In late February, Robert Lindner died. He was forty-one. Mailer lauded his boldness and intelligence in his March 7 column, and also called him “one of the warmest people I have ever known.” But he said that Lindner would have hated a “facile eulogy,” and so devoted the rest of the column to quotations from his work, including one from Lindner’s final book, Must You Conform?, published a few weeks before his death. Lindner’s study reflects his collaboration with Mailer on “Lipton’s Journal,” as well as his own long-standing belief that current psychology practice falsely held that “human development is linked to human passivity.” He ends the column with his own comment on Lindner’s legacy: “Because of the instinct of rebellion, man has never been content, finally, with the limits of his life: it has caused him to deny death and to war with mortality. Man is a rebel. He is committed by his biology not to conform, and herein lies the paramount reason for the awful tension he experiences today in relation to Society.”
Mailer was obviously saddened by Lindner’s death. But he felt something else, as he explained when he neared his own death.
I talked to him on the phone one day and he said “There’s nothing they can do; I’m going to die.” And he burst into tears. And I was so cold and so full of anger at where we’d gotten, and when I look back, it was one of the most unpleasant moments in my life. I didn’t feel a fucking thing for him. I felt contempt that he was weakened. You see, my feeling was: “We’re soldiers and if we die, we die.” I have that feeling now; it’s a lot easier now, I can assure you. But I remember not being sympathetic. Going through the dull motions of being sympathetic, the way one does when one’s not there with a friend, but not really giving him what he needed. And I didn’t believe he was going to die. And then, some weeks later, he died. And that was one of the great blows of my life because I couldn’t believe it. And then I felt woe, and then I felt contrition. And then I remember at his funeral, his memorial service, I remember speaking and talking about him, and creating a sensation at the memorial service because I was talking about all his many wonderful qualities, and I said, “And on top of all that, he was a rogue.” “Whohooohoo” went through the audience at the memorial service. There’s his wife, his widow and all. But it was true.
A line from “The White Negro” may help us to understand what prompted him to blurt out what he did at the memorial: “The psychopath knows instinctively that to express a hidden impulse actively is far more beneficial to him than to confess the desire in the safety of a doctor’s room.” Truth telling would always be paramount for Mailer, whatever the cost. By his logic, he was honoring Lindner with his candor.
He changed the title of his column to “The Hip and the Square” not long after Lindner’s death. The passing of his friend drove him back to his journal where he found the materials to begin creating a philosophy of Hip. He was also seriously reading Sartre for the first time, and exploring in his column what he felt were the profound differences between European and American existentialism. Both were the products of alienation from the conditions of twentieth-century existence. Both were premised on the inalienable freedom of the self and rejected tradition and authority. Both had leftist inclinations. Both were concerned with decoding the involutions of consciousness—sensory perceptions, intuitions, motives, and frissons. As Mailer put it a few years later, Sartre “had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion.” But Sartre and his followers were “alienated beyond alienation from their unconscious” and “its enormous teleological sense.” Hip, he wrote in his penultimate column, “is based on a mysticism of the flesh.” According to Mailer, Hip had faith in the possibility of personal spiritual transcendence, as yet undefined; most continental existentialists dismissed the idea of an afterlife.
Throughout his tenure as a columnist, Mailer’s relations with the staff were tense at best. He berated them for a lack of boldness and for missing opportunities. For example, he wanted to run interviews with criminals, a murderer, perhaps. He was particularly incensed at proofreading and typesetting errors in his column, and when an editor substituted “nuisance” for “nuance” in a column that he, as usual, had turned in late, Mailer screamed at him over the telephone: “WHY DON’T YOU GET YOUR FINGER OUT OF YOUR ASS?” At one point, Wolf, who was usually quiet and detached, yelled back at him: “For a socialist you’re acting like the worst capitalist in the world.”
