Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  In early 1958, Knox suggested that Mailer bring the play to Actors Studio, a New York City theatrical organization founded by Elia Kazan and a few others in 1947, and subsequently run for over thirty years by Lee Strasberg, the guru of Method acting. The organization’s guiding principle is that actors, playwrights, and directors be allowed to develop their skills without commercial pressure; the productions are read or staged on simple sets. Many talented actors have been affiliated over the years, and it was there that Mailer met Rip Torn, Anne Bancroft, Kevin McCarthy, and several others. The camaraderie revived him somewhat. He maintained a membership in the organization for the rest of his life. A friend of Knox’s, the director Frank Corsaro, staged some readings of Mailer’s script, with Mailer kibitzing. Knox played Munshin, Torn was Faye, McCarthy was Eitel, and Elena was played by Bancroft. But she and Mailer had disagreements and, art following life, Adele took over the role, performing well after some instruction from Corsaro. Mailer had gifts for characterization, but the play in its initial version lacked a dramatic arc, and he withdrew it after several months. He would return with a new version in the fall of 1960, and then tinker with it for several years before its off-Broadway run in 1967. At the time of his death, he was working on still another revision. The Actors Studio involvement heightened his interest in theater, and he later attempted to recast several of his novels into plays or films.

  WHILE IN CONNECTICUT, he spent a lot of time in his carpentry shop. Adele remembers hearing “Norman’s anger in the piercing whine of the buzz saw.” He was “becoming more detached and more depressed,” she said. But he spent a lot of time with Danielle, whom they called Dandy. Every few weeks they would drive to a party in New York, returning drunk after harrowing drives in winter weather. One night on the way home they got into a mean fight about flirtations at the party. “I handled it in my predictably alcoholic, out-of-control way, hating him, wanting to pull his curly hair out by the roots,” Adele recalled. Her mother was visiting them, but they continued to scream at each other and then, in the early hours, took swipes at each other. In the morning, her mother asked her what happened and Adele mentioned divorce. But later they talked it out. “Believe it or not,” she told her mother, “we love each other, and he loves the baby. Don’t worry, we’ll work it out.”

  On one of their trips to New York in early 1958, at a dinner party at Lillian Hellman’s apartment, the Mailers met Norman Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter. Just before they met, Podhoretz had published an essay, “The Know-Nothing Barbarians,” attacking the Beats, especially Ginsberg and Kerouac, in Partisan Review. A Columbia protégé of Lionel Trilling’s who had also studied under F. R. Leavis at Cambridge, Podhoretz made some sharp remarks in the piece about Mailer’s views on violence in “The White Negro.” Like many others, Podhoretz was appalled by what he saw as the hipster’s psychopathy. Nevertheless, he was taken with the essay’s “sheer intellectual and moral brazenness.” Mailer, down in the boxer’s crouch he adopted for such occasions, confronted Podhoretz, telling him he had misunderstood “The White Negro.” “Like me,” Podhoretz said, and “practically every Brooklyn boy I had ever known, he was direct and pugnacious and immensely preoccupied with the issue of manly courage.” He parried Mailer’s attack by telling him that he should withhold criticism until he had seen a long essay he was writing about him for Partisan Review. Within a short time, Podhoretz showed him the galleys of the essay, titled “Norman Mailer: The Embattled Vision.” It is the first major examination of Mailer’s work, and contains a cogent summary of his strengths and aspirations. Podhoretz doesn’t say whether their conversations are reflected in the twenty-five-page essay, but it is a warm, generous appraisal, and the opening accurately captures Mailer’s self-estimate. Mailer, he says, is one of the few postwar writers whose qualities “suggest a major novelist in the making.” What is most remarkable, he continues, is that

  his work has responded to the largest problems of this period with a directness and an assurance that we rarely find in the novels of his contemporaries. Mailer is very much an American, but he appears to be endowed with the capacity for seeing himself as a battleground of history—a capacity that is usually associated with the French and that American writers are thought never to have. He is a man given to ideologies, a holder of extreme positions, and in this too he differs from the general run of his literary contemporaries.

  Mailer had to be pleased with his new friend’s endorsement of his desire to address complex questions, especially since he did so in the Partisan Review, the flagship publication of the mandarin New York literary world. Their friendship was cemented.

  He met another couple at the Hellman party who would also play a major role in his acceptance by “The Family,” as the political columnist Murray Kempton called the Partisan Review–Commentary–Columbia University intellectuals and critics who dominated high culture in New York from the 1940s to the 1960s. Lionel and Diana Trilling were key members, and their approval meant a good deal to Mailer during the next decade. He was seated next to Diana at the table and turned to her with a comment not recommended for establishing a friendship: “And how about you, smart cunt.” In her memoir, Trilling said, “I am usually addressed with appalling respect: he got my attention. We became good friends.” She would also write a major essay about Mailer, and engage in an important correspondence with him. Steven Marcus, another Columbia professor, also met Mailer at the dinner party. Marcus’s 1963 Paris Review interview with him became a major document in establishing Mailer as a serious writer. The dinner party confirmed Mailer’s long-held belief that the right mixture of liquor and daring at parties could sometimes dramatically change people’s lives.

