novel, The End of My Life, in John Aldridge’s 1951 book, After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars, in which he and Bourjaily had been affirmed as important writers, along with Gore Vidal; expatriate Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky; and Truman Capote, whose slim gothic novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was published just a few months before Naked and the Dead. Aldridge’s study had been praised by Mailer’s Harvard mentor, Robert Gorham Davis, on the front page of the same issue of The New York Times Book Review that contained a surly review of Barbary Shore. When Aldridge’s work was reprinted in 1985, Mailer wrote an introduction in which he said that Aldridge’s study had given him a much needed sense of identity at the time. Aldridge soon became a friend—introduced by Bourjaily—and Mailer’s most important admirer in the critical world for over forty years.
Mailer wrote back to Bourjaily with thanks for his kind words on Barbary Shore, adding, “The reviews were depressing, economically as well as psychically,” and that he made himself go through his novel again “to remind myself that it’s not all bad.” A few months later when James Jones was in New York, Bourjaily telephoned him and said that Jones was visiting him. Mailer invited them over to his cold-water flat on Pitt Street for a drink. He recalled their first meeting: “In those days,” Mailer recalled, “Jones was an avatar of energy.”
His presence could certainly fill any small room. The variety of his small-town personality was not only canny and overbearing, but also as warm as your best buddy. It felt like a great new kid had just moved onto the block. How rich was his simplicity—his was the wisdom of a good redneck. No doubt about it, he made Vance and me feel pale, establishmentarian, and much too modest by comparison.
But we all got drunk. That equaled us out. By twilight, we were the best of friends. And on the rise of this good musketeer spirit, three good writers ready to tackle all the ugly asinine powers above, we got candid with each other. Finally, Jones asked, “Vance, do you ever cheat on your wife?”
Now you had to know how cool Vance was in those days. He never showed his hand. . . . We had, however, forged a mood. Vance’s belief in those days (it may still be active) was that there were few things as unattractive and dispiriting as being the man to kill a good mood. So he looked up, and a glint of divine or diabolical light came into his eye, and he said, “Yes! Whenever and wherever I can,” and these being the lost years of rampant male authority (it feels like a millennium ago!) we all roared and hit another belt of booze and felt for a godly half-hour like the swashbucklers we were not, not quite.
A few weeks later, Mailer introduced Jones to Montgomery Clift at a party at Bourjaily’s apartment in Greenwich Village. Clift always claimed that it was at that party that he and Jones talked about making a film of From Here to Eternity. The film’s huge success—it won eight Oscars including Best Picture—undoubtedly helped reignite Mailer’s desire to see Naked made into a film.
By October he had 240 pages of the new novel, but he was dissatisfied with the draft, which he later said was “the worst writing I had ever done.” He then turned “dispiritedly” to short stories. The easiest topic for him was the army, and by the end of 1951 he had turned out three stories, “The Paper House” (based on a story about a geisha house told to him by Bourjaily), “The Dead Gook,” for which he drew on his memory of the Filipino Huks he had fought with in Luzon, and “The Language of Men,” a story about an army cook, his most autobiographical short story. He wrote all three in a day or two each, his idea being that if he couldn’t finish a story in one day, it wasn’t meant to be written. If one made a bad bet on the direction of one’s plot, he said, it would mean the wastebasket and new beginning. Therefore, when writing a novel, he said, “I move ahead like a banker, careful not to lose the investment of my work.” Cy Rembar tried unsuccessfully to sell the stories to some of the most prestigious fictional outlets of that time: The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Mademoiselle.
Mailer turned a small contretemps with Adele into another story, “The Notebook.” They had exchanged angry words after an old friend of hers paid too much attention in a restaurant. When he began recording the incident in the small notebook he always carried, Adele became more upset and told him, “You were just watching yourself be angry, taking notes on your emotional condition.” She sulked for the rest of the walk home. He turned the situation into a gem, the narrative equivalent of a mirror held up to a mirror. The story’s narrator is castigated by his girlfriend, much as Adele snapped at Mailer, for being “nothing but a notebook,” after which she stomps off, “her high heels mocking her misery in their bright tattoo upon the sidewalk.” He asks himself if he started the fight so he could record it, and then “considers this, priding himself on the fact that he would conceal no motive from himself, no matter how unpleasant.” As he runs after her, he rehearses how he will justify his incessant notebook jottings, and then asks himself if his explanation is for her or for the notebook. He stops and makes another entry. The story also underlines one clause in his credo, traceable all the way back to the notebooks he kept at Harvard: a promise never to hide his motives from himself, no matter how ignoble.
