In 1957, linking timidity with the female gender was a commonplace and didn’t elicit the opprobrium it would a dozen years later, as he would learn. The immediate fallout came several weeks later when he learned that Eisenhower’s press secretary, James Haggerty, called Wallace’s office to request a transcript of the program. For the first but not the last time, Mailer had gained the attention of a sitting president.
The baby was born in New York on the evening of March 16. Attesting to their continued friendship, the Mailers asked Jean and Galy to be the godparents. Mailer was certain it would be a boy, but was wrong. Susan suggested the name, Danielle. The middle name, Leslie, according to Danielle, came from the French actress and dancer Leslie Caron. Mailer made a fuss in the delivery room when the nurse began shaving Adele’s pubic hair, saying it was unnatural to do so, but relented when her contractions got strong. He also tried, and succeeded, in convincing the obstetrician to allow him to stay in the delivery room, something that was considered bizarre in that era. He wrote to Knox to say that he had remained until fifteen minutes before the end, and had “a fantastic experience.” The baby had a full head of black hair, he said, and resembled him a bit.
After the birth, around midnight, he showed up at the apartment of his former sister-in-law, Phyllis Silverman-Ott, who had remained in contact with him after he and Bea had divorced. In her 2006 memoir, she says that “Norman always loomed like the North Star over me.” He was off-center when he arrived, she recalled, because of his “awe at the power of a woman to endure and create, a glorious humiliation that left him feeling unloved.” She had told him earlier that she loved him, and he spent the night in her bed. Being Mailer’s lover, she said, made her feel “like I was walking on stilts.” A few days later, the Mailers drove back to Connecticut “to begin” as Adele put it, “what I thought would be a new life.”
In his letter to Knox about Danielle’s birth, Mailer gives a clear sense of his now heightened feelings about personal violence in the wake of the eye-gouging incident. Knox had been threatened by a man in Rome, a rival for a woman’s affection, and asked for advice. Mailer told him he had to make a stand, even if “he smashes the living shit out of you”:
Hit him where the hair meets the neck, kick him in the balls, kick his shins, stick your fingers in his eyes, jab your fingertips against the base of his nose, but don’t run, and don’t just take it. Now I know this sounds easy to say, but I’m talking from experience because I’ve had a couple of ugly fights as you know in the last year and I know the difference it makes between fighting and quitting. If you fight, even if you take a bad beating it 1) does not hurt that fucking much while it’s going on, and 2) you’re left with some fucking dignity—you can actually feel good after a bad losing fight.
VIOLENCE WAS MUCH on his mind when he sat down at the beginning of April to write “The White Negro.” What is sometimes overlooked is the distinction Mailer makes in the essay between the kind of personal violence he describes in his letter to Knox, and collective violence, the violence of the state, which at its most malign leads to concentration camps and the elimination by hideous means of millions of human beings. In Mailer’s mind—Reich’s influence is apparent—the hipster stood opposed to the repression of instinctual urges that are noble and natural, a suppression that seemed likely to lead, under the threat of nuclear warfare, to a new epoch of Faustian regimes that would wield technology to eliminate opponents, regimes so efficient that Hitler and Stalin would resemble crude bully boys in comparison. Against the emergence of such regimes stands the hipster. This Adamic figure is patterned, in part, after the Negro, who must often choose between subservience and rebellion; the psychopath, who is in more direct contact with his unconscious than ordinary neurotics; the drug addict, who seeks ecstasy in the absence of community; the jazz musician, whose riffs and glides mimic the rhythms of sex; and the mystic, who lives in “the enormous present.” Transcendental spontaneity is the quality they all share. One commentator on Mailer’s writing, Joseph Wenke, describes how the hipster’s sense of time differs from ordinary clock time.
Each moment fills, becomes more resonant and complex. Correspondingly, one’s experience of time slows down. Such an alteration in one’s sense of time is a key element of the Hip quest for freedom. It means that one is now able to control the rhythms of one’s own experience and live out of what is really a transcendentalist sense that one can recreate one’s own identity out of the eternity of the present moment and so escape temporarily from the limits of history. From this subjective standpoint, the future exists only as vision, a romantic vision of ever-expanding possibilities merging with one’s experience of freedom in the present.
