Over two thousand attended the conference in McEwan Hall, a massive amphitheater that Mailer likened to a Roman circus. There was much banter from the audience, and the session leaders, Mailer and Mary McCarthy among them, were not totally surprised to learn that someone had filled the water carafes with whisky. “A nice touch, don’t you think?” said one of the organizers. No one was allowed to speak for more than five minutes, so the discussion of aspects of the novel was spirited and easy to follow. Besides Mailer and McCarthy, those given a speaking slot included Lawrence Durrell, Muriel Spark, Stephen Spender, Rebecca West, Alex Trocchi, and two writers Mailer was to meet for the first time: William Burroughs and Henry Miller. The French delegation, which was supposed to include Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, failed to appear, as did the Russian delegation. While the British and Americans dominated, there were representatives from nearly every European country, and some from Asia and Africa. Mailer said that he came to the conclusion that he had to be “a bit of a public figure” at the conference, as the audience would “listen more carefully to Behan than Dos Passos.” By some estimates, he was the star of the conference.
When Mary McCarthy lamented that it was difficult to have a real debate about censorship without the presence of a genuine practitioner, Mailer took on the role of devil’s advocate, one he always relished. “This man Mailer,” one reporter wrote, “stocky, curly-headed, almost cherubic at times (like a Rubens) has the reputation of being so far out as to be almost inarticulate,” but when he spoke in favor of censorship, he did so with “quite brilliant articulateness.” He began by saying that “a profound argument can be advanced that sexual literature, you see, does weaken warlike potential because it tends to drain it.” He elaborated on his hypothesis and drew rejoinders from several speakers, including McCarthy, Burroughs, and Miller. McCarthy cited Sparta where sex “was felt to be the pap of war,” and Mailer responded with the example of Stalin using sexual censorship to make Russia into a warlike nation in the 1930s. Burroughs noted tersely that censorship of sexual material was an adjunct to capitalism’s desire to “channel the sexual instinct into production and purchase of consumer’s goods.” Henry Miller held fire until near the end, and then spoke briefly. “It’s all very much more simple than it sounds,” he began.
The whole world today is in my mind strangled. We have no freedom of action really, we are all talking nonsense. Well, we all would like to do when we see a good interesting woman is to sleep with her. We should not make any bones about that. There is nothing wrong with lust or with obscenity, we all have impure desires. We should have the pure and the impure, they exist together. Good and evil belong together. You can’t separate them. Let’s stop talking about censorship; let’s do it, think it, talk it, act it. Thank you.
Miller’s remarks (which recall D. H. Lawrence) neatly reinforced Mailer’s ideas about the existential life. Remembering his first meeting with Miller, Mailer said he not only admired his work; he admired his personality. “It is all of a piece,” he wrote, “no neurotic push-pull, no maggots in the smile, no envies, no nervousness.” Miller, wearing knickers and a cap in Edinburgh, had “a good tough face, big nose, near bald head, looking for all the world like Marx’s noble proletarian, like some bricklayer, let us say, you started talking to on the train, and then it turned out he had eighty-two kids and worked at his hobby in his spare time—it was translating Sophocles.” Mailer recalled that Miller “leaned over and said, ‘Where are you from, Norman?’ I said, ‘Brooklyn.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m from Brooklyn too.’ ” That cemented things.
His admiration for Burroughs was also burnished by their interaction. At one point, Burroughs was describing his cut-up/fold-in method of composition, whereby he cut typed pages in half vertically, and then folded one half into another cut-up section. “The method,” he said, “could also lead to collaboration by writers on an unprecedented scale to produce works that were the composite effort of any number of writers, living or dead.” He had used fold-ins, he explained, from Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Saint-John Perse, along with passages from magazines, newspapers, and letters, to produce composite novels whose authorship he shared. When the novelist Khushwant Singh, sitting near him on the speakers’ platform, asked if he was really serious, Burroughs, looking for all the world like Buster Keaton, answered, “Yes, of course.” Remembering Burroughs at the conference, Mailer said that “he spoke to his friends exactly the same way he spoke to his enemies, which was somewhat remotely.” Burroughs remained undemonstrative.
Edinburgh was still a bit Calvinist in 1962, and it was hard to get a drink in a bar after ten. Consequently, there were private drinking parties every night of the conference. “Edinburgh had very many evil spirits loose for those few days.” Mailer recalled, “there was madness in the air.” At a celebratory party after the final day, he was drinking with Sonia Brownell and John Calder, the two chief conference organizers. Burroughs was also there. They were joined by Max Hayward, the translator of Doctor Zhivago, who was quite drunk. Calder says that Hayward made a clumsy pass at Brownell; Mailer remembers him complaining about being roughed up by some Edinburgh hoodlums. Hayward went on interminably, Mailer said, in a whining, self-pitying manner about this unmerited cruelty. Angry or disgusted or both, Mailer picked Hayward off the ground, and with some help from Calder carried him out to the landing. “He told me to let go,” Calder said. “When I did, he heaved Hayward over his shoulder and on to the stone stairs, whereupon he rolled down all the four or five flights to the bottom. Five minutes later, he reappeared, blood flowing from several places, and quietly resumed drinking.” Many years later, Mailer recalled that crazy night and shook his head. “I could have killed him,” he said.
