His comments on Jones and Styron destroyed whatever shreds of comity persisted after their recent quarrels. He begins his comments on Jones generously, saying that From Here to Eternity was the best American novel since the end of World War II, despite being “ridden with faults, ignorances, and a smudge of the sentimental.” He was unique, Mailer said, because “he had come out of nowhere, self-taught, a clunk in his lacks, but the only one of us who had the beer-guts of a broken glass brawl.” But his early success “handcuffed the rebel in him.” He concluded that if Jones “dares not to castrate his hatred of society with a literary politician’s assy cultivation of it, then I would have to root for him because he may have been born to write a great novel.”
Styron, Mailer said, wrote “the prettiest novel of our generation. Lie Down in Darkness has beauty at its best, is almost never sentimental, even has whispers of near-genius,” although it had three defects: “Styron was not near to creating a man who could move on his feet, his mind was uncorrupted by a new idea, and his book was without evil.” Without having read a word of Styron’s second novel, Set This House on Fire, Mailer speculates that it will be “a cornucopia of fangless perceptions which will please the conservative power and delight the liberal power,” because “the mass media is aching for such a novel.” The book’s reception “will be a study in the art of literary advancement. For Styron has spent years oiling every literary lever and power which could help him on his way, and there are medals waiting for him in the mass-media.”
On Baldwin he is no less severe. After lauding Notes of a Native Son for its “sense of moral nuance,” he says that many paragraphs “are sprayed with perfume. Baldwin seems incapable of saying ‘Fuck you’ to the reader.” But he has one large advantage: his personal experience has been “as fantastic and varied as the life of any of my fellow racketeers,” and if he is bold enough “we will have a testament, and not a noble toilet water.”
The last writer he discusses is William Burroughs, who had recently published a fragment of his unpublished novel Naked Lunch. Mailer saw in him exactly what was lacking in most of his contemporaries: an unflinching assault on the torpor-producing forces of the culture. He found the excerpt to be “more arresting, I thought, than anything I’ve read by an American in years,” and if the rest of the novel were as good, “Burroughs will deserve rank as one of the most important novelists in America.”
He submitted the manuscript of the collection in late April. Advertisements for Myself came in at 200,000 words, one third of which was new work. When it was in the hands of the editors at Putnam’s, he made arrangements to publish three of the four pieces in magazines just before or at the same time as the collection, which was now scheduled to appear on November 6. “The Mind of an Outlaw” appeared in Esquire, “Buddies” in the Village Voice, and “Quick and Expensive” in Big Table. Finally, two scenes from the dramatic version of The Deer Park came out in Partisan Review, giving Mailer close to simultaneous exposure in four very different publications, two hip and two “overground,” as Esquire editor Harold Hayes called his magazine. While prepublication excerpting was nothing new, no one in 1959 was doing it quite so shrewdly or widely. He continued the practice for the rest of his career, and must be considered the leading “magazinist” (a name applied to Poe) of his era.
In “Last Advertisement for Myself Before the Way Out,” which concludes the collection, he is nearly as rough on himself as on his peers. Comparing himself to Scott Fitzgerald, “an indifferent caretaker of his talent,” he says that he has been “a cheap gambler” with his. He goes on to describe himself as “cowardly,” “stupid,” and guilty of “fear and vanity,” winding up with a flourish that recalls the bold, mythical gesture of Babe Ruth, a passage that would be regularly quoted in the future by detractors and admirers alike. The big novel, he says,
will be fired to its fuse by the rumor that once I pointed to the farthest fence and said that within ten years I would try to hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters. For if I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way.