  He had written a number of pieces for Dissent, and had done his Village Voice column, but beginning in the late 1950s he began to move adroitly between highbrow, popular, and Beat publications. He had decided to plow more than one field, and Partisan Review, Esquire, and Big Table, a Beat publication out of Chicago, demonstrate the spread. In the 1960s, he would add Paris Review, Commentary, and Playboy, continue with the Voice, appear occasionally in girlie magazines such as Rogue, Stag, and Nugget, as well as in oddball publications such as Way Out and Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. “The White Negro” opened doors. Not only was he invited to the homes of The Family, and asked to speak on college campuses and appear on TV, he began being noticed by important literary critics. Podhoretz was the first, but then came a clutch of essays, some of praise, some of dismay, but all recognizing that Mailer was one of the most important postwar writers. Charles Fenton, writing in Saturday Review, said Mailer was a “conspicuous success.” Edmund Fuller, who would review his work for decades, wrote in American Scholar that “the promising talent of Norman Mailer has collapsed utterly” in his second and third novels. Bridging the gap between Fenton and Fuller was Dwight Macdonald, who had become quite friendly with Mailer. Macdonald named him and Baldwin as the best young novelists. He praised Baldwin for writing successfully about the “homosexual dilemma” in Giovanni’s Room, but was more expansive about Mailer: “I value Mailer because he is ‘a born writer,’ whose failures (of which there are plenty) are more interesting than the successes of less-talented writers, but chiefly because he is always experimenting, changing, developing, and, naturally, making a fool of himself.” Macdonald also praised his enthusiasm for ideas, saying that if he could bring his intellectual qualities together with his literary skills, “the result may be a masterpiece.”

  In mid-March, relations with the Styrons, and with James Jones and his wife, Gloria (née Mosolino, whom he had married a year earlier), took a turn. Mailer wrote to his Hollywood friend Chester Aaron to tell him they were returning to New York, as their social life in Connecticut had dissolved. “Lousy people these country gentry,” he wrote. “Beneath the manners they don’t even have the humanity of slum hoods.” Mailer’s handwritten, two-page list of twenty-four grievances, titled “Styron’s Style,” explain some of the circumstances
of the breakup. The first complaint, “Hiram Haydn and The Deer Park,” indicates Mailer’s vexation about the lack of Styron’s support for his novel. There are three other literary complaints: that Styron would not freely comment on his work; that he had suggested that Howard Fertig (who did some secretarial work for Mailer) was the real author of Mailer’s play; and the “bitchery” with Jones. One notation states that Styron had told him that Jones’s 1957 novel, Some Came Running, which had been badly hammered by reviewers, “wouldn’t be written by a 15-year-old.” Mailer wrote later that when Styron would read aloud the worst passages of Jones’s novel, he “would laugh along with the rest, but I was a touch sick with myself for doing so.”

  The majority of the items on the list concern what the Mailers perceived as Styron’s high-handedness—cutting them off from Lew and Jay Allen, dismissing Aldridge’s idea for a literary conference, calling Leslie Aldridge “the slut”; and, most irritating, inviting Adele’s parents to visit them after Adele had “obviously demurred.” When the Styrons visited, Bill would “snoop” and “poke around” on detours from trips to the bathroom. One night he found some of Mailer’s pornography and told all the dinner guests about his discovery. Some of the slights seem minor or misinterpreted: the Styrons gave them expensive Christmas gifts and always left some of Adele’s food on their plates, “including dessert.”

  The core of the ill feelings centered, however, on the Mailers’ perception of how the Styrons were treating Adele. She was upset because Styron gave her “clumsily patronizing pats on the shoulder” and called her “sweetie,” and that they refused to look seriously at any of her paintings. The Mailers also noted Styron’s “Adele-go-back-to-Brooklyn remark.” But there is no mention of a comment Styron reputedly made that resulted in an angry letter from Mailer, suggesting that this list was drawn up before the comment was made. The Mailers had engaged in various intimacies with another woman on several occasions, and a few times with another couple. His marriage to Adele, Mailer said, was “very free.”

  We had a lot of orgies. Mostly with women because Adele was very attracted to other women. And she was attractive to women, so we’d pair her up with another girl and then we had a lot of—and very occasionally, we’d have a four-way orgy but I couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t stand a man making love to her. That would wipe me out. It was very painful, so those were fewer, but there were a lot of orgies on the other side. Very selfish from my point of view; those were the years I was having two women and that gave me a feeling of great superiority. I’d feel, “Oh well, these other literary lights, they had their social superiority, but I had my sexual superiority,” and that was what was feeding me.

  Someone told Mailer that Styron was making remarks about Adele being a lesbian. On March 12, he wrote to Styron.