Because the essay soars and swoops through such imponderables as time, sex, love, God, courage, extermination, and revolution, and is rife with qualifications, extended appositions, and restrictive clauses, it is not an easy read. Mailer later admitted that it was “too elliptic.” As literary critic Morris Dickstein has commented, Mailer “rarely bothers to distinguish lurid metaphor from literal prescription,” and writes a prose that “mingles fact and fiction, social criticism and confession, cultural prophecy and personal therapy.” Nevertheless, one cannot help but feel the seductive energy of the essay—energy, in fact, is its pith and marrow. “The White Negro” is a dithyrambic hymn to energy which pulses in a universe that is not a fact, but “a changing reality whose laws are remade each instant by everything living, but most particularly man.” “God,” he says, is “energy, life, sex, force, the Yoga’s prana, the Reichian’s orgone, Lawrence’s ‘blood,’ Hemingway’s ‘good,’ the Shavian life-force.” This is not the God of organized religion, but the God within “the paradise of limitless energy and perception just beyond the next wave of the next orgasm.” How to achieve it? First, one has to be “ready to go, ready to gamble.” “Movement is always to be preferred to inaction. In motion a man has a chance, his body is warm, his instincts are quick, and when the crisis comes, whether of love or violence, he can make it, he can win, he can release a little more energy for himself since he hates himself a little less, he can make a little better nervous system, make it a little more possible to go again, to go faster next time.”
The essay’s promise of escape from Eisenhower’s wet blanket helped make it the most discussed American essay in the quarter century after World War II. Maligned as much for its obscurity—Baldwin said it was “downright impenetrable”—as it was celebrated for its orphic verve, it is also the most reprinted essay of the era. A generation of young people proudly carried their copies of the City Lights edition of the essay, a pamphlet whose cover depicts a reverse negative head shot of an archetypal hipster (rumored at the time to be Paul Newman) with them when they migrated to the awakening cities of the nation. Bored with the timidities of the middle class, the new generation saw the essay as a blast on the trumpet of defiance, a call to radical self-assertion and the fullest sexual experience, even though the hipster milieu that it celebrated was not yet real. As Alfred Kazin astutely pointed out, “The White Negro” “is an attempt to impose a dramatic and even noble significance on events that have not genuinely brought it forth.” Mailer was trying to imaginatively will into being an army of hipster revolutionaries who could bring about an urban utopia.
From its initial publication in Dissent in the summer of 1957, through its reprinting in 1959 by City Lights and the same year in Advertisements for Myself, the essay’s most controversial passage drew vigorous rejoinders. It comes after a long peroration on the therapeutic benefits of expressing forbidden impulses, even violent ones, a necessary prelude to self-discipline, community, and love. He gives the example of “two strong eighteen-year-old hoodlums” who assault and kill a candy store keeper. Not much gain here, he says, because the victim is not a physical equal. But, he counterargues, “courage of a sort is necessary” because the hoodlums are “daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly.” Numerous com
mentators on the passage have expressed revulsion for the notion that even a smidgen of approval is given for such a vicious act, even though it was hypothetical. Mailer was never able to satisfactorily answer such objections, yet he never relinquished his belief that there were morsels of redemptive gain in all risk-taking acts, even when they were criminal. “If one wants a better world,” the essay warns, “one does well to hold one’s breath, for a worse world is bound to come first.” Barbarism, he argued, was preferable to “the cold murderous liquidations of the totalitarian state.” He would continue to find things to admire in unsavory individuals, even one who assassinated a president. The essay was a turning point for Mailer, and also, as Dickstein says, “a momentous shift in American literary culture, a turn toward the dark side, the rebellious and the demonic.” The 1960s were coming.
MAILER DISCUSSED THE essay with several friends in Connecticut in early 1957. These included Lew and Jay Allen and John Aldridge, who had rented the nearby home of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, who were in England making a film. Aldridge’s wife, Leslie, recently divorced from a young Esquire editor, Clay Felker, had known Styron at Duke. That set up what Mailer called “an odd three-way community.” Aldridge lived halfway between the two writers and, initially, got along well with both. Aldridge, Mailer recalled, wanted to start “a new Athens in America. It was his idea to get a bunch of intellectuals living out there about 70 miles from New York.” Adele remembers thinking that New York was a hard-drinking town, but it was “a kindergarten,” she said, compared to the Connecticut scene.
