Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Nor do I like this business of giving Adele the rap. I don’t know what the hell she said to Mos [Gloria], but it couldn’t have been so godawful because 1) she liked Mos, and 2) she wanted to make friends—she was damn bewildered when the two of you took your powder. My guess—from the kind of stuff you reported as flipping you—was that she went in for some heavy kidding which she saw as teasing, and both of you chose to see as deliberate insult. Well, stow that bullshit. If Adele had come to me doing a burn because Gloria had said this or that unforgivable thing to her, I would have told her to stick it up her ass, she was a big enough girl to take a little crap rather than jam up a possible friendship. It just isn’t nice of you, Jim, and it isn’t of Gloria, either, because you don’t tear an evening over a couple of remarks unless you really want to—which is the way I read it, that both of you were not interested in doing much else but tearing the evening. If you saw a fight in the air, I didn’t. I wouldn’t get into a fight with you unless I were ready to kill you, and I always instinctively assumed that was true for you.

  Jones had ended his letter by saying if Mailer wanted to see him, he could come to New York. Mailer ended his by saying he’d meet only in Connecticut, and if Jones didn’t want to do that, there was no need “starting a farce of letters back and forth.” Jones agreed, apparently, and they did not see each other for several years. Their friendship was all but destroyed. The Joneses left for Paris near the end of March and lived there for the next sixteen years.

  A week after writing to Jones, he wrote to Styron:

  I just got back from a few days in Florida, and found this billet-doux. So I invite you to get together with me face-to-face and repeat that my letter is mean, contemptible, and false—if you feel up to it. If you don’t, recognize your reply for what it is—a crock of shit.

  Mailer

  Styron did not reply, and they did not communicate for many years. Styron and the Joneses drew closer after their split with Mailer, and would become even better friends after Mailer published a searing appraisal of their work eighteen months later. Within a few days, Mailer had lost two of his best friends, partly if not largely of his own doing. He believed them to be the only two of his contemporaries, save Baldwin, whose ambition and talent matched his own.

  THE SAME DAY that he wrote his last letter to Jones, he wrote to Baldwin. Almost reflexively, it seems, he tried to build a bridge to replace the two that had collapsed. Baldwin was also moving back to New York, and Mailer promised him a big party after the Bridgewater house was sold and they found a place in New York. He said he had just read Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin’s second book, the one that established his reputation as an essayist of the first rank and on which his continuing reputation rests. Mailer said that he thought it to be “beautifully written and intellectually alive. Of how many other things can I say that?” Another letter written that day went to Knox, who along with Malaquais invariably received frank letters about Mailer’s inner states. Mailer said he was exhausted and had written only sixty pages of his new work in four months. “Writing ties me into knots which only liquor releases at the expense of my fucked up brains.” He was feeling middle-aged, he said, and had grown a mustache and beard.

  The new work he referred to consisted of two long stories, one about Marion Faye, “Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out: The Prologue to a Long Novel,” and “The Time of Her Time,” about O’Shaugnessy cutting a sexual swath through the Village. There was also a fragment about Faye being raped in prison, and after his release showing up at O’Shaugnessy’s loft, but it was clearly unfinished and remains unpublished. A few weeks earlier, Mailer had written to Philip Rahv at Partisan Review to see if he was interested in either of the stories, which he said were “on the edge between the serious and the pornographic.” Rahv wrote back saying that while publishing anything too raw might endanger the magazine’s nonprofit status, he nevertheless felt that PR’s readers “need to be shocked out of their complacent regard for us,” and that he would be glad to look at anything Mailer would send. Mailer replied by saying that he liked this “damn-the-torpedoes invitation,” and sent Rahv the two stories. He was also planning to include both pieces in his new collection, which he hoped would generate interest, and give him the prod he needed to proceed. In the end, Rahv selected “Way Out.”

  Described as “awkward,” “muddled,” and “cloying” by critics, the story has received little comment. It is all of these things, but it is also a tale, like some of Poe’s, that emphasizes the perilous, confused, or mutable condition of its teller. From this point on in his career, Mailer’s narrators will inevitably point to the harrowing difficulties of telling their stories, a circumstance that becomes as important as the story itself. Like the narrator of “The Man Who Studied Yoga,” whose name changes from day to day, the narrator of “Way Out” is a disembodied figure who says, Ishmael-like, “my name eludes me.” He admits to being one or more of the following: “ghost, geist, demiurge, dog, bud, flower, tree, house, or some lost way-station of the divine,” perhaps a participant in the “fluid conscious of a God.” Humans, he says, partake in the deity’s struggle to forge an extraordinary destiny, “yes, God is like me, only more so.”