Mailer didn’t hit this “longest ball,” but considering what he did produce in the ten years after Advertisements for Myself, he had some solid hits. In addition to challenging himself, another motive for his prediction—corroborated by the taunts and dares that he leveled at his “fellow racketeers”—was to stimulate them. He genuinely believed that a great achievement by any of them would be the keenest spur for the rest—which is not to say that he did not feel envy. He explained in a 2007 interview with Andrew O’Hagan how he felt about his contemporaries: “I remember I received a copy of From Here to Eternity, which I think I’d asked for, and Jones inscribed it: ‘To Norman—my most feared friend; my dearest rival.’ That’s the nature of friendship among writers. Gore Vidal—who has never been at a loss to see the negative side of human nature—pointed out that ‘Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.’ That’s an exaggeration of this notion of competition. But in time we may get to the point where, although something of you does die, some other part of you is encouraged. You say, ‘Well if he’s doing it, I can do it.’ ”
MINTON WAS UNCERTAIN about including “The Time of Her Time” because of its detailed sexual descriptions. To this end, Mailer wrote identical letters to thirteen literary critics, stating that a majority of those polled would have to approve of the story for Putnam’s to go ahead. If opinion was seriously divided, the story would be cut. Accompanied by a copy of the story, the letter went to: Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz; F. W. Dupee, Diana and Lionel Trilling, and Richard Chase at Columbia; Leslie Fiedler at the University of Montana; Philip Rahv, William Phillips, and William Barrett at PR; two important independent critics, Alfred Kazin and Dwight Macdonald; and Mailer’s former professor Robert Gorham Davis. He said he did not like to ask for an appraisal of unpublished work, “but I believe this piece may be important enough to justify the act.” He asked for a reply by mid-July 1959. His plan was clever; he not only garnered twelve positive endorsements—Davis demurred—and convinced Minton of the story’s merits, he also gained advance support for his collection from a group of influential figures. Four of them went on to write supportive reviews of Advertisements, including two that were highly favorable.
The story, a comic masterpiece and perhaps Mailer’s finest short story, is a first-person recounting of the Herculean efforts of Sergius O’Shaugnessy, a Village stud who calls his penis “the avenger,” to bring Denise Gondelman, a “proud, aggressive, vulgar, tense, stiff and arrogant Jewess” to her first orgasm. As critic Andrew Gordon has explained, “Sergius is the hipster battling Denise the Square, determined to liberate her from her dead-ass sexual repressions, her intellectual priggishness, and her obsession with psychoanalytic jargon, or as Mailer would say, from her totalitarianism. On another level, it is both “a glorification of the power of sex and a reductio ad absurdum. The controlling metaphor is sex as war, and sexual intercourse takes on the qualities of a championship boxing match, an encounter between a matador and bull or an epic struggle for survival between two savage beasts in a jungle clearing.” O’Shaugnessy, Gordon says, “sees himself, and only half in jest, as a sexual messiah” carrying the gospel of Lawrence and Reich to uptight pagans in Greenwich Village. After several near-victories, she ultimately achieves “the time of her time,” an obvious reference to God’s whispered words to O’Shaugnessy at the end of The Deer Park. Far from being grateful for pushing her over the top after many long nights of phallic endeavor (achieved when he whispers in her ear, “You dirty little Jew”), Denise tells him the following morning that his “whole life is a lie, and you do nothing but run away from the homosexual that is you.” Then she departs and is “out the door before
I could rise to tell her that she was a hero fit for me.” As Gordon points out, the story is a rehearsal for an even more detailed and symbol-laden (if less exhausting) series of sexual bouts in Mailer’s 1965 novel, An American Dream. O’Shaugnessy, he notes accurately, is “the first of Mailer’s active narrators” in a fictional work, and a precursor to Stephen Rojack, the narrator-protagonist of that novel.
