EIGHT
THIRD PERSON PERSONAL: ARMIES AND AFTER
Norman Mailer, professional writer and amateur boxer, climbed in the ring to congratulate José Torres, professional boxer and amateur writer, a moment after he defeated Willie Pastrano for the light heavyweight championship of the world at Madison Square Garden, March 30, 1965. Mailer was as jubilant as Torres. He would soon trade writing lessons for boxing instruction from Torres, the first Latin American to win this championship, and a heroic figure among Puerto Ricans. When financing for the fight seemed in doubt, Mailer had offered to lend him money to guarantee it, a considerable sum, but ultimately the original backers came through. The gesture endeared him to Torres. After the bout, there was a victory party at 142 Columbia Heights. Harry G., Mailer’s Bellevue friend, was the bartender for the large crowd, which included Gay Talese and Pete Hamill—both good friends of Torres’s—and also Truman Capote and James Baldwin. Barney was there—but not Fan—and enjoyed himself thoroughly as he always did at his son’s parties. Torres, in a tuxedo, arrived late with his wife, Ramona, and Mailer “greeted the new champ in the lambency of a triumphant party, and they embraced like two new-born orphans,” as another writer present, Brock Brower, recalled. A day later, Mailer flew to Alaska for his five-day visit.
Mailer received enthusiastic applause for his off-the-cuff speech to a joint session of the Alaska legislature in Juneau. Then he flew to Anchorage, where he appeared on local television with Senator Gravel and the two professors who hosted his visit, Edmund Skellings and Donald Kaufmann. At a reception in a downtown hotel, locals came to meet Mailer. As Kaufmann recalled, they glared at Mailer and said things like “Where’s that tough guy?” and “Where’s that wife-knifer?” At one point, he got into a fight, but security personnel broke it up. Early the next day, he and the two professors flew on a small plane to Fairbanks, the second largest city.
When they arrived, Mailer took a breath of the crystalline air of the city and was ecstatic. “I can breathe here. You can see for miles with clear vision,” he said. Ralph Ellison met them at the university, and for the next three days the two writers met with students and addressed audiences assembled for a festival of the arts. As he usually did, Mailer threw himself into meetings with students. He nicknamed the state “God’s Attic,” and said it had an extraordinary characteristic: “The future of this state is totally unknown. But it is an unknown in extremes, for the end result will be one of two opposites, the best or the worst.” He was aware that the hawkish state was generally in favor of the Vietnam War, and that Fairbanks was Alaska’s “Sin City,” where military personnel came on R&R. He also knew that he was close to the magnetic North Pole, especially after he saw a display of the aurora borealis. In words that anticipated his next novel, he told the university audience: “All the messages of North America go up to the Brooks Range. That land above the circle, man, is the land of icy wilderness and the lost peaks and the unseen deeps and spires, the crystal receiver of the continent.” On the return trip to Anchorage, Mailer asked the pilot of the small plane if he could buzz the top of Mount McKinley. The Indians call it Denali, “The Big One.” The pilot agreed and told them the altitude would require them to breathe oxygen through small mouth inhalers. “For twenty long minutes,” Kaufmann wrote, the pilot “made low passes around the peak, and with each pass, buzz, or mind-skimming on Denali’s top, I looked down and wondered what Mailer was imagining or seeing as he sucked oxygen.” Nearsighted and vain about wearing glasses, Mailer nevertheless put on a pair for a better look. “I lost myself,” Kaufmann wrote, “in simultaneous images of Papa Hemingway peering down on Kilimanjaro, seeing a frozen leopard, and Mailer (on Alaskan oxygen plus magic) peering down on Denali.” Would Mailer have written his novel about Alaska, Why Are We in Vietnam?, without these loops around the highest point (20,320 feet) on the continent? Kaufmann, with some justice, thinks not.
Upon his return, he wrote to Diana Trilling to nail down the dates of his and Beverly’s April 28 visit to Oxford. She suggested that they dine in the Oxford faculty dining room, but Mailer had a different idea.
Now what I’d like ideally is a dinner for eight at your house and then perhaps a few more people in afterward. One can’t possibly get to talk to sixteen or twenty people at dinner by any method known to man, and the Senior Common Room, while appealing to the novelist in me, and very suitable and exciting if it should come to pass promises still less in the way of a delight than dinner for eight in that charming small house you seem to possess. Surely even at Oxford people have been known to drop in after dinner. Isn’t that remotely possible.
Trilling wrote to Mailer that the dinner was a great success. Her guests “adored” Mailer and “celebrated you both most shamelessly.”
