Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  His thought of course has the nobility of a cathedral, but he’s filled every square inch of the cathedral with a tile, and so his new thought can consist merely of improving the total design. He can replace one tile by another. But he will never build a cathedral which dissolves into light. For all the beauty of his conceptions, a dank oppressive gloom breathes out of the doors and no one wants to enter Malaquais’ cathedral. He is left the gloomy caretaker of it. One reason he cannot chase me away entirely is that I’m the village boy who wandered in one evening and stayed to admire the cathedral for many years, asking the caretaker every day, “Don Malaquais, tell me about the saints, and why this stone is this color?” I was a naughty boy and I was forever quitting his lessons to throw stones at the bats, but what he cannot bear, dear Malaquais, is the silence now that I am gone. Timidly, terrified, like a shy old miser, he is making endless preparations necessary to go out and buy a new hat. He has no real hope he’ll be detained in the village and find a place to build a new cathedral, he knows he’ll go back to the old one and watch the bats multiply.

  If there is any doubt about the shift in his feelings, his list of desired literary executors in the journal makes it clear. He names his sister, Cy Rembar, Dan Wolf, and, as chief executor, Lindner. Malaquais is not on the list. Barney is.

  In late January 1955, Mailer spent most of the day with his father. It was, he wrote, the first real talk they had ever had, and he told his father that he loved him, “instead of hitting him with all kinds of shit and making him feel like a piece of dirt,” as he wrote in “Lipton’s Journal.” For the first time, he had the conviction that he understood Barney from Barney’s perspective. He saw that his father’s gambling was not just a neurotic condition, but also “an expression of his artistry,” not only an aberration but also a source of deep pleasure for Barney, however much it aggrieved the conventional sensibilities of his mother. He repeated that Barney understood him better than his mother, and what appeared to be his father’s pompousness was really a burlesque of Fan’s bourgeois sentiments.

  He overdid it. Unconsciously, he made her sound ridiculous. It was his private way of encouraging me to be a rebel. Her dictums made a certain practical common-sense. To rebel against them would have made me feel too guilty. But there was my father, repeating what she said, exaggerating it, multiplying it, until the sheer human nonsense of bourgeois human values rang in my head. . . . From deep within him, he was warning me, he was saying, “Go out, son, be a rebel, because if you’re not a rebel you’ll end up a pompous fool, ignored, and the subject of people’s contempt.” So I loved him today.

  He would soon enough overtop his father’s transgressions, although he would never cut himself off from his mother’s family values. If Fan was a bourgeois “saint,” Barney, as Mailer’s sister put it, “was probably a bit psychopathic.”

  On his thirty-second birthday, Mailer wrote over ten thousand words in “Lipton’s Journal,” a record. He was preparing himself, anointing himself. In his thirty-third, Christological year, he would begin his public mission as prophet and culture hero. The journal’s ruminations and meditations, the postscripts to his first three novels, the brutally honest self-analysis, and the candid portraits of family members and friends comprise a web of carefully considered calibrations of his relationships with people, events, and ideas, set down in preparation for this mission. We can in fairness call the journal an examination of conscience and consciousness (reminiscent of that practiced by William James), but perhaps more than anything else it is an urgent summoning of his powers. He called his introspections a “great adventure,” adding “I don’t think I have ever been so frightened in my life.”

  He wrote long passages in the journal exploring the relations between the saint and the psychopath, often sounding like D. H. Lawrence, whose continuing influence on Mailer cannot be gainsaid. Here is Lawrence, commenting on Tolstoy’s espousal of Christianity in his late works, followed by Mailer.

  And this is Tolstoi, the philosopher with a very nauseating Christian-brotherhood idea of himself. Why limit man to a Christian brotherhood? I myself, I could belong to the sweetest Christian-brotherhood one day, and ride after Attila with a raw beefsteak for my saddle-cloth, to see the red cock crow in flame over all Christendom, next day.

