Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  He began buying bags of marijuana at a dollar apiece and carefully removing the stems and seeds. Anticipating his luggage being searched when he and Adele and Susan reached the border, he hid his cache with Adele’s tampons, which were then put in condoms.

  I had the feeling that this was the way to get it through customs. And sure enough, when the time came and we were crossing the border—I remember Susie, by then, was about five and turned to me and said, “Daddy,”—she had a wonderful sort of Spanish accent—“Why are you so nervous?” I was ready to clout the kid—anyway, the customs guy sort of went through our bags very carefully and when he got to Adele’s bag and he opened it, I had put some black lace panties on top of the Kotex box. He lifted them very gingerly, saw the Kotex box, slapped back the panties, closed her bag and that was it.

  Mailer had the supplies he needed for his upcoming campaign.

  SIX

  GENERAL MARIJUANA AND THE NAVIGATOR

  “Calculation never made a hero.”

  —John Henry Cardinal Newman

  Feeling financially secure from the sale of Naked to Gregory and Laughton in November 1954, and perhaps weary of looking out their bathroom window on a cemetery, the Mailers decided to move out of the railroad flat on First Avenue. They rented a duplex in a four-story brownstone at 320 East 55th Street, not far from Sutton Place, one of the wealthiest enclaves in New York, where they would remain for the next two years. Susan, who was spending the fall with them, had her own bedroom. Speaking of the move, Mailer told Vance and Tina Bourjaily that he wanted his gravestone to read, “He wished to live only at the bottom or the top.” Adele bought new modern furniture and hung her paintings on the wall; he busied himself catching up on his correspondence and trying to place “The Man Who Studied Yoga.” He purchased hi-fi equipment but felt guilty about the expense. “When the revolution comes,” he wrote to the Bourjailys, “the workers will put me on a spit.” He wrote to Gregory to say that Robert Mitchum was too big physically to play Sergeant Croft in the film version of Naked. He wanted Brando, whose recent performance in The Wild One as the leader of a motorcycle gang impressed him for its subtle combination of repressed violence and “a certain spirituality.” In several letters to friends, he cited continental writers who had influenced The Deer Park: Stendhal, Gide, Proust, Moravia. Writing to his Uncle Louis in South Africa on November 17, he said that “it meant something to me to get off the floor” after the failure of Barbary Shore. A day or two later, with a Publishers Weekly advertisement for the novel already in print, Stan Rinehart insisted on deletion of the fellatio scene. Mailer refused; Rinehart halted production. The Deer Park was adrift, and although Mailer didn’t know it, unfinished.

  The story of what happened over the next two months as the novel moved from publisher to publisher, picking up rejection slips like barnacles, is told in his long essay “The Mind of an Outlaw,” published in Esquire four years later. It is, Mailer later said, “the most accurate account I’ve ever written of myself,” as well his declaration of independence from the New York literary world of “cliques, fashions, vogues, snobs, snots, and fools, not to mention a dozen bureaucracies of criticism.” The era of magisterial editors and publishers like Maxwell Perkins and Charles Scribner was gone, he lamented, and “there was no room for the old literary idea of oneself as a major writer, a figure in the landscape.” From November 1954 to January 1955 The Deer Park was considered and rejected by Random House, Knopf, Simon & Schuster, Harper’s, Scribner’s, and Harcourt Brace. Styron was enlisted to help at Random House, although he told Hiram Haydn, the top editor there, that he had mixed feelings about it, something Mailer already knew. Haydn also didn’t like it, finding it to be “gray and dreary.” Mailer was always urging his friends who had reservations about the novel to read it a second time, and when Haydn did, he reversed himself and saw a “convincing strain of compassion for his unlovely and unhappy characters.” But this reversal came too late to help him at Random House. Jones may have tried to help at Scribner’s, his (and Hemingway’s) publisher, but the editors there detested it. Mailer soon learned that Jones felt the same way. He wrote to Mailer that the novel was “a pretty bad book,” and compared it unfavorably to Barbary Shore. He added, “I still believe there are great books in you. Great books. If you can ever get them out.” On some days, Mailer thought that The Deer Park was, if not great, close to it, and Jones’s dismissal of it, on top of Styron’s lukewarm praise, dealt a blow to the esprit of the trio.