After he sent the story to the thirteen critics, he gently encouraged them to respond and thanked them when they did. Kazin was one of the first to respond, praising the story’s “literary seriousness and power,” and calling Mailer “immensely talented.” Then this reservation: “You are the Rabbi of screwing, the Talmudist of fucking, the writer who has managed to be so solemn about sex as to make it grim.” He argued for more passion, and ended by saying that the “characters make love with a stop-watch in each hand. For this I should make love?” Mailer wrote back immediately to say that being called “the Rabbi of screwing” gave him a laugh, and agreeing that the grimness of some of his descriptions was “the single most unattractive feature” of his writing. There was a reason, however: “I am more or less obsessed with the idea that sex is dying in a new ice-age of the psyche, and I think the only way to change one’s readers and warm them—for yes, I am guilty of a messianic lust—is to make them set up camp on the ice for a while.” In the big novel, he would depict “characters who are monsters of self-consciousness and try for the more difficult and perhaps impossible trip into a terrain where emotion becomes real again.” Over the years, Kazin would continue to chide him in reviews and essays about taking his obsessions too seriously, and urging him to distance himself from his characters (a reflection, perhaps, of the Henry James revival then under way).
Kazin was not the only member of The Family pushing Mailer to be more Jamesian. Diana Trilling and Mailer liked each other from the start, and her positive vetting of the story brought them even closer. The fact that she also praised The Deer Park in the same letter, calling it “a fantastically courageous book, intelligent book, noble book,” was further uplifting, especially since she said that her husband shared her enthusiasm. She began to see him as her personal project, and her letters over the next few years mixed praise, joshing, and advice. Besides giving him her counsel, she said his work was an advance on Hemingway’s. He said in reply that Advertisements for Myself “is a bit obsessed with Hemingway—I’m afraid he crops up in the book the way an old lover appears in the conversation of a woman who insists the man could now not mean less to her.” Advertisements is the high-water mark of Mailer’s interest in Hemingway, although after his suicide in 1961, his ghost would often return. In his reply to Trilling, written after his return from Provincetown, he did not remark on the concern Trilling expressed at the end of her letter: “I hope to God you’re not falling into the trap of explaining yourself. Like seeing yourself in history, self-explanation is one of the new and most elegant ways for a writer to cut his own throat.” Like Kazin, she wanted Mailer to put some aesthetic distance between himself and his creations, something he was less and less prone to do. In fact, before the next decade was over, he would do precisely what she wanted him not to, exactly what Henry James had avoided. Podhoretz said Mailer saw himself as “a battleground of history,” but Mailer had bigger ideas: he wanted to intervene in history, and dramatize his intervention.
He also sent “The Time of Her Time” to Lois Wilson. She shared it with her husband, Graham Wilson, also an English professor, who knew of and sanctioned their relationship from the beginning. He responded by saying that the Sergius-Denise affair seemed to parallel hers with Mailer, but in reverse. Mailer wrote to her in early May about a tryst they were planning. “A man is nothing without his greed,” he said. A couple of weeks later, he wrote to a New York hotel to make a reservation for her, enclosing a money order and signing the letter “Marion Faye.” Reflecting on their time together, which both enjoyed greatly, he said:
once in a while I think we’re ripening for one another, that in five years we’ll be very good for one another, even be able to restore the nerves of love to one another that the others (some of them) deadened away. Anyway, phony schizophrenic, Junebug Daisy DeSade, have your good time in Europe. I’ll be envying you except that I’ve got the galleys of the book that may change my life again, and I’m working on them for the next five or six weeks. Everything has to be handed in by August First so you will either catch me either exhausted or full of myself depending on what I think of the book. And of myself.
He added that he now had a green sports car, a Triumph, and signed the letter “J. Kafka Hemingway.”
As he was making plans for a trip to Germany to meet with his German publisher, Adele gave birth to a girl after ten hours of labor. Elizabeth Ann (soon referred to as Betsy), was born on September 28. He wrote to his Uncle Dave, now a widower, to announce the birth. Unlike Danielle, who looked like Adele, Betsy “was very much a Mailer. She has a most definite chin, and a thin, determined, and quite beautiful mouth.” He told Dave that a copy of Advertisements for Myself (dedicated to Dave, the memory of Anne, and Barney), would be sent to him shortly. He added that there had been “a boom in my literary stock lately.” A week later, he left for Germany.