AFTER A WEEK-LONG ski trip with Adele in early January 1952 to Stowe, Vermont, he started a brief untitled journal. He was still working on the short stories, and Lillian Ross had promised him a reading by a top editor at The New Yorker, but he devalued the stories to Ross. He always believed he was a “journeyman�
�� in the form. He was experimenting with marijuana a bit, the beginning of a long love affair with the drug, and the journal has some entries about his experiences while smoking it. His actions puzzle him: “I will be so nice to people, so desperately determined to make them like me, and yet will be driven to give false romantic pictures of my own degeneration. How deeply I must be convinced of how uninteresting I am.” The journal is studious in detailing what he called his “irrationality.” The two chief topics of the journal, however, are his relationship with Adele and his ideas for a new novel. The two are more than just temporally linked, as the following excerpts from the journal demonstrate. He interrogates his feelings about Adele the day after asking her to stand naked before him.
She is so beautiful, her pointed breasts, her firm buttocks, her long back, her dark skin which does look golden even though I always feel as if I’m lying when I use the word to her. And yet she’s beautiful as a Gauguin and all fuck. It is the adolescent hungers which never die, the idea that I am making love to a woman who is all fuck, who exists only to deploy herself sensually for me which furnishes such excitement. I suppose always we make love in obeisance to our adolescent archetypes. Certainly Adele does. She enjoys sex so much because it is dirty to her, because she is raped, ravished, taken, ground into nothing, and repaid with the sweetest kind of pleasure. It is probably the nature of women when all superstructure and complexity is cut away to be naturally, amoral whore and tender mother. It is why Adele is so womanly.
In the next paragraph, he says that what he has written is false to a degree because he has left out something: “I hate her often for her social inadequacies which make me feel bound (how romantic!) to a lower level of the world than I aspire to—dinner parties in the East Sixties which I give?” After this admission, he says that “even if I hurt her often, I like her, I wish her well, I feel tender toward her.” Through several more long entries through the end of March, when the journal ceases, Mailer traces the sinuousities of their relationship. He never mentions Pygmalion, although in her memoir, The Last Party, Adele says that he had “an intense need to play Pygmalion” but that she “resisted the role of Galatea.” From Mailer’s journal:
January 14: As a writer, these have been the worst months of my life. Nothing breaks through, no ideas with any fluency, nothing seems to develop. I’m living in a vacuum. How long can it possibly continue.
January 15: Idea for a novel. About Adele written in first or third person, somewhat in the manner of [Alberto Moravia’s 1949 novel] The Woman of Rome, about a Greenwich Village girl, and what happens to her, the milieu she passes through, the qualities and lacks she feels in her life.
January 16: Adele told me last night that she’s been having fantasies of going into a convent, i.e., getting religious first and then convent—probably from [Graham Greene’s 1951 novel] The End of the Affair. Also of dropping everything, job and all, and going to a strange city. Also, of murdering me, and then committing suicide.
January 17: In comfort station in subway, a man taking a piss wonders if the man next to him is a homosexual, then wonders if the man next to him suspects him in turn. Then has a moment of interest in the fate of poor driven subway homosexuals, remembers an episode from his childhood when a man had sat next to him, and had wanted to suck his cock.
February 5: For the omnibus novel: One of the lives—the life of crime. The end of the novel might be found in the life of resistant action to the powers that be—take the quote from Zola—but the problem is to find the definite action. Always the problem for today’s novels. The quote: “Ah, to live indignant, to live enraged at treacherous arts, at false honor, at universal mediocrity! To be unable to read a newspaper without paling in anger! To feel the continual and irresistible need of crying aloud what one thinks, above all when one is alone in thinking it, and to be ready to abandon all the sweets of life for it.”
Toward the end of February he rented a studio in the Ovington Building on Fulton Street in Brooklyn and he took the subway from Pitt Street most days to work there. He was seeing James Jones a lot and had recently met William Styron. Dan Wolf was someone else he saw often during this difficult period. Mailer admired Wolf and confided in him. They also did a fair amount of drinking and carousing together. The new novel still had not come into focus and his affair with Adele was reaching a critical juncture.
February 22: Right now, today, the thing with Adele seems hopeless, with no future. I cannot conceive of myself as married to her. We drag upon each other so, we exhaust each other like leeches turned sucker to sucker. Without sex, I wonder if there would be anything at all in the relationship other than need. Yet a week ago, I felt very much in love with her (for me), I felt no sense of loss in emptying the house in Vermont, I felt warm and close to Adele. Was it only because Jim Jones obviously admired her?