  One must love disorder and love order, hate order and hate disorder. Yet, here is where I disagree with the Greeks and all the other Golden Meaners—there is no such thing as a Golden Mean in Life. It is only by welcoming the extremes of one’s personality, tempering those extremes only—assuming of which I’m not certain that life here is better than life-after-death—tempering those extremes only by the knowledge that one must not be destroyed by them, that one goes on, one grows, one finds creative-destroying fulfillment.

  The journal is also a testament of his love for Adele.

  Adele’s qualities. She hated the portrait of Elena [Esposito, in The Deer Park], it hurt her terribly, she felt it was the way I saw her, yet she accepted it, she loves the book. Part of it of course is her despised image of herself, but more important still is the terrific woman in her who accepts my work no matter how painful it is to her, who is even capable of wishing only the best for it.

  Near the end of the journal, he states explicitly what until then he had held back: “Today I can know that I love her because the thought of losing her, through death, through the army [he feared being recalled if war with the Soviet Union broke out], through jail, through whatever, is unbearable to me. A void opens. I know that without her I would be a cripple.” Their relationship was far from settled; there was rough ground ahead. But they had reached a plateau.

  ADELE RECALLED HIS mood swings in early 1955, and the extremes of his personality. At parties, she said, he took pains to include her in conversations, while holding her hand and smiling. “I never felt pushed into the background,” she said, “because I was essentially not competitive with him. If anything, I was proud of my darling when he was at his sober, intelligent, funny, best in public.” But when he was drinking heavily, he flirted with other women, and got into arguments. Adele says she began to find telephone numbers written down on matchbooks, and wondered why he had to prove to himself that women liked him. Once, she wrote, when they had an argument in the presence of Dan Wolf, he slapped her. She often drank heavily at parties, trying to drown the “nagging voice in my head that whispered, ‘You’re an imposter. You’re not this cool, beautiful wife of a famous writer.’ ” The booze freed her, she said, to play opposite Mailer’s repertoire of roles, including “Rocky Marciano, Jesse James, Miles Davis the Cool and Scott Fitzgerald the Drunk.”

  His experimentation with personas in “Lipton’s Journal” contains extended characterological theories and ruminations arising from his new identity as saint-psychopath. He planned to deploy his ideas in at least three novels: the recently aborted concentration camp novel, “The City of God”; “Antacid-Analgesic,” a mammoth novel about sex; a third is a continuation of the stories of Marion Faye and Sergius O’Shaugnessy. None of these came to pass, but their themes would be examined in the essay that established Mailer’s reputation as a philosopher of hip, “The White Negro.” The first idea is recorded in his entry for December 31, 1954: “Wild thought. The atom bomb may naturally have kicked off hipsterism.” The link persisted in memory, and in the early spring of 1957 he wrote the first sentence of the essay: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years.” The hipster, the American existentialist, he wrote, appeared on “this bleak scene,” determined to live in the “enormous present” under the overhang of past totalitarian liquidation and potential nuclear destruction. The prime model for the hipster, Mailer avers, is the urban Negro (“Black” was not an accepted term until the mid-1960s and “African American” until even later). He may have been the first writer to link the restless energies and suffering of American
blacks, the atom bomb, and the German crematoria.

  On January 27, 1955, he introduced a new topic in the journal: the sexual potency of blacks. He says that “Southern rage” at Negro progress is due to the “unconscious belief in the myth—which may well be right—that the nigger has a happy sex life, happier than the white, and the Negro is recompensed for his low state in society by his high state in the fuck. The scales are balanced.” Two years later, he told his idea to a journalist, Lyle Stuart, and Stuart sent it to William Faulkner, Eleanor Roosevelt, and several others for comment. The mainly negative responses that came back, and Faulkner’s curt dismissal, prompted Mailer to begin “The White Negro.” “Lipton’s Journal” would be his source book for the essay, and many passages have their origin there. The idea of the existential “enormous present,” for example, is found in the journal, and the following passage, written on February 1, undergirds the entire essay.