Dinner parties for Mailer were, ideally, a happy combination of pleasure and diplomacy, good food, plenty of drink, laughter, gossip, debate, flirtation, and the exchange of intelligence. He was a careful social planner and personally assembled his guest lists and seating plans. Lunch and dinner guests were sometimes struck by the semiformal arrangements and the solicitous manner of their host. Steven Marcus remembers Mailer preparing and serving lunch in Brooklyn “in what must be called a lordly fashion,” with the host conducting himself “without affectation as a kind of secular prince.” He drew his guests out in conversation, and was ever eager to hear about their roots, passions, opinions on the events of the day, and the occasional glimpse of an Achilles’ heel. Everyone was expected to contribute. In later years, he sat at the head of the table with a woman on either side, often newcomers, while Norris sat at the opposite end with their male partners. He also made it a point, even at large, loud, and crowded parties to try to speak with each guest for a few minutes. His manners were “exquisite,” Marcus said.
Family dinners were a bit different. Peter Alson (Barbara’s son) recalled his self-consciousness as an adolescent at Uncle Norman’s table.
Being around Norman exacerbated the intensity of the feeling, because he was so fucking brilliant himself that it was impossible to try and share the stage with him. And there’s no question that there was a certain amount of theater in those dinners, an aspect of performance art. And of course Norman was always the red-hot center; he dominated in a way that’s almost impossible to describe except that it was both incredibly fun but at the same time scary and intimidating, especially if you actually dared to take part. There were two things that characterized him: he always listened very intently when someone else spoke, but he also had an extremely short attention span. If you didn’t grab him in the first few sentences you were done. I remember a few times when I started to say something, and ended up trailing off pathetically because I could see that I hadn’t grabbed him.
His uncle liked to be provocative, Alson said, but you “could usually see the twinkle in his eye.” He enjoyed verbal sparring, and “it could be very tough.” But Alson always looked forward to the family dinners “because I knew, knew, I was going to be dazzled in the best possible way. I was going to learn things.” For many people, a family dinner is something to be endured, he said. “In our family it was something to look forward to with glee and excitement.”
Upon his return from England, Mailer flew to California, because he had agreed to speak at a teach-in at Berkeley, part of “Vietnam Days,” May 21–22. The event ran for thirty-six hours with an aggregate live audience of thirty thousand, and was also broadcast on radio station KPFA. There were fifty speakers and entertainers, mainly antiwar, although not because the organizers failed to invite administration officials. The State Department and the South Vietnamese embassy declined invitations, as did pro-war members of the Berkeley faculty. Old Left figures were invited, but they posed so many restrictions—X wouldn’t come if Y was there, So-and-So didn’t like the setup, etc.—that they were excluded. The New Left had replaced the Old. Mailer told Yamanishi it was “the largest audience” he had ever addressed, approximately 10,000.
On Ma
y 21, Mailer began by noting that the citizenry’s “buried unvoiced faith that the nature of America was finally good, and not evil” had over the past months “taken a pistol whipping.” The cause: the most advanced nation in the world was “shedding the blood and burning the flesh of Asian peasants it has never seen.” This was being done, officially, to keep the nations of the Far East from falling one after another—the Domino Theory—under the communist yoke. The communists could only flounder in the nations they conquered, he argued. The real reason for the Vietnam War, he continued, was that the president needed to get the country’s mind off the civil rights movement at home. His fear, he said, is that this “bully with an Air Force” was “close to insanity” brought on by “his need for action.” And so, he said, we stand at a crossroads: “Is this country extraordinary or accursed?” He ended his one-hour speech by urging everyone to attach photos and drawings of Johnson’s face on every surface, on walls and phone booths and billboards. “You, Lyndon Johnson, will see those pictures everywhere upside down, four inches high and forty feet high; you, Lyndon Baines Johnson, will be coming up for air everywhere upside down. Everywhere, upside down. Everywhere. Everywhere.” Realist editor Paul Krassner published the speech in the June issue with an upside-down photo of the president on the cover. Mailer wrote to Yamanishi after the teach-in and said that for the first time in his life he had received “a standing ovation which went on for many minutes.” It was most welcome, he said, because at this stage of his career he was caught between “counter-waves,” of approval and disapproval, and “I am being bounced like a cork at the confluence.”
FIG AND ECEY and their children joined the Mailers in Provincetown that summer. Barbara, now divorced from Larry Alson, joined them. Her new boyfriend, Al Wasserman, a documentary filmmaker (they married in 1968), was also there. Mailer had hoped to do some new writing, but he was mainly enjoying the summer and starting to put together a new collection, consisting mainly of material written after The Presidential Papers. And he was distracted by two of his