The finished essay, titled “In the Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention in 1964,” went to Harold Hayes for the November Esquire. Mailer wrote to his Bellevue friend, Arnold Kemp, still in prison, to say he was pleased with it, and that if Goldwater wasn’t so negative about civil rights, he might vote for him. He went on to say he was still working on An American Dream, and compared his editing method to adjusting a slack drum, tightening it all around, little by little. You have to do this, he said, “until you can’t stand it any more, and then go over it twenty times more. If you’re left with nothing by the end of that time, that’s probably just as well. There may have been nothing there.” André Deutsch hoped to publish the British edition at the same time as the American, and had been pestering him for the final manuscript. Mailer told him he was still tightening the drum and hoped to have it completed by October 15. In the end, he needed until almost the end of the year.
Deutsch was in a dither about Mailer’s new agent and his “hard stick-’em-up methods.” Meredith had gotten $125,000 up front for Dream, which impressed Mailer, especially since before Meredith took over from Rembar, Minton had given him only $50,000, half up front, for a still unwritten novel. Mailer told Deutsch to stop calling Meredith a pirate and recognize that he had good credentials: he was one of the most hated agents in New York. He said he didn’t care “to hear about the less agreeable methods of people who work for me, but back them up eventually I must, until they fail to do their job, which is to get me the best publisher and the largest royalty available in every country.” Deutsch had already paid $70,000 for the rights to Dream, the highest price ever paid in England for the hardcover rights to an American novel, but he would be outbid on later Mailer books.
Twice more before the year ended, Mailer put aside his revisions to Dream. Robert Kennedy, formerly his brother’s and President Johnson’s attorney general, was running in New York against the incumbent Republican senator, Kenneth Keating. His entry in the race came after Johnson had turned aside Kennedy’s effort to be named his running mate in the 1964 election. Previously, Mailer had had reservations about Kennedy, but Kennedy’s civil rights activism led him to write a piece in The Village Voice endorsing him for senator. His logic was this: while both were equally liberal, Keating was dull and “had a face like the plastic dough children play with.” Kennedy was an “active principle,” he said, who had come “a pilgrim’s distance” since his brother’s assassination, and “something compassionate, something witty, has come into the face.” Kennedy won easily and Mailer became his ardent supporter.
President Johnson incited Mailer’s ire more than any politician of the era. He sided with the Kennedy clique in distrusting LBJ, and only grudgingly congratulated him for pushing through the Civil Rights Act. Vietnam was just becoming a major issue—Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in August 1964, which led to a military buildup—and Johnson’s war policies would soon enrage Mailer, but at the end of 1964 it was the president’s prose that riled him. Johnson had written a campaign book, and Mailer agreed to review it. JFK’s prose, he wrote, is to LBJ’s as Tocqueville’s is to Ayn Rand’s. “It is even not impossible,” he said, “that My Hope for America is the worst book ever written by any political leader anywhere.” Mailer also disliked Johnson’s face, which reminded him of a medieval Italian warlord’s, a member of the condottieri, with its “hard, greedy, exceptionally intelligent eyes whose cynicism is spiked by a fierce pride, big fleshy (and acquisitive) nose, thin curved mouth.” Johnson won the election decisively and got Mailer’s vote.
Mailer delivered his revisions of An American Dream just before Christmas. Then he began building “a city of the future” out of Lego blocks with Beverly’s half-brother, Charlie Brown, and Eldred Mowery, a friend from Provincetown. When completed, it would be a scale model of a fantastical half-mile-high city of fifteen thousand apartments housing sixty thousand people. Mailer was proud of it. In January, “Cities Higher than Mountains” appeared in the Sunday Times accompanied by a photo of the assemblage, now called “Vertical City.” The project gave him a much needed break from writing. He enjoyed planning Vertical City (which he based on his memory of Mont St. Michel), but given his aversion to plastic, pressing together ten-thousand-plus Legos made him “feel flat and dead.” The construction—seven feet by five feet by three feet—stood in a corner of Mailer’s Brooklyn apartment for the next forty years. “It was a bitch to dust,” Norris often said. It finally began to crumble as the glue they had applied disintegrated. Members of the family and friends kept a few pieces as souvenirs of the structure, a color photo of which graced the cover of his 1966 collection, Cannibals and Christians.
MAILER WAS ASKED to help William Burroughs and his publisher, Barney Rosset of Grove Press, who were being prosecuted for obscenity in Boston. On January 12, 1965, along with Allen Ginsberg and poet John Ciardi, he testified to the merits of Naked Lunch, specifically about Burroughs’s language: “He catches the beauty and, at the same time, the viciousness and the meanness and the excitement, of ordinary talk—the talk of criminals, of soldiers, athletes, junkies. There is a kind of speech, gutter talk, that often has a fine, incisive, dramatic line to it; and Burroughs captures the speech like no other American writer I know.” The prosecution won the case, but it was reversed by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and as Mailer said later, the decision “changed the literary history of America.” The banning of books for obscenity in the United States was drawing to an end. Looking back on the decision, Mailer was somewhat nostalgic “for the days of oppression, because in those days you were ready to become a martyr, you had a sense of importance, you could take yourself seriously, and you were fighting the good fight.” More than a few times, he humorously fantasized about dying a literary warrior’s death, one that would carry his boat to what he called “the golden islands of posthumous investiture.”