  He hints that he may even be an old house in Provincetown, one similar to the one on Miller Hill Road where Mailer spent the summer of 1950 with Bea. A “climactic party” of several days duration took place there during a gloomy stretch of fall weather. The narrator says that “in the history of our republic there has never been a party equal in montage.” Marion Faye, the ex-con host, is now a fabulously wealthy “master pimp.” He has chartered two planes to fly in thirty powerful, prestigious, and/or infamous figures, one each of the following: prostitute, boxer, psychoanalyst, athlete, jazz musician, actor, cop, spy, queer, transsexual, grande dame, crook, mother, taxi driver, TV entertainer, physicist, war hero, bullfighter, etc., etc.—pilgrims all. The Canterbury Tales could have served as a model. The party’s program: first an orgy, followed by a suicide and a murder. Faye intends to kill someone—a “Brave murder”—and so reverse the process of his corruption. The act will, reciprocally, advance God’s program by getting the dialectic working again, helping to blast the twentieth century out of the caution and propriety that is smothering everything artful, brave, and good in life. The one-thousand-page novel that is to follow would then explore the trajectories of the guests and their interactions after this very hip, potentially history-altering party. Mailer was setting a high bar.

  At the end, the narrator admits that he is the spirit of the dead man—perhaps Faye himself—and the list of potential identities given at the outset might represent possible stages in his reincarnation, should the embattled God who makes karmic decisions determine that the murder was justified and has aided His cause. On a functional level, Mailer was trying to surmount the point of view difficulties of The Deer Park. He was fumbling for a way to retain a first person voice, while remaining free to explore the minds and hearts of a huge cast of characters in a novel of Proustian scope and ambition—a balancing act he worked to perfect all of his writing life. If the murdered man is judged to have been a true warrior of God, he will be reincarnated after he has told the story. The entire mammoth novel will be told in the instant “between the stirrup and the ground.” The project was so vast that he never found a way to move forward from the prologue. The victim would have to have been as historically pivotal as Rasputin—someone Mailer planned to write about in his final years—and therein was his problem: he needed a half-heroic, half-malign figure of consequence and at the time couldn’t conceive one. We have, therefore, only the assurance of a nameless, irritatingly evanescent narrator that the party is of epochal dimensions. Mailer was unable to come up with a good plot, his inveterate weakness. There was another reason: he was about to be distracted by invitations too alluring to be ignored. The story, therefore, is a curiosity, but one that contains the germ of much of his future fiction.

  THE ENGLISH DEPART
MENT of the University of Chicago invited Mailer to speak, and he accepted. He was to meet formally and informally with creative writing students. His host for a week in May 1958 was novelist Richard G. Stern, who would remain friendly with Mailer. Assisting him was Robert Lucid, a graduate student, whose job was to show their guest around town. Lucid became one of his closest friends and vied with Aldridge for the informal title, Dean of Mailer Studies.

  Mailer spoke in two of Stern’s classes and “enjoyed the sheer hell out of it.” He liked the give-and-take with students and told Knox that he could make a living teaching if necessary. In his letter accepting the invitation, he said that he would like to explore a “series of questions on the relations between one’s own experience and the experience one writes about.” In the event, these questions turned into a recitation of “horror tales” about The Deer Park, which no doubt cranked him up to write his essay about its composition, “The Mind of an Outlaw.” When he thanked Stern upon his return to Connecticut, he emphasized that his tales had not been exaggerated. The serial rejections of the novel still burned. Mailer enjoyed Chicago immensely. Stern and his wife took him to a nightclub to hear Lenny Bruce, and he did some late night carousing with Lucid and a young poet, Paul Carroll. After the visit, he said Chicago was “the only big city I ever felt comfortable in,” largely because it reminded him of Brooklyn, that is, “if Brooklyn ever made it.” But the major outcome of the visit—apart from meeting Stern, Lucid, and Carroll—was a published interview he did with Stern.