  Generally speaking we have come to the point in history—in this country anyway—where the middle class and upper middle class is composed primarily of the neurotic-conformists, and the saint-psychos are found in some of the activities of the workingclass (as opposed to the workingclass itself), in the Negro people, in Bohemians, in the illiterates, among the reactionaries, a few of the radicals, some of the prison population, and of course in the mass communication media.

  When he realized that he would have to immerse himself in the Putnam’s galleys of The Deer Park, he knew that he would have to end the journal, and this led to several final recognitions. The regular use of marijuana, followed by sleeping pills and/or Scotch and then a lot of coffee would have to stop. If he wanted to write another long work—the journal being “quite unpublishable in its present form”—he would have to plod along without drugs. “Now,” he wrote, “I have to take an enormous step, and my capacities may not be equal to it. Still, I don’t regret the too-quick opening, the great take of these past few months. I had to, for my health, and besides one should also try for more, not for less. That’s the only real health.”

  Although he was still focused on the novel, for the first time he began to see that he wanted to try other genres and forms. “I must desert my old obsession” about only writing one thing at a time and take on a variety of projects, “and whenever I feel bored or worn out with one, I must leave it for the next.” For the remainder of his career, he would move with little strain from the novel to the essay, newspaper and magazine columns to poetry, plays to biographies, and also glide effortlessly from private labor to public activity—rotating his crops, as he once put it.

  Toward the end of the journal, Mailer reflects on several of his salient mental faculties, which, as they developed, resembled Emerson’s.

  My capacity to do something exceptional comes from the peculiar combination of powerful instincts face to face with my exceptional detachment. I am one of the few people I know who can feel a genuinely powerful emotion, and yet be able to observe it. That is what I must depend on, instead of violating my capacities by trying to make the rational scholarly effort to illumine my understanding of other men’s jargons. Instead of poring (pouring) over all the relevant books, and there are five hundred I “ought” to start studying tomorrow, I do better to “waste” time and discover things for myself. The only things I’ve ever learned have been the things I’ve discovered for myself.

  An exception to his rule of self-discovery happened one night in June 1953 when he was at the Handy Colony in Illinois. Jones had just given him a brief tutorial in Eastern religions, karma, and reincarnation. Mailer, then a hard-shell atheist, was somewhat incredulous. “You believe in that?” Mailer asked. Jones answered, “Oh, sure. That’s the only thing that makes sense.” Jones’s answer, he said, “rang in my head for years.” It opened a shaft to deep waters, and may have been the foundation for what happened on February 25, 1955. In a long entry at the very end of “Lipton’s Journal,” he describes how on that night he smoked marijuana when he was “already in a state of super-excitation,”

  I had nothing less than a vision of the universe which it would take me forever to explain. I also knew I was smack on the edge of insanity, that I was wandering through all the mountain craters of schizophrenia. I knew I could come back, I was like an explorer who still had a life-line out of the caverns, but I understood also that it would not be all that difficult to cut the life line. Insanity comes from obeying a hunch—it is a premature freezing of perceptions—one takes off into cloud seven before one has properly prepared the ground, and one gives all to an “unrealistic” appreciation of one’s genius.

  This was Mailer’s road to Damascus experience. His atheism withered and belief took hold, belief in a God who was not all-powerful, an existential God. Writing in 1970, he remembered being “terrified” in that hour when he “first encountered the thought around one of the bends of marijuana fifteen years ago.” All of his later ideas had their roots in that moment, he said, although it would be three years before he was able to fully articulate his beliefs.