A POET-PROFESSOR FRIEND, Edmund Skellings, who taught at the University of Alaska, invited Mailer to come for a visit. He replied, somewhat outrageously, that he would come if he could be met by the governor at the airport, address a joint session of the Alaska legislature, and meet with the Democratic Party caucus. The speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives, and later U.S. senator, Mike Gravel, was a friend of Skellings’s and an admirer of Mailer, and he arranged for the legislative address and the caucus meeting. Governor William Egan was also willing and invited Mailer to dinner. With all conditions met, Mailer cheerfully agreed to the visit, beginning on April 1. The Alaskans had wanted him to come the previous week, but Mailer’s friend José Torres, a light heavyweight boxer from Puerto Rico, was fighting against the champion, Willie Pastrano, at Madison Square Garden. He had been introduced to Torres by Pete Hamill at the Liston-Patterson fight in 1962. They became lifelong friends.
Another invitation came, one that indicated that the literary establishment had changed its views on Mailer. He was asked by the Publishers’ Publicity Association to participate in a Manhattan press conference as part of the annual National Book Award events. On March 10, he spoke and answered questions for an hour. The first question concerned Saul Bellow, who the day before had been awarded the National Book Award for his novel Herzog. In his acceptance speech, Bellow stated that “our rebels” attribute the low quality of current American literature to “the horrible squareness of our institutions, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough.” Not so, he said, adding that it was “evident that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art.” Bellow may still have been smarting over Mailer’s comments about him in Esquire. In an interview a few months earlier, Bellow had sharply disassociated himself from “the apocalyptic romanticism” of twentieth-century writers who believed “the world is evil, that it must be destroyed and rise again,” writers such as D. H. Lawrence. When the interviewer asked his response to Mailer’s comment about his timidity, he answered: “I’m s
ure I’m not a great writer in Norman Mailer’s light, but then I don’t want to be.”
Asked about Bellow’s speech, Mailer acknowledged that he was one of the writers (along with Ginsberg and Terry Southern, among others) that Bellow had attacked. “But we moral nihilists,” he said, “are responsible for all the real developments in literature. We are the adventurous ones. Conventional morality attacks violence, he said, but better to commit an act of violence against one person than “to curb that impulse and spend 20 years poisoning the lives of everyone around you.” Then he turned to Bellow: “I admire the novel ‘Herzog’ very much. But it is not a book of ideas. There is nothing intellectually new in it. Bellow is mindless. There is depth of feeling in his novel. His humanity gets to you. But his mind is that of a college professor who has read all the good books and absorbed none of them.” He concluded by calling Bellow a “hostess of the intellectual canapé table.” Mailer’s widely quoted remarks understandably poisoned his relations with Bellow.
The publication party for An American Dream took place at the Village Vanguard on March 15. The booze was plentiful as were copies of the book with its distinctive dust jacket showing a stylized American flag with an inset photograph of Beverly Bentley, the model for Cherry. James Jones and Irwin Shaw were there, as were Richard Baron, the publisher of Dial Press, and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the editor who had worked with Mailer on the novel. Miles Davis also came and began “flirting with Beverly.” José Torres saw Mailer getting tense as he watched, and it appeared that he might get into a fight with Davis. Torres was afraid that he might have to step in. “I didn’t want to hit Miles Davis,” Torres recalled, “but I didn’t want him to punch out Norman first. Luckily, Davis just walked away.”
Mailer was surly. Lehmann-Haupt remembered that he was “fairly drunk and moody and deep in some funk. I’ve only seen him that one time in that degree of withdrawn moodiness.” Earlier, he had tried to spar with James Jones, and when Lehmann-Haupt stopped at his table to say goodbye, he threw or spilled his drink when Lehmann-Haupt put out his hand. John Aldridge also attended and recalled that Mailer “was absolutely catatonic.” As he was leaving, he went up to Mailer, “and he looked as though he was completely out on his feet. He was standing, but propped up against the wall,” he said. “I think he was simply plastered.” But the next day when he visited Mailer in Brooklyn, he looked no worse for wear. The jazz musicians who played at the party were at the apartment, Beverly was there, and Anne Barry, whom Aldridge remembered as “a small round girl with chubby cheeks and huge horn-rimmed glasses. There were also two black maids in white uniforms. It seemed distinctly a ménage and very much a Mailer ménage—crowded, busy, vital.” Mailer had put on weight, twenty pounds, Aldridge estimated, and was sharp and alert. Styron’s name came up, and Mailer noted that Styron had been invited to the White House by both Kennedy and Johnson; neither had invited him. He said that Styron’s social ambitions might prevent him from being a great writer. He was aware, certainly, that he faced the same problem, but to him divided loyalties were catnip, irresistible.