  Bill,

  I’ve been told by a reliable source—closer to you than one might expect—that you have been passing a few atrocious remarks about Adele. Normally, I would hesitate to believe the story, but my memory of slanderous remarks you’ve made about other women leaves me not at all in doubt. So I tell you this, Billy-boy. You have got to learn to keep your mouth shut about my wife, for if you do not, and I hear of it again, I will invite you to a fight in which I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.

  What you choose to do about this letter is of course your own affair, but I suggest you do no more than button your lip. The majority of things you do come back to me, and my patience with your cowardly and infantile viciousness—so demeaning and disgraceful to your talent—is at an end.

  Norman

  According to his biographer, Styron was “astonished” by this letter and one that followed two weeks later. Lew Allen, whom Styron showed it to, said, “Bill was scared, really scared.” He immediately wrote a point-by-point refutation, one of which accused Mailer’s source of having a “warped and perverted imagination.” He denied making any remarks about Adele. But he did not mail the letter, and the next day when visiting his wife in the hospital where she had just given birth to their second child, he met Jim and Gloria Jones and informed them of the situation. They concluded that something other than the alleged remarks must be bothering Mailer.

  Years Later, Styron said that the letters from Mailer were “profoundly upsetting and depressing.” He called the first one “a lightning bolt.” But he went on to say the following:

  A lot of people didn’t like Adele. She was aggressive. She was out of her—you know—I think a lot of people thought she wasn’t a lady. I liked her, but she’d get drunk. I think a lot of people regarded her as common—or whatever the word is, and she just didn’t fit in, a big aggressive broad . . . and people were put off by her. It may have been indeed—I suspect it was true—that I probably uttered something about her like a lot of other people did and it got back to Norman.

  Adele’s version divided the blame between the two men. Norman, she speculates, “probably bragged about the few times we’d indulged in a three-way.” Styron, “employing one of his sneaky tactics” out of his envy of Mailer’s status, “seized on the stories as an excuse to get Norman.” In Mailer’s recollection, he was partly to blame:

  Yeah, I wrote him a letter and told him to stop bad-mouthing my wife. Because stuff had come back to me and I think looking back on it, I provoked the fight. I didn’t have hard evidence of what he’d been bad-mouthing—I was certain he had been bad-mouthing Adele. You could tell almost by the way he looked at her. And of course, Adele in turn, what she had in relation to all these people—most of them WASPs—was she had her sexual intensity and she was letting them know it, so there was a certain hostility basic to the whole thing. And that was very much there in these relationships. You know, her attitude was well, “Styron may be superior in this way, this way, this way, but I have the best sexuality and as a result, Norman does too, and you, poor Bill Styron will never know.”

  A few weeks earlier, Mailer had written to Jones giving him a critique of his recently published novella, The Pistol, which he said, “contains a perfect short novel buried within what was for me, very frankly, a slipshod presentation.” He felt it was too didactic, and it needed a “touch of mystery.” He ended by saying, “Let’s get together soon, you clunkhead. You’re the only man I know who has an outside chance of ever understanding me.” They did get together more than once in New York, and the Joneses also visited them once in Connecticut. At one of their nights out in New York, Adele got into an argument with Gloria and, distressed at what her husband called “emotional sword-twirling,” they left early in the evening. In a March 18 letter, which begins with Jones’s response to Mailer’s comments on The Pistol, Jones said he was sorry about their departure, but still felt that Adele “was pretty much out of line” with both him and Gloria. She tried “to get my goat,” he said, “telling me about a conversation (unflattering in the extreme) which she had heard in the hall about me, and did I want to know what people really thought about me?” She went on in this vein, Jones said, and so they departed. Apparently, the possibility of a fistfight came up, because Jones said he didn’t intend to engage in one because “it would give Adele too much happiness.” He and Gloria liked Adele and thought she was “a remarkably sweet gal when she’s sober,” but they didn’t like to be around her when she wasn’t. Jones left it up to Mailer about getting together again, but said he was getting too old for “perpetual hassling. If that’s what you call living out at the furthest edges of danger, then I’m not for it, and will never make a hipster.” Mailer found Jones’s letter in his mail when he returned from a trip to Florida.

  A letter from Styron was also there when he returned.

  Norman:

  . . . Your letter was so mean and contemptible, so revealing of some other attitude toward me aside from my alleged slander, but more importantly so utterly false, that it does not deserve even this much of a reply.

  B.S.

  Mailer replied first to Jones, painfully. “Parasi
tes,” he said, seem to have undermined Jones’s ability to “trust the notion that somebody just wants to see you to make friends.”

  Well, I’m an old enough clubfighter in New York’s social eliminations to have known, even as I was doing it, that it was a big mistake to make it so obvious that I wanted to get together with you, but I kept telling myself to drop the guard just once, that you weren’t a shithead snob like all the others I know, and so Mailer takes a chance, you’re going to be dead one of these days. Well, buddy, you proved that my sour instincts were more reliable than my few remaining generous ones, and so you did me a damage and I don’t like you a hell of a lot for it.