MAILER RETURNED TO a full plate. He had agreed to a September 22 debate in Chicago with William F. Buckley, whom he had called “the most important conservative in the public eye after Barry Goldwater.” Two days later, he would go to Comiskey Park to watch the heavyweight boxing match between champion Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston, which he planned to write about in his new Esquire column. He stayed at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion overlooking Lake Michigan. Hefner was clearly cultivating Mailer, and Mailer liked “Hef,” and looked forward to mingling with the fight crowd and a bevy of playmates at his sybaritic mansion. His first concern upon his return, however, was his wife and the new baby. He found that Jeanne was recovering nicely, and that the “frighteningly bright” Kate had the admirable ability of “staring one hard in the eye.” Now the father of four girls, he wondered if he possessed “some exceptional virtue or vice to be so curiously blessed.” He was feeling better about himself than he had for some time. Graham Greene’s recent letter saying he had been “moved and excited” by the “magnificent” Advertisements for Myself, was also encouraging. His literary correspondence had now grown to the point where he needed a full-time secretary.
He hired a young woman named Anne Barry, a WASP from New Hampshire who had just graduated from Radcliffe. She had spent a day with Mailer in Manhattan several months earlier, discussing a paper she was writing on Advertisements. Her thesis was that Mailer was having an identity crisis in the late 1950s, and although they laughed about this, she was correct. Shortly after they met, she wrote “First Meeting with Norman, March, 1962.”
He was a particularly intense man. I was, of course, impressed because a famous or rather notorious writer asked me to have a drink with him. I saw that rather square face, that broadshouldered frame now slightly paunchy, those eyes so sharp, in a soft tough too old face, and I knew that every word counted, that I would be judged not unfairly but strictly by this man.
We walked out on the street; we went to Dorgene’s; there was a piano, and we couldn’t hear ourselves talk, so we went to a bar across the street. “I don’t know what it is about you. You interest me.” And then, after he said this, “I just thought I’d tell you that now. It’s something to take home with you.” I thanked him, sarcastically, knowing that I would n
eed this to take home with me—and this made me bitter. So trapped, I am in pettiness. “You can’t take a compliment, can you?” (Suddenly he was frighteningly ingenuous.) “You look like a girl who can hold her liquor. I like that.” And, later, “When I first saw you, Barry, I thought you were Boston Irish. I came down the stairs, and saw you standing there, with your chin set, looking me over, and I knew right then you were a monster.” (His eyes sparkle, his face crinkles into a smile, imp-like, suddenly.) Two bars, four scotches. I must live up to my hard drinking reputation. He walks away from the table: “Get me another drink,” and I must, somehow, fight my way past the drunks at the bar, and order him I can’t remember what, not paying for it. “I knew you’d get me that drink,” he said, and our eyes met, and I knew I’d passed another test. Always testing his friends, his enemies, never relaxing.
Barry typed up whatever he was working on—columns for Esquire and Commentary, stories, poems, and speeches—he would edit them, and she would retype, sometimes several times. It was a routine he maintained with all his subsequent secretaries. Writing poems on scraps of paper for a couple of years had convinced him of the merits of longhand, and he wrote in pencil on white unlined paper from then on. His relationship with Barry was open and friendly; they joshed and joked. She found him to be “a very funny man,” and corrected his punctuation. He called her “Mrs. Mark Twain,” and in a letter to Don Carpenter that she typed, “a stuck-up little New Hampshire cunt whom you may have met.” She also made him breakfast and lunch, walked Tibo and Zsa Zsa, and later helped him take care of Sadie, Jeanne’s maid, who was left with him when Jeanne moved out. Barry said she admired his “freedom, his humor, his willingness to look things that are unpleasant in the eye—a reluctance to make things look nice—these are Jewish qualities, and they come through in his work as well as in the man.” They had a warm relationship and remained in contact until his death.
The Chicago debate with Buckley was billed as “The Real Meaning of the Right Wing in America,” but the context was the intensifying arms race with Russia—the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in October 1962—and the emergence of an energized conservative movement led by the GOP senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater. Buckley’s magazine, National Review, was Goldwater’s cheerleader and applauded his plan to spend more on nuclear weapons. Mailer wanted to end the Cold War, arguing that the United States was demonizing the communist state. “Let communism come to those countries it will come to,” he argued before the audience of nearly four thousand. The Cold War, he said, has become “an instrument of megalomaniacal delusion,” and had turned the nation’s attention away from the true plague, which Mailer defined in more specific ways than he had in the past, a reflection, in part, of his embrace of existential philosophy, especially that of Heidegger. He pointed, for example, to the blandness of modern architecture, the way it masked the functions of buildings: “The airports look like luxury hotels, the luxury hotels are indistinguishable from a modern corporation’s home office, and the home office looks like an air-conditioned underground city on the moon.” New drugs proliferate to treat “small epidemics with no name,” but are ineffective. “Nature is wounded in her fisheries, her forests. Airplanes spray insecticides. Species of insects are removed from the chain of life. Crops are poisoned just slightly. We grow enormous tomatoes which have no taste.” Five days after his speech, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, an indictment of environmental pollution that led to the banning of DDT, was published.