After lunch, Mailer walked Aldridge to his Brooklyn hotel, “wearing an old trench coat and looking like Harpo Marx. He shook my hand with real warmth and feeling, as if we had some affinity. I felt we had and felt sad to say good-bye to him. He’s a very lovable and remarkable man, a genuine creative force, undoubtedly the very best we have.” Aldridge’s review of Dream appeared in Life a few days later. Mailer liked it well enough to pay for the reprinting of the heart of it in the same issue of PR containing Elizabeth Hardwick’s negative review. PR’s editor, William Phillips, sent the review to him before publication, and after reading it, Mailer sent him the excerpt from Aldridge’s review and this statement:
An American Dream has received the best and worst reviews of any book I’ve written. Now it is rumored that Elizabeth Hardwick has written a bad review for Partisan. I hasten to shudder. She is such a good writer. I also hasten to furnish for her company a review by John Aldridge which appeared in Life. I cannot pretend I was displeased to see it there, but I’m nearly as pleased to see it here even if I have to pay for the pleasure.
As Mailer noted, the division of opinion on the novel was nearly absolute. There were few mixed reviews. In addition to Hardwick, who called it “a fantasy of vengeful murder, callous copulations and an assortment of dull cruelties,” leading critics and literary figures such as Granville Hicks, Philip Rahv, Roger Shattuck, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and Tom Wolfe said the novel was a conspicuous failure. On the other side of the chasm, in addition to Aldridge, who called it “a religious book” that “dramatizes the various ways a man may sin in order to be saved, consort with Satan in order to attain to God,” was a cadre of enthusiasts: Leo Bersani, Richard Rhodes, Joan Didion, Paul Pickrel, and Richard Poirier, a young academic who would become one of Mailer’s most discerning critics.
Perhaps the most significant thing about the book’s reception is that his erstwhile admirers at Partisan Review, The New York Review of Books, and The Village Voice were negative, while stuffy Harper’s, conservative National Review, flag-waving Chicago Tribune, and, most surprising of all, Henry Luce’s Life, applauded the novel, evidence of the new openness to the outrageous in the country. Even Time had a few good words (Newsweek called it “noxious”). William Buckley sent Mailer an advance copy of the review of Joan Didion, then a young editor at Vogue. He added a note: “Congratulations on a nearly near-perfect novel.” Didion thought it even better, “a novel in many ways as good as The Deer Park, and The Deer Park is in many ways a perfect novel.” As sensitive to social fragmentation as Mailer, she thought the novel caught the mood of the country, which was going through the same kind of change that it had in the 1920s. Dream is “the only serious New York novel since The Great Gatsby,” she said, adding that Mailer and Fitzgerald shared several things: “The notoriety, the devastating celebrity which is probably in the end as nourishing as it is destructive. The immense technical skill, the passion for realizing the gift. The deep romanticism. And perhaps above all the unfashionableness, the final refusal to sail with the prevailing winds.” Mailer wrote to Buckley that it was the “nicest” review he had received. “What a marvelous girl Joan Didion must be.” They met soon after and became friendly. In the 1980s, she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, wrote a screenplay based on The Deer Park, but it was never produced.
Mailer himself was, not uncharacteristically, two-headed about the novel. In a letter to Diana Trilling, he said it was either “an extraordinary piece of crap,” or “the first novel to come along since The Sun Also Rises which has anything really new in it.” He was planning to visit her and Lionel, who was teaching at Oxford for a semester, when he went to England, and had begun anticipating the British reaction to An American Dream. He was secretly enjoying the argument over the novel’s merits, he said, “because no vice of mine could be greater than my desire to create a sensation and be forever talked about. Sometimes I wonder, beloved, if I am the ghost of some long-dead London beauty. Well, well I expect the British will give me a good whipping with the thinnest strings of leather for the outrages I’ve committed in the name of literature.”
The novel sold quite well in the United States and spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, reaching number eight in late April. It was his first bestseller (and first novel) in ten years. At this moment in mid-1965, as the country was sliding into carnival and revolt, Mailer’s situation can perhaps best be summed up by the title of Aldridge’s review—“The Big Comeback of Norman Mailer”—which ended by saying that Dream “may well represent the first significant step the current American novel has taken into fresh territories of the imagination.” The country was undergoing profound change and Mailer was poised to become its chief chronicler and interpreter. Over the next decade, he would write sixteen books, create three experimental films, produce an off-Broadway play, and in 1969, before appearing on the cover of Life, would run for (and lose) the
Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City. Five consecutive books during this period, beginning with The Armies of the Night, would be nominated for the National Book Award. Armies won it, and also a Pulitzer. This would be the most productive, celebrated, and accomplished period of his life.
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