The shouting matches intensified and Mailer resigned. The final straw, he said in his farewell, were the typos in all but two of his columns. But the deeper cause, he argued, was that Wolf and Fancher wanted the Voice to be “more conservative, more Square,” and he wanted it to be more hip. Wolf and Fancher were working long days just to get the paper out and had no desire to revamp it. Mailer thought the newspaper “should be very radical, full of sex and drugs,” Wolf recalled. Mailer didn’t think the paper would make it, Wolf said, “so it should go out in a blaze of glory like a big firecracker.” Wolf and Fancher believed that there was room for two community newspapers in the Village, while Mailer scorned the idea. He thought the Voice should distinguish itself from The Villager by publishing sharp critiques of a society that was smothering creativity instead of civilized commentary on New York politics, cheery neighborhood vignettes, and listings of French films. He noted, however, that his column had never been edited or censored. He retained a minority shareholder stake in the Voice for over a decade, and after a three-year hiatus began writing occasional pieces for it.
Letters of regret poured in when Mailer resigned. The Voice printed eight of them. Seven were positive. The negative letter said the Voice was “richer for the loss of the castrated bellow of N. Mailer.” The final letter was from a reader who had changed his mind.
To Mr. Mailer:
Let me say that I am extremely sorry your May 2 column is your final one. In all your columns, while some were damned aggravating (and why shouldn’t they have been), what you did say, in essence, when the decorations were dismissed, and when the chips were down, was true and truly strong and original to read.
Sincerely,
Joe Jensen, Bank Street
A half century later, reflecting on his first stint as a columnist, Mailer said that once Wolf realized that the Village was on the edge of social change,
that it was open and angry and wanted stuff, once he saw that my notion of it had not been incorrect, he went with it, and probably proceeded with vastly more wisdom than I would have. I would have wrecked it all over again in a few months because I was a wild man. I wanted the revolution to come; I wanted blood in the streets; I wanted the whole thing to start, and of course Dan would have been opposed and we would have been fighting all over again.
AS HIS ACTIVE involvement with the Voice began to wind down, Mailer took the advice he had given himself in his journal, and cast about for new projects. “I had mad ideas,” he said later, and became “very curious” about the next stage of his own development. “You start making all sorts of experiments. I put myself in a laboratory.” There were times, he wrote to Mickey Knox, “when I have to crack up a little or else I’ll crack up big.” He and Adele had discussed a trip to Europe for some time, and he wrote to Malaquais to make arrangements for what would be a ten-week trip that summer.
Although he was dismayed by the idea of starting a novel before he had recovered from the strains of The Deer Park, he began thinking about a short story that would eventually become part of “the big novel,” as he would soon refer to it. Sergius O’Shaugnessy was by now a comfortable avatar, and “The Time of Her Time” is an account of his orgasmic struggles with a young woman, Denise Gondelman, set in the Village loft where he runs a bullfighting school by day and offers sexual therapy by night. He planned to include the story in a paperback collection consisting of his Dissent essays, Voice columns, plus some new material. His most momentous idea is first noted in a letter to Irving Howe. He asked if Dissent might be interested in an ess
ay “on the philosophy of the hipster, because I think there are certain things in the ambiance of hipsters which should be interesting to radicals since the hipster, after all, is a new kind of underground proletariat and one which does cut across classes.” He said that the idea was “most provisional,” but given the conscientious probing of his psyche over the previous eighteen months, his heroic aspirations, and the coalescing of his new theology, writing “The White Negro” in this season of his life now seems to have been inevitable.
Just before they left for Paris on May 15, he and Adele went to see the acclaimed Broadway production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In his May 2 column where he announced he was leaving the paper, he had dismissed the play, while admitting that he had neither read nor seen it. The reviews of Godot had led him to conclude that Beckett, unlike his friend and countryman James Joyce, saw humanity as hapless, powerless. “So I doubt if I will like it,” Mailer had written, “because finally not everyone is impotent, nor is our final fate, our human condition, necessarily doomed to impotence, as old Joyce knew, and Beckett I suspect does not.” Then he read the play, and he and Adele went to see it. The power of Beckett’s vision was clear. On the ride home from the theater, he was depressed and made more so when Adele said, “Baby, you fucked up.” He got up the next morning, and “finally putting together what he had learned in seventeen weeks,” wrote a three-thousand-word mea culpa, and paid the Voice to publish it.