  He had not had much sleep for several days, and in the interview found himself “rushing into a confession of ideas I had never really talked about with anyone before.” In his brief preface to the interview, “Hip, Hell, and the Navigator,” Stern says that Mailer’s speech rose to “a pitch of excited engagement” as the interview progressed, the words tumbling out with “urgency” and “authenticity.” The discussion takes off from “The White Negro,” which Stern puts down as a product of “anti-expressionism.” Mailer patiently explains that when he was younger, he might have agreed, but “I started as one kind of a writer, and I’ve been evolving into another kind of writer,” moving from Marxist rationalism to mysticism. It has been a hard journey, he says, and “consists of losing all the friends that one’s found in the past.” Then Mailer made what Stern called “a fantastic assertion.”

  I think there is one single burning pinpoint of the vision in Hip: it’s that God is in danger of dying. In my very limited knowledge of theology, this never really has been expressed before. I believe Hip conceives of Man’s fate being tied up with God’s fate. God is no longer all-powerful. (Here a phrase was lost to static on the tape.) The moral consequences of this are not only staggering, but they’re thrilling; because moral experience is intensified rather than diminished.

  Human beings, Mailer continues, “are the seed-carriers, the voyagers, the explorers, the embodiment of that embattled vision; maybe we are engaged in a heroic activity and not a mean one.”

  STERN: This is really something.

  MAILER: Well, I would say it is far more noble in its conception, far more arduous as a religious conception than the notion of the all-powerful God who takes care of us.

  STERN: And do you take to this conception for its perilous nobility, or do you take to it because you believe in it?

  MAILER: I believe in it.

  STERN: You believe in it.

  MAILER: It’s the only thing that makes any sense to me.

  Mailer’s reply echoes the one that Jones had given him about karma in Illinois five years earlier, before he had begun his evolution, or his transmogrification, into another kind of writer.

  Toward the end of the interview Lucid breaks in to say that what bothers him about Mailer’s comments is that while the novelist “consciously makes decisions and accepts the moral consequences,” the hipster is “unconscious of risks of this kind.” Mailer responds by saying that tacit in his comments is the belief that the unconscious “has an enormous teleological sense,” that it is always measuring to what degree the actions of individuals are conducive or destructive to growth. Hour by hour, minute by minute, it asks, am I growing or shrinking? “It is with this thing that they move, that they grope forward—this navigator at the seat of their being.” He had discovered someone new at the rudder of his psyche. The “anxious boyish Jewish intellectual” who had been the link between the saint and the psychopath has given up his place to a helmsman from the lower depths, a guide and connection to the mysteries of Being and becoming.

  AFTER RAHV HAD formally accepted “Way Out” for the fall 1958 issue of PR, Mailer wrote to his mother, who was visiting Susan in Mexico, with the news. “Partisan is the most important (by far) literary magazine in this country,” he said, “and to print a long piece by me will do an awful lot of subtle good. I’m really pleased.” He was also happy, as he told his Japanese translator, Eiichi Yamanishi, that “The White Negro” was “much discussed,” and that he was being touted as “one of the very few reliable guides to the mysteries of the American nihilism which is coming into being.” To be accepted by the opposed wings of America’s literary culture—the Beats and The Family—put Mailer in the catbird seat he had aspired to since falling from the heights with Barbary Shore. His timing couldn’t have been better. On the Road was published in September 1957, three months after “The White Negro.” Kerouac’s novel produced a hunger for insights into the origins and meaning of the Beat movement, and Mailer’s essay was often seen as its intellectual manifesto. There were condemnations and celebrations of beatniks in all the major publications, and Life did a photo essay.