  The novel got the lengthiest consideration from the firm of Alfred A. Knopf. Mailer would have been elated to see its elegant Borzoi wolfhound logo on its title page, given the firm’s commitment to high literary endeavor, and several of his literary heroes—Spengler, Mann, Maugham, and Pound—on its rolls. Working with the firm’s lawyers for three weeks, he said, “I took out sentence after sentence which might be construed as sexually gratuitous,” agreeing to these excisions because they were willing to leave the fellatio scene intact. But when the lawyers pressed for still more cuts, he bridled and negotiations ceased. He blamed Blanche Knopf, the founder’s wife, for being “almost irrationally terrified” about the book being prosecuted. But he was wrong; she was “eager” for the firm to take it, as her husband explained in his memoirs. It was Knopf himself, and his top lawyer, Harry Buchman, who were opposed. Shortly after it was turned down, the Knopfs invited the Mailers to a cocktail party. When they were leaving, Alfred went to the door with them. Mailer, he recalled, “immediately offered to bet me that the book would sell over a hundred thousand copies.” Mailer repeated the offer a day or two later in a letter, saying he would wager “hard cash” on his instinct, and that if Knopf did not reply, “the impression I obtained of your character when we exchanged 40 words at Blanche’s party will be confirmed.” Knopf wrote back a terse note, declining the bet and saying he had “no reason to care one whit whether your book sells 250 or 250,000 copies.”

  Adele remembers that during this period he would “just sit staring at nothing,” all the while drinking Scotch and chewing the ice cubes. “Sometimes in the middle of a conversation, he would seem to be distracted. It was as if he was out of his body. He would smile to himself, as if I weren’t there, his lips moving soundlessly, having a dialogue with himself.” As the rejections piled up, he recounted, he stayed as close to the manuscript “as a stage-struck mother pushing her child forward at every producer’s office. I was amateur agent for it, messenger boy, editorial consultant, Machiavelli of the luncheon table, fool of the five o’clock drinks, I was learning the publishing business in a hurry, and I made a hundred mistakes and paid for each one by wasting a new bout of energy.” His exposure to the manners and mores of the publishing world was the kind of experience, he said, that “was likely to return some day as good work.”

  “The Mind of an Outlaw” is that good work. It can be compared, with some justice, to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay “The Crack-Up,” an anguished account of his descent from renown to obscurity. Arresting as it is, Fitzgerald’s piece (also published in Esquire) reeks of self-pity. Mailer’s essay is not without it, but he is considerably feistier, funnier, caustic in some places, self-lacerating in others, and captures perfectly his jangled mood after Rinehart’s rejection. Exaggerated descriptions of his novel’s obscenity were sloshing around publishers row in New York, and each new rumor, Mailer believed, narrowed the novel’s chances at the next house it was sent. To get the payment due him from Rinehart for accepting the manuscript, he had to mount a costly legal effort. The novel he had started about a concentration camp, “The City of God,” was another casualty, he said. Given his sea of troubles, beginning a new novel was inconceivable. Finally, the sum of his frustrations “drove a spike into my cast-iron mind,” forcing the recognition that he had become “the sort of comic figure I would have cooked to a turn in one of my books, a radical who had the nineteenth-century naïveté to believe that the people with whom he did business were 1) gentlemen, 2) fond of him,
and 3) respectful of his ideas even if in disagreement with them.” The man who ultimately took the novel, Walter Minton, the new president of Putnam’s, was more to Mailer’s liking; he reminded him of a general. Minton paid Mailer $10,000, the highest advance in the history of Putnam’s. Minton would live up to his reputation a few years later when he would publish another controversial novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Ted Purdy, editor in chief, was also high on the novel, and Minton later said that The Deer Park was “the best novel that’s ever been written about Hollywood.” Minton asked for no changes, yet Mailer was still unhappy, savoring his anger and half disappointed that he would not be self-publishing The Deer Park.