I’m always so afraid of stops on a train, afraid someone will sit next to me, and I shall be forced to talk. It is even more irrational than that—I just don’t want a body next to me. This hasn’t changed in all the years. In social life I have a crutch, I am Norman Mailer, and I get a false sense of ego, but to be alone on a train, eat in a train diner, and everything intimidates me, including the hostess, the waitress and the other passengers. Once again I am little and ugly.
March 3: It’s ironic. I sit here and plan a novel or at least the beginning of one, so vast, so comprehensive, that the amount of energy, invention and determination to see it through would be staggering. Yet, never have I felt as lackadaisical, flat, and spiritless. From such beginning could a book come? I note this, only for the odd chance that I may follow it through.
Am I fucking too much? Can this account partially for my washed-out dispirit?
Mailer was not a huge admirer of the women’s magazines where Cy was peddling his stories. In 1947, when he was writing Naked and the Dead, Adeline had introduced him to Pearl Kazin (Alfred’s sister), an editor at Harper’s Bazaar. “She irritated the hell out of me. She was so super-superior,” he recalled. “She read more books; she was more on top of things.” When Kazin later wrote to ask if he would care to submit something to the magazine, he wrote back: “Dear Pearl Kazin, I’m still too young and too arrogant to care to write the kind of high-grade horseshit you print in Harper’s Bazaar.” He was “very happy” to mail that letter, he said. But in early 1952, his arrogance was on a leash. At a cocktail party in early March that he hosted, he met Cyrilly Abels, the managing editor of Mademoiselle, where his stories were being considered. A close friend of Katherine Anne Porter’s, she was responsible for publishing new young writers such as James Baldwin, Capote, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. But she was not immediately taken by his stories. “What a horror she was. I felt like screaming Shit while talking to her about my stories which [she said] were very interesting but not quite right for them,” he said. “At one point I had to say something about, ‘I know editors always want blood, but what color blood do you want?’ ” He got drunk after the party and his stories were later turned down. He ends his account of the failure to connect with Abels by saying that he wished he could “forget all this shit connected with short stories.” What he really wanted was “to get my teeth into a novel.”
FIVE
THE DEER PARK
The next day, a Sunday, he woke with a hangover. Dan Wolf had been at the party and he too was hung over, as he informed Mailer when he called to tell him that he had obtained “a dirty film” from Ed Fancher. Mailer went to Brooklyn to borrow his mother’s projector as Adele, her friend Irene Fornes, Dan Wolf, and Rhoda Lazare (whom he would later marry), gathered in Wolf’s Village apartment. The DC current in the building blew out the motor and when they put new fuses in the projector, it blew out the power in the entire building. “Just Kafkan,” Mailer wrote in the journal. Adele remembered that Norman Rosten had a projector and Mailer rushed back to Brooklyn Heights to borrow it while the rest of the party went to the Pitt Street apartment, which had AC current. They ate
, drank, and watched the film several times, and after the others had left, he and Adele watched it again while making love. But the film had “depersonalized us,” Mailer said, and the lovemaking was “without personal heat.”
After confiding these “hilarious” events to his journal the next day, he had a thought. Perhaps what happened the night before could be recast as a comic prologue to the omnibus novel he was trying to conceptualize. He began making notes. It would be told from the point of view of a novelist thinking about the nature of his profession:
How the novelist must be paranoid and therefore seeks to fuse with the entire world, how he must have a feminine component to his nature and be obsessed with his masculinity; how he must be terrified of experience and intensely hungry for it; how inferiority and megalomania must alternate in his conception of himself. Is this sufficient to project the novel? Also he must want power, and have no capacity to gain it. Be a narcissist, too.
The vast ambition of this novelist character (who, it must be said, has a good deal in common with his creator) would be realized in a sequence of eight interlocking novels that would explore the following worlds, in this order: pleasure, business, communism, church, the working class, crime, homosexuality, and end with mysticism. The narrator, he wrote in the prologue, “dreams or conceives of himself in many milieu, and traces out his adventures in each milieu with the same set of characters.” This scheme, which he said would require “the seat of Zola and the mind of Joyce,” was one of the ways Mailer fought off the depression that followed the failure of Barbary Shore. Several times over the next half century, including his final years, he came up with ambitious, skeletal plans for multinovel projects as a way of getting started on the next one. The projects were huge, daunting, but not to him; he was energized by their scope and complexity. Robert Lucid called Mailer’s bootstrapping efforts “exercises in imagination-isometrics”; they are also reminiscent of Baron Munchausen pulling himself out of the swamp by his own hair.
Norman Mailer Page 18