His essay, “A Public Notice on Waiting for Godot,” printed partially in tiny agate font, and taking up one full page of the Voice’s May 9 issue, is more than just an apology, however. He gives a very competent summary and analysis of the play, and then, toward the end, amplifies the theological ideas he had been mulling since encountering them “in the bends of marijuana” a year earlier. Either “consciously or unconsciously,” Mailer says, Beckett is saying that “God’s destiny is flesh and blood with ours,” that the deity is not a distant, all-powerful Jehovah, but a God who is “determined by man’s efforts, man who has free will and can no longer exercise it and God therefore in bondage to the result of man’s efforts.” Mailer wished to recruit and lead an army that would storm the redoubts of liberal caution and bourgeois prudishness to free God.
From the time Mailer began “Lipton’s Journal,” he had been dipping into Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, reading snippets as he was “riding the electric rail of long nights on marijuana.” In the two-volume collection, Buber, an internationally known philosopher, scholar, and religious existentialist, clarified and organized the oral teachings of the Hasidic movement, beginning with the founder Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (1700–60). The Hasidim, it will be remembered, were opposed by a more scholarly sect, the Misgnagdim, children of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, favored by Mailer’s grandfather. Buber “hulled” the most telling anecdotes of the Hasidic masters “from the mass of the irrelevant” for his collection. The Rabbi ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov, or Master of the Good Name (for his knowledge of how to employ the secret names of God), and his followers over several generations were revered as charismatic teachers, or zaddikim. These spiritual masters claimed to the power to discern, intermittently, the divine emanations surrounding humanity and, in indirect ways, to communicate with God. The zaddikim taught with parables and metaphors of the homeliest sort, but leavened with humor, as in the following, which Mailer quoted.
The Fear of God: Once Zusya prayed to God: “Lord, I love you so much, but I do not fear you enough! Lord, I love you so much, but I do not fear you enough! Let me stand in awe of you like your angels, who are penetrated by your awe-inspiring name.” And God heard his prayer, and his name penetrated the hidden heart of Zusya as it does those of the angels. But Zusya crawled under the bed like a little dog, and animal fear shook him until he howled: “Lord, let me love you like Zusya again!” and God heard him this time also.
He did not write about Buber’s collection until 1962, but its influence is apparent in the Beckett essay. The Tales, he said, became his vehicle in the mid-1950s “for a small intellectual raid into the corporate aisles of modern theology,” and a point of departure for his opposition to Sartrean existentialism. Henceforth, Mailer’s apprehension of the invisible universe would be a subtle but steady presence in his thinking and writing, although it was rarely taken seriously by his readers, or barely noticed, for several years.
He ended his essay on Godot by arguing that Beckett’s work could mark the end of ten years of “angry impotence,” referring to the anxieties of the postwar period. While he was not a great admirer of the likely Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, he had significantly less regard for President Eisenhower, who he thought might not be reelected. His guarded optimism in the summer of 1956 led him to hear “the whispers of a new time coming. There is a universal rebellion in the air, and the power of the two colossal super-states may be, yes, may be ebbing.” If that proved true, then “the creative nihilism of the Hip” might usher in a revolution, “the sexual revolution one senses everywhere”—from the suggestive jokes of TV comedians to the “growing power of the Negro.” Thus, in his final piece in the Voice, he links black power with sexual emancipation at a time when both were only dimly perceived—and not in tandem—on the cultural horizon. Mailer’s essay on Waiting for Godot is the prologue to “The White Negro,” and his advertisement for himself as the philosopher-general of Hipsterism.
ACCORDING TO ADELE, Mailer was somewhat relaxed on the crossing on the SS United States of America. They drank and fought less than they had during the previous few months. Once in Paris, they regularly visited the Montparnasse apartment of Jean Malaquais. It was there that Mailer met James Baldwin, a writer who would influence and later challenge his ideas about black sexuality. The Harlem native was already acclaimed and, with Ralph Ellison, considered to be one of the most talented and promising postwar African American writers. In 1953, he published a novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, about the role of religion in black America, based on his own experience as a teenage preacher in a revivalist church in Harlem. He followed this with a collection of autobiographical essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955), that solidified his reputation as a leading commentator on racial issues. One of the essays sharply criticizes Native Son, the masterwork of another African American Paris expatriate, Richard Wright. Baldwin was seen to be clearing a place for himself.
Meeting Mailer gave Baldwin the opportunity to measure himself against a writer whose ambition matched his own. “Jimmy had an absolutely wonderful personality in those years,” Mailer told James Campbell, Baldwin’s biographer. “I don’t think there was anyone in the literary world who was more beloved than Jimmy. He had the loveliest manners.” Baldwin remembered it this way: “Two lean cats, one white and one black, met in a French living room. I had heard of him, he had heard of me. And here we were, suddenly, circling around each other. We liked each other at once, but each was frightened that the other would pull rank.” They were about the same age, both were New Yorkers, both had published three books. Mailer was more famous and considerably wealthier. Baldwin said his chief credentials were being black and knowing more about the “periphery,” the mean streets of Harlem. He didn’t know that Mailer was already thinking about an essay premised, in part, on the superior sexual prowess of blacks, but Baldwin did know that “to be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol.”
Baldwin, who was gay, had come to Paris to escape prejudice against blacks and homosexuality. Mailer, deeply curious as usual, wanted to discuss both, as well as jazz, Harlem, criminals, books, everything. When they met, Baldwin had just concluded an unhappy affair with a Swiss man, and was in no mood to discuss intimate matters. He also saw that Mailer accepted the “myth of the sexuality of Negroes,” and so he “chickened out” of what he thought would be an excruciating attempt to challenge Mailer’s ideas. Instead, he socialized with the Mailers—he could drink as much as Mailer—and after a few w
eeks left for Corsica. He had no inkling of his new friend’s roiled state, his addictions, and career anxieties. Mailer’s public visage prevailed, and Baldwin’s chief memory of that time in Paris was of “Norman—confident, boastful, exuberant, and loving, striding through the soft Paris nights like a gladiator.”
Baldwin hid his despair over his failed affair from the Mailers. He was working on a novel, Giovanni’s Room, a bold study of violence and homosexuality set in Paris, but was having difficulty finishing it. Nights after leaving the Mailers at the Hôtel Palais Royal, he “wandered through Paris, the underside of Paris, drinking, screwing, fighting—it’s a wonder I wasn’t killed,” he said. Mailer had insomnia and left the hotel in the early morning hours. It would not have been surprising if they had bumped into each other. In a poem about that summer, “A Wandering in Prose: For Hemingway,” Mailer begins with the memory of Adele’s face “powder which smells like Paris when / I was kicking seconal and used to / get up at four in the morning and / walk the streets into the long wait / for dawn.” He would find himself “at five in an Algerian / bar watching the workers take a / swallow of wine for breakfast, the / city tender in its light even to me / and I sicker than I’d ever been, / weak with loathing at all I had not done.” He then recalls Adele’s “detestation” of him for not being “nearly brave enough for you.” Adele’s memory is that Mailer, in withdrawal and “still reeling from The Deer Park disaster,” was both angry and scared and often took it out on her. “In my own way,” she said, “I could fling a lot of shit right back at his face.” Mailer, however, put on a good face for Baldwin, Jean and Galy Malaquais, and they didn’t grasp the tense state of the Mailers’ marriage.
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