  His use of marijuana had accelerated in Mexico; he was also drinking again, his liver having recovered, but “tea” was his drug of choice, opening his senses and his passion for jazz, “intricate music that spoke of the complexity of life,” as he later described it. The Mailers went to clubs in Harlem and the Village where they heard Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, and Miles Davis. He continued his regular, energetic discussions with Lindner. The combined effects of this stimulation—colloquies with Lindner, jazz, marijuana (and the liquor and sleeping pills with which he tempered it), the raucous, disenthralled culture of Harlem, and the adrenaline that Rinehart’s betrayal pumped into his system—led to something bursting within his deepest self.

  I do not know if it was so much a loving heart, as a cyst of the weak, the unreal and the needy, and I was finally open to my anger. I turned within my psyche I can almost believe, for I felt something shift to murder in me. I finally had the simple sense to understand that if I wanted my work to travel further than others, the life of my talent depended on fighting a little more, and looking for help a little less. But I deny the sequence in putting it this way, for it took me years to come to this fine point. All I felt then was that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it, I liked it a good night better than trying to be a gentleman.

  ON DECEMBER 1, 1954, Mailer began setting down the ideas that came in wake of the Rinehart rupture. He called it “Lipton’s Journal,” a not-so-veiled reference to the “tea” he smoked before he sat at his typewriter. He wrote fast, in bursts of ten or more pages every few days, and over the course of three months, until March 4, 1955, typed 248 pages containing approximately 110,000 words. The entries are numbered, 1 to 689; each is a stand-alone pensée. As he proceeded, he entertained the possibility that his insights could challenge some of the dominant ideas of Western thought, specifically, Freud’s theories on the merits of sublimation and repression.

  But at a dozen points he faltered, questioning the wisdom of naked soul bearing, much as Walt Whitman did in Song of Myself.

  As was evident in the notes yesterday, I was moving toward a depression, and it came on me during the evening. I felt very tired, and rather disgusted with myself. It seemed to me as if I’d been indulging in mental masturbation for quite a few days, playing word games, playing at being a genius, playing at being at the edge of psychotic. . . .

  Last night taking my seconals I thought—“A pill for the swill.” And I was flat (stunned) by the recognition. How I hate this journal, hate myself, hate Adele, hate my wild kick, hate the garbage I release, how I cling to society to knock me out, to stun my rebellion. If I ever go insane I’ll not be a schizo. I’ll be manic depressive.

  His recoveries are just as fervent; he sometimes sounds like Kerouac.

  I am manic, alive, filled every day with the excitement and revelation of everything I see. . . .

  I’m a synthesizer, just as a crook is. I cannot make the original discovery, but I can add the fabulous jewel to it at my best. So I dip into other books and other men’s styles, take the ideas I wish, throw away the others, understand one facet of a person to the exclusion of the rest because what I want is the jewel in the suitcase—fuck the rest, fuck the furs and the bonds. . . .

  My mind is like a tiger.

  The journal jumps over a wide arc of heterogeneous material, making it hard at times to find a filament of continuity, yet it hangs together. One reason is that “Lipton’s Journal” is a psychoanalytic act. Lindner wouldn’t analyze him, so he does the job himself. He looks at his childhood, his wives, his family and friends, his ambitions and his failures, his writings, all with an eye to clarifying the basic lineaments and conflicts of his psyche so that he can move forward and claim his genius, which he boldly asserts. Another claim to coherence is that the journal is a dictionary of dualisms. The indubitable doubleness of all nature, all phenomena, is the centrifugal belief that supports every exploration in the journal. All the antinomies that he had pondered since his youth come tumbling out. He works through a range of commonplace oppositions such as sun-moon, conscious-unconscious, heaven-hell, as well as bodily functions—orgasms and vomiting, weeping and laughter, intercourse as giving and taking—and dozens of others: choice-habit, antacid-analgesic (which he proposes as the title of a one-thousand-page novel), and energetic repetitions of the saint-psychopath dualism. He considers his sexuality, his addictions, and like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Reverend Dimmesdale, practices vigils of self-examination.

  Looking at myself in the mirror, high on Lipton’s, I saw myself as follows: The left side of my face is comparatively heavy, sensual, possessor of hard masculine knowledge, strong, proud, and vain. Seen front-face I appear nervous, irresolute, tender, anxious, vulnerable, earnest, and Jewish middle-class. The right side of my face is boyish, saintly, bisexual, psychopathic, and suggests the victim.