  THE PUTNAM’S GALLEYS arrived in early February, but the novel had a June publication date and Mailer doesn’t seem to have looked at them except in a cursory way. Accompanying the galleys was Ted Purdy’s letter with some suggestions for improving the novel, but ruling out a major rewrite. The new deadline for turning in the corrected galleys was April 15, but Mailer had given one of his sets with marginal notes to Charles Laughton with the hope of interesting him in a film version of The Deer Park. Laughton had been in New York in connection with his film The Night of the Hunter, and from February 23 to March 2, they met daily at the St. Moritz Hotel to discuss Naked, which Laughton was still interested in producing. He remembered the experience fondly in a 1968 letter to Laughton’s widow, Elsa Lanchester. He told her that he had never met a more intelligent or learned actor. “He gave me a marvelous brief education in the problems of a movie director,” he said, “as he would explain to me, sometimes patiently, sometimes at the edge of his monumental impatience, how certain scenes which worked in the book just weren’t feasible for the movie.” When Laughton was having trouble visualizing the characters, he asked Mailer to draw pictures of them. Mailer protested that he lacked the skill, whereupon Laughton said, “Nonsense, Mailer, anybody can draw. You go ahead and do it and that will give me some idea of what you have in your mind that you can’t express.” Laughton was correct, and Mailer got many new insights about his characters. After a week of work, Laughton said, “ ‘Mailer, let’s get the hell out of here, I feel like seeing some art.’ And we went over to the Oriental Room of the Metropolitan where he was, of course, well known, and I was introduced that day to [the Japanese artists] Hiroshige and Hokusai, a pleasure for which I’m still in debt.”

  Mailer wrote to Laughton at the end of March asking for the return of the galleys. Laughton replied by telephone and promised that they would be sent shortly. When the galleys arrived nearly three weeks later, Mailer went to work, assuming he would have them done in a few weeks. He dearly wanted to put The Deer Park behind him. But what he discovered as he began was that the voice of his narrator, Sergius O’Shaugnessy, did not match his experience. He sounded more like Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, a Princeton graduate, than a young man who had been brought up in an orphan asylum, scuffled through adolescence and early manhood, and earned his first lieutenant’s silver bars flying a score of combat missions over Korea. The only course was to begin “ripping up the silk of the original syntax” and give O’Shaugnessy a more aggressive tone, a more colloquial voice, one that matched his hardscrabble background.

  When planning The Deer Park four years earlier, Mailer had been a different person. At that time, before suffering through the reviews of Barbary Shore and the ensuing doubts about his vocation; before meeting Adele and Lindner; before beginning to seriously smoke marijuana while conducting a self-analysis in “Lipton’s Journal”; before jettisoning lingering pieties about the literary establishment and catching a glimpse of a verti
ginous universe; before identifying more closely with his father’s rebellious ways; prior, in short, to his rebirth as a psychic outlaw, Mailer resembled in more ways than one a sensitive young man. Now he was stronger, more cynical and belligerent, and his new narrator, as he came into focus, was not only a shrewder, more credible observer of Elena’s love affair with Eitel and his slow, tragic corruption by Hollywood, he was, Mailer recognized, “an implicit portrait of myself as well.” He didn’t like the notion of using his own divided psyche as the armature for O’Shaugnessy’s. Doing so, he wrote, “was a psychological violation.” But there was no alternative. His editors were getting anxious. They were not happy when he asked that his delivery date for the galley proofs be pushed back to June 1.

  Without drugs, he couldn’t write; he needed more than in the past. Along with marijuana, Seconal, booze, coffee, and two packs of cigarettes a day, he began taking a tranquilizer, Miltown, and a type of amphetamine with the trade name of Benzedrine. Bennies, long used by long-haul truckers and pilots, were a favorite of various Beat Generation figures, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg most notably. The trick was to find the point at which the drugs balanced out and he could write for an hour or two. “Bombed and sapped and charged and stoned,” he lurched forward through May, feeling as tired as he had when on patrols in Luzon. He missed the June submission date and negotiated a final, drop-dead date of August 1, which pushed publication to mid-October. He knew that further delay would destroy any chance of good fall sales.