MAILER LANDED IN Munich on October 11. He gave a reading there, went on to Berlin, and then flew home on the 20th. Almost all that is known of the visit is contained in a November 6 letter to Lois Wilson:
Dear Lady (with the light)
Your letter was nice. First nice letter I’ve gotten from you since my last work. I am at the moment empty. There was almost too much of a good time in Berlin where I stayed for six days after planning only two, and I fell in love with a bar girl (a tall tough sharp mean and rather honest lady) who fell first in love with me, and would take no further money from me after the first night (as the clean proof of her love) which act unmanned me a bit, for the dream of all whoremongers like myself is to get that hard dikey man-hating pussy for nothing, and at last I had succeeded. So you were right. It was good for me to go to Europe, and it would have been better with a month.
But there is one thing awful about falling in love in Europe. Once one is back it all slips away, inexorable bit by bit, and now the lady is no longer real to me—instead I sit around wondering whether my new rocket is going to break through that most critical smog. It’ll be depressing if it doesn’t, although not fatal I suspect, but I can’t quite keep from thinking that it’ll be nice if it does.
At any rate I would rather try to answer the question you half asked me in the letter, but I hesitate because I never have a good sense of when the words we use are the same and when we’re no help to each other at all. But when you wrote that you never know what goes on inside me because I do not know myself which way I’ll go next, I can only say you’re right but hurrah! It’s the one part of me I wouldn’t want to change.
The German barmaid, Regina, gave Mailer a pocket photograph of herself, inscribed to “Der Dick.” He never saw her again, and it appears that they did not correspond. Years later, he identified her as the model for Ruta, Barney Kelly’s lubricious maid in An American Dream. The letter also shows that the division in his psyche remained. As for his “new rocket,” it went into orbit.
Advertisements for Myself had modest sales, less than ten thousand copies in the Putnam’s edition, but it was a succès d’estime, receiving notably strong reviews in The New York Times Book Review, Partisan Review, and the Village Voice. Time, unsurprisingly, panned the collection, saying that judging from the excerpts offered from the big novel, its title should be “The Nude and the Stewed.” Two of the most positive and perceptive reviews were from prominent members of The Family, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin. Both had caveats, as might be expected from men who finely sliced their discriminations, but overall they left no doubt about the fact that Mailer had arrived. Howe criticized him for getting carried away with his own metaphors, “using cancer as a synecdoche for the spread of social rot.”
But he praised the “bouncy” advertisements that held the collection together as being “done with bravado and good humor with an utter willingness to risk full exposure.” Howe, a deeply committed socialist, gave his highest praise to Mailer’s “devotion to restlessness,” and his “fear of stasis” in the culture. This is a new Mailer, he said, a “post-depressive Mailer.”
Kazin, one of the most intelligent critics writing in the late 1950s, was Edmund Wilson’s heir apparent. As a Brooklyn Jew with leftist inclinations and Family membership, he was comfortable in appraising Mailer’s status and prospects. He states unequivocally that his first three books, while interesting, were uneven. He expresses concern that Mailer’s “over-intense need to dominate, to succeed, to grasp, to win” may interfere with his artistic development. Nevertheless, he finds Advertisements for Myself to be a clear advance, a book that shows “how exciting, yet tragic, America can be for a gifted writer.” Tragic because the country “hungrily welcomes any talent that challenges it interestingly—but then holds this talent in the mold of its own shapelessness.” Exciting, because Mailer seems to have found a way to be “an honest and intransigent spirit,” while remaining thoroughly American. The collection, he says, contains “more penetrating comment on the America of Eisenhower, television, suburbia, and J. D. Salinger than anything I have seen in years.” He possesses “a remarkable intelligence,” and yet is “one of the most variable, unstable, and on the whole unpredictable writers I have ever read.”
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