Their speeches were published in Playboy, Buckley’s with the subtitle, “A Conservative’s View,” Mailer’s “A Liberal’s View.” Mailer took umbrage. “I don’t care,” he said in a letter to the editor, “if people call me a radical, a rebel, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist, or even a left conservative, but please don’t ever call me a liberal.” Few called him a liberal again, but left conservative or, eventually, Left-conservative, stuck, despite his never-ending difficulty in explaining exactly what he meant by it. For Mailer, a liberal was a knee-jerk, unthinking incrementalist on social issues, a helpful, smiling, reverent, grown-up scout who opposed nothing but discourtesy. Mailer opposed much and wanted to be sure that the world knew it.
In his speech and some of his framing comments for it in The Presidential Papers, he added a brief preface of the same kind found in Advertisements for Myself. He says that Americans are afraid of something besides the communists. “Dread,” he continues, “has been loose in the twentieth century, and America has shivered in its horror since the Depression.” Besides the more tangible manifestations of dread, he notes with alarm that philosophy itself may be dying. “Metaphysics disappears, logical positivism arises,” and “soon a discussion of death will be considered a betrayal of philosophy,” a remark reflecting Heidegger’s adjuration to humans to stand “in the openness of Being, of enduring . . . and of out-braving the utmost (Being toward death).” Mailer notes ruefully that the logical positivists are displacing the existentialists in Anglo-American philosophy, and goes on to attack psychologists (excluding Reichians and Jungians) for treating dread as “a repetition of infantile experiences of helplessness.” The dread and anxiety felt by humanity, he believes, should be seen as something more primitive and authentic, namely, the danger of “losing some part or quality of our soul unless we act and act dangerously.”
There is no way to determine how much influence his reading had on his debate speech. But we do know that during his seventeen-day stay in Bellevue, he had read an anthology edited by Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, which contained excerpts from the writings of ten existential writers, including Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger. It is no weak supposition to conclude that the title of the Nietzsche chapter, “Live Dangerously,” and the Nietzsche quote from which it was taken, rang a big bell for Mailer: “For believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities under Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves!”
An excerpt from Kierkegaard’s influential work The Concept of Dread, “Dread and Freedom,” is included in the anthology. It appears to be the source of Mailer’s oft stated notion that “the saint and the psychopath were united to one another, and different from the mass of men,” and that this “paradox” had “driven Kierkegaard near to mad for he had the courage to see that his criminal impulses were also his most religious.” But it is the Heidegger chapter that may have been uppermost in his mind when he decided to explore the concept of dread in his speech. Dread, for Heidegger, is felt in the face of Nothingness, and courage is the essential virtue that opposes dread and sustains Being (which Heidegger called Da-sein, or human existence or presence). Heidegger says the dread felt by courageous persons is no simple joy, but stands “in secret union with the serenity and gentleness of creative longing,” which can be taken as certifying the high valor of the artist. The extent to which Mailer’s conception of the artist’s role was invigorated by the writings in the Kaufmann collection is uncertain, but the force of his belief in the heroic mission of the artist is indisputable. The last line of his 1971 introduction to a new edition of Deaths for the Ladies captures it best: Time’s dismissive review of his poetry, he says, “put iron into my heart again, and rage, and the feeling that the enemy was more alive than ever, and dirtier in the alley, and so one had to mend, and put on the armor, and go to war, go out to war again, and try to hew huge strokes with the only broadsword God ever gave you, a glimpse of something like Almighty prose.”
Gay Talese, who had met Mailer a few years earlier at a prizefight at the St. Nicholas Arena in Manhattan, covered the debate for The New York Times. He described it as a contest between the conservative Buckley (“a clever jabber with a tiptoe stance”), and Mailer the hipster (“who hooked with his fists as he spoke”). In his lead, he said the match was considered to have ended in a draw. Talese’s story r
an on September 24, the day before the Patterson-Liston fight. Mailer read it, and then saw the reporter at one of the prefight receptions for the press. Talese, who remembers wearing “a summer weight suit, a tan, gabardine, three-piece suit,” saw Mailer walking his way. “I sensed that he wasn’t happy, he wasn’t smiling, and he was carrying a drink. I remember him walking over, and he said, ‘It wasn’t a draw.’ ” Talese tried to make light of it, but Mailer “continued to be serious and looked at me in a very hostile way. And I did see his drink in his right hand and I thought, ‘He’s going to throw that drink at me,’ because I had a recollection of Mailer’s public image as a guy who could be volatile and throw a drink at someone, or a punch. I thought, ‘It is early in the evening, I’m wearing this suit, there are people here who will see this guy throw this drink at me.’ ” Talese said Mailer looked menacing, and Talese said, “Don’t throw that drink at me.” Mailer said he had no intention of doing so. “Then there was a smile, and then there was a casual reflection on the article. That little moment passed, but it was my one moment.”
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