  The first chronicler of the Beat generation, John Clellon Holmes, said that Mailer brought to an understanding of Beatness “the most venturesome intellect (not to mention nerves) currently at work in American literature.” He called “The White Negro” a document “fully as important to the secret history of this age as Notes from the Underground was to the Europe of its time.” The movement wanted intellectual approbation from a celebrated writer, and Mailer wanted attention and the circulation of his ideas. His essay, considered notorious by some, gave him credibility with the Beats. By late 1958, he was at least an associate member of The Family, and the only one to rise above a condescending or angry dismissal of the Beats. While he did not care for the Beats’ beatific passivity, or for Kerouac’s characterization of the Beats as “solitary Bartlebies staring out at the dead wall window of our civilization,” he admired the “ecstatic flux” of his language. Mailer was angry not passive, engaged not withdrawn, and much preferred “American nihilism” to the “Beat Generation.” He said that the difference between Beat and Hip was the same as that between rebellion and revolution. “Beat still has no center to its rage, and so is sentimental enough to assume that the world can be saved with words. It is going to take more than that.” He never changed his mind on this distinction.

  At a party in August, Mailer told his neighbor, novelist Dawn Powell, that he wanted to move to New York. “All that green makes him sick,” she recorded in her diary, a remark that brings to mind Woody Allen’s line about living in Connecticut: “I am at two with nature.” That same month, he saw the film version of Naked and the Dead with Adele and his sister during one of their regular trips to the city. Barbara said he was appalled by the production, and she just sank lower and lower in her seat. Mailer wrote up a response a short time later, detailing “the disembowelling naked greed which gutted this movie of its promise.” The casting bothered him the most. Aldo Ray, “a big fattish bull of a man with a gravel voice,” played Sergeant Croft, “a small, lean man” with “a soft murderous Texas voice.” In the novel, he said, “Croft was the hunter, the killer, the horn of the platoon, an icy will-driven phallus of a man, a mountain-climber—one cannot substitute a raw-voiced weightlifter.” Added to the casting problems was the inclusion of a big scene in a Hawaii nightclub—no one in the novel ever sets foot in Hawaii—where a stripper, played by
a genuine ecdysiast, Lili St. Cyr, is pawed by drunken soldiers. He ends the diatribe by saying that if it seems he has been hard on the producer and director, “I can tell you, friends and foes, dear family, there is no one I feel harder on at the moment than the real villain, that stupid idiot—Norman Mailer.” He later called the film “the worst movie I’ve ever seen,” but he did not publish his angry comments on it, as he had originally planned.

  There was one more disappointment before the Mailers left Connecticut. He had been hoping that Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, now back from England, would invite them for dinner. They lived only five miles apart, and while not notably friendly, they were both Brooklyn boys who had begun their careers high on the mountain. But Mailer said that the invitation never came, as he remembered in his biography of Monroe (referring to himself as the “novelist”):

  Nor could the novelist in conscience condemn the playwright for such avoidance of drama. The secret ambition, after all, had been to steal Marilyn; in all his vanity he thought no one was so well suited to bring out the best in her as himself, a conceit which fifty million other men may also have held—he was still too untested to recognize that the foundation of her art might be to speak to each man as if he were all of male existence available to her. It was only a few marriages (which is to say a few failures) later that he could recognize how he would have done no better than Miller and probably have been damaged further in the process.

  Adele’s memory is that Miller did invite them for drinks, and then mentioned casually that Marilyn was not at home, that she had gone to Hollywood on business. Mailer was angry on the drive home. “The bastard waited till she was away to invite us over,” he said. Mailer wrote his account fifteen years after the event; Adele’s was written nearly forty years later. Either could have misremembered. Miller’s memory, however, supports Mailer’s. In his autobiography, he says that Mailer “might make good company for an evening,” but Monroe “rejected the idea,” saying she “ ‘knew these types,’ ” that is, “people obsessed with images.” Miller wrote his account while still angry about what he felt was an unfair portrait of his marriage in Marilyn. He speculated that Mailer might have treated Monroe and him differently “had we fed him one evening and allowed him time to confront her humanity, not merely her publicity.” Monroe was aware of Mailer’s writing, according to her friend W. J. Weatherby. At some point, she read his copy of The Deer Park. Her response: Mailer was “too impressed by power.” While this may seem to be a simplistic response to Mailer’s hard-won insights into the complexities of how power is wielded in Hollywood, her intuition wasn’t all wrong. In a later interview, Mailer said that his plan during his time in Connecticut had been to write a play in which she would star, but in hindsight it would have been a “terrible tragedy” to play Pygmalion with Monroe, admitting that he was just another of the many men who wanted to make the most of this “sweet child of life,” but in his own way, not hers.