  For Mailer it was incontestable that two people—not two halves of one—lived inside every human. As he put it, “Every man is a marriage within himself.” The two people inhabiting him, referred to over and over as the saint and the psychopath, are linked by “the apparently silly compromise of an over-friendly anxious boyish Jewish intellectual, ‘seductive’ and inhibited by turns.” This front-face construct, a “social image,” is close to being a “despised image,” he says, but one necessary for fruitful relations with those he is too much in awe of to disclose his real self, or selves. He names as authority figures Ted Amussen, Stan Rinehart, and John Aldridge, but says there are many others. Lindner is not one of them. He is Mailer’s audience of one, a source of psychoanalytic practice and insight and, in a real way, his collaborator on the journal. They are utterly candid.

  The inter-fecundation is starting. A letter from Bob [Lindner] says, “Occasionally . . . I find myself leaping ahead in my mind—or arguing fiercely as if you were present.” It has to be. So many of my ideas are expansions of Bob’s ideas—in turn many of mine will be expanded by Bob. Yet, I’m ashamed to say that I was not entirely pleased when I read the above. There’s a part of me which is such a holder. I really hate to give with a part of me, and I usually give best when I will not be totally accepted. (Bob was right about this.) I’m so afraid things will be stolen—which of course is the way of saying things will be improved. What causes the rich man so much anguish when his joint is looted is that deep in him he suspects that the thief will enjoy his property more than he did. There is one other fear about Bob which is justifiable perhaps. I’m not at all sure he’s the revolutionary—he is so capable of turning back to be the mere reformer.

  When Mailer became rampant and arrogant during a December visit to Baltimore, Lindner called him “a pint-sized Hitler.” “It’s so true,” Mailer acknowledged in the journal. He could be just as frank: “Lindner gave me a pain in the ass last weekend,” he wrote. “He acted like a shy sexy teasing society bitch who gave you the sexual come-on when you’d given up, and threw her manners at you when you advanced.” When Lindner said that Mailer was “blindly paranoid,” Mailer countered with a list of his friend’s lacks: “his shlumperness, his sly (but heavy) manipulations, his hang-dogness, his fear of authority, his half-works, his games with [his wife] Johnn[ie], his guilt about it, his guilt about every fucking thing.” Yet they were close enough for Mailer to compare their relationship to that o
f Marx and Engels, and concluded, “If I didn’t like him so much, if I didn’t feel so psychicly [sic] close, as if we were the two talented Jewish sons of the same family, the older brother I never had, I really would be tempted to slug that sly stealing cocksucker.” As he completed portions of the journal, he would mail the carbon to Lindner, who responded with long letters.

  Mailer knew the writings of Marx better than he did those of Freud; the converse was true of Lindner, but both felt the ideas of the two great thinkers needed irrigation. Mailer laid it out:

  So, modestly, I see my mission. It is to put Freud into Marx, and Marx into Freud. Put Tolstoy into Dostoyevsky and Dostoyevsky into Tolstoy. Open anarchism with its soul-sense to the understanding of complexity, and infuse complex gloom with the radiance of anarchism. As Jenny Silverman [Bea’s mother] said of me once, “The little pisherke with the big ideas.” Pint-sized Hitler. Yes.

  In another entry, he fleshed out the reciprocal, developing nature of their missions.

  I who was one of the worst soldiers ever to go into an Army, one of the people who had the least feeling for Army life, nonetheless was the one who had to capture the psychology inside and out of the Army. I, who am timid, cowardly, and wish only friendship and security, am the one who must take on the whole world. I, whose sexual nature is to cling to one woman like a child embracing the universe, am driven by my destiny to be the orgiast, or at least the intellectual mentor of orgiasm. I, who find it essentially easier to love than to hate; I who could probably find more people to love in the world than anyone I know, am destined to write about characters who are conventionally “unlovable.”

  Mailer’s Marxist mentor, Malaquais, receives a few comments and it is clear that their friendship will continue, although slightly altered. Mailer is grateful to Malaquais, but no longer stands in awe of him. This can be seen in an early entry, a reflection on the “square blunt building-brick quality” that Mailer found to characterize most socialist analyses. His emerging style can be seen in the extended metaphor with which he reveals the evolution of their relationship.