Mailer later recalled the social situation. Styron, he said, was considered by some to be the most talented writer in America. “You can imagine how that hit me.” Aldridge was close to Styron, but wanted to get even closer. But Styron “was sort of unhappy about sharing. You know, he was a true southerner—‘What I’ve earned, I’ve earned, and I’m not eager to deal it out to other people.’ ” Styron commanded the social scene, Mailer said, “and I began to realize what it is to be a social inferior.” Leslie Aldridge “was not a social gift altogether, certainly not in the eyes of Styron.” “She was on the make, and obvious. She was never a lady the way Rose [Styron] was, naturally. But compared to Adele, she was pretty slick.” Rose, on the other hand,
had great social gifts. She could make anyone feel good in a hurry who came to her house, that kind of thing. Adele was still awkward, doing her best, but rough at the edges whereas Rose just could move and negotiate. All girl, pick up things, pick up the mood here, quiet the mood there. They had a very good social life, a lot of big literary parties. Well scripted. So there was Styron and I, very competitive as literary men, but he was having a big social life and I was having a small one.
Adele said that for the first year, her husband and Styron got on well, “swapping stories, talking about writing, each being as charming as the other and as drunk as the other. I never saw Bill without a drink in his hand.” Adele thought he projected “an air of smug superiority,” and that Rose’s manner “had a hint of condescension—that is, when she could tear her attention away from my husband.” Styron’s biographer, James L. W. West III, writes that the evenings the three couples got together “were intense and stimulating, but not especially pleasant.” Aldridge spoke with “a ponderous authority” that irritated the others; Styron had “a tendency to stick to superficialities in conversation”; Mailer “was raffish, funny and charming, but he could also be belligerent and confrontational.” The men were “ambitious and competitive, all three women were good-looking and sexy.” Aldridge’s memory is that while Styron “was originally king of the roost,” Mailer “quite quickly became the center of energy.”
One evening, Adele recalled, “Styron was going on and on about the colored people this and the colored people that” in a smug manner. She called out to him, banged her fist on the table and said, “I happen to be passing for white, so keep your fucking comments to yourself.” After a pause, “someone snickered, and my remark was ignored as the conversation resumed. My husband just grinned at me, raising his glass in a half toast.” Mailer said this about his relationship with Adele: “I had a situation where I was Pygmalion; I was someone who could develop someone, and I certainly could develop her, develop her into someone quite special. I had a romance with the idea that she was a member, finally, of the working class and here was I, this leftist intellectual (via Jean Malaquais), and now finally I had someone from the working class that I, as a middle-class, guarded, sheltered, spoiled individual, could work for and develop.” It was a complex marriage: they drank, they experimented sexually, they became parents, they struggled with their art, they had fierce battles, and maintained a tenuous solidarity through all the difficulties of the next year.
“The White Negro” was by far the most extraordinary piece that had appeared in Dissent, and brought the journal needed attention, although the editors had problems with parts of it. Howe was excited to have the piece, but regretted not asking Mailer to cut out the hoodlum-storekeeper passage. Mailer said years later that the essay “made me one of the spokesmen for the Beat Generation,” even if the more pacific Beats had their reservations. The Partisan Review crowd—William Phillips, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel and Diana Trilling—especially Macdonald—didn’t like the antinomian emphasis of the essay, but as Phillips explained, it was still “acceptable,” just “as with Lawrence,” because “the thinking of a man who’s wild was interesting.” James Jones had no use for the essay, telling Mailer it was “a good illustration of a swiftly accelerating decadence.” Mailer read the essay aloud to Styron, and told him writing it was “like coughing up blood.” Styron, always the formalist, didn’t admire its rhetoric or agree with its conclusions, yet was “fascinated by it nonetheless.” The division of opinion on the essay continues; it is regularly used as a club in the continuing race-gender-power debates of academics. It rasps, it elates, it confuses, but it is unforgettable.
Mailer told Knox the nine-thousand-word essay was the best thing he had ever written. It will be important over the years, he said, because it points to “a new way to think.” In addition to the essay’s long-term influence, he saw two immediate results: “I was now the intermediary,” he said, between the Beats and the intellectuals, between, say, William Burroughs and Dwight Macdonald, and this satisfied his two psyches. It also “emboldened” him later, he said, to write Advertisements for Myself, where he planned to take on issues that no one else would. The first new piece he wrote for inclusion in this planned collection for Putnam’s was a fragment from the dramatic version of The Deer Park. He expected to have a first draft completed soon, as he said in a letter to Chandler Brossard in which he also turned down his request for an interview in a girlie magazine, Nugget. He liked the magazine, he said, but felt that appearing in it would show his literary enemies that “my writing about sex is not the act of a serious writer but one who is looking for notoriety.”
MAILER FINISHED A draft of the four-act play in early August. It was over three hours long. He wrote to Bea, Knox, and Malaquais on the same day to announce its completion. He told Knox that it was “one of the four or five best plays that have been written since the war,” and said to Bea that “it’s better than Death of a Salesman and Streetcar Named Desire put together.” Mailer had seen both plays on Broadway and admired them extravagantly, so he may have swallowed hard when making this claim. Getting it produced, he told Malaquais, would be difficult because it was “so bold that it could really cause an explosion.” Knox wanted to direct it, and Mailer told him choosing a director was the prerogative of the producer. If he ever produced it off-Broadway with his own money, however, Knox would certainly get a role. Ten years later, this is exactly what happened. Knox was the star of the production, playing the comic role of Collie Munshin, Herman Teppis’s opportunistic son-in-law, who introduces Eitel and Elena.
Mailer had lunch in New York with a well-known literary agent, Monica McCall, and got her interested in the play,
sight unseen. He mailed her a copy with a cover note saying the play was a bit shorter than Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, which he had also seen. He appended a note with his “dream cast”:
Eitel
Charles Boyer or Laurence Olivier
Elena
Marilyn Monroe (if her voice is loud enough)
Marion Faye
Marlon Brando or Ben Gazzara or Monty Clift
Collie Munshin
Jackie Gleason or Jules Munshin
Lulu Meyers
Elizabeth Taylor
It is notable that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is not mentioned. In the dramatic version, his presence is diminished (which suggests his marginality in the novel); he is a sort of impresario, a hip version of the stage manager in Our Town. The play, Mailer suggests, is a product of O’Shaugnessy’s memory; one that takes place in “a rather incredible hell,” a metaphysical perdition. Marion Faye becomes a more important figure, and some of the action occurs after he and Eitel have both served time in prison. The Elena-Eitel affair and Eitel’s subtle corruption remain the central actions. McCall began showing the play to producers.
Almost three years had passed since the completion of the novel version of The Deer Park, and he wanted to begin the leviathan novel about “the mysteries of murder, suicide, incest, orgy, orgasm, and Time,” as he later described it. He had no real excuse not to begin. His play was being considered, but he conceded to Malaquais that it might be “a bad play—enough people are turning it down.” A retrospective collection of his work was still on his mind, but he wasn’t sure how to proceed with it, especially since Walter Minton was eager to have another novel from him. He wrote to Knox that he was going to put off “side work” and finally, after Thanksgiving 1957, he started on the novel. Over the next month “with a medium gruesome effort,” he wrote twenty-seven pages. Then he stalled again. He told Malaquais that with the exception of “The White Negro” and his Voice columns, nothing he had done for years had been successful and the thought of “this enormous novel I’m now starting which could well take ten years” was simply too daunting. He read Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals, an excruciatingly bitter account of his drug- and alcohol-soaked final years, and thought, “Now there’s a man who’s exactly like me.” By the end of the year, he had reached an impasse. He told Malaquais what he needed to write again: “If I had twice the youthful energy which wrote The Naked and the Dead, and had your powers of reasoning, and Meyer Schapiro’s retention and culture, and five good friends who supported me, took care of me, even wiped my ass—why then, by God, I could write the book which would create a new radical movement.” One side of Mailer desired earnestly to get to work on the leviathan; the other subscribed to David Stacton’s aphorism: “An artist exists only in the work he has not yet written, which to others remains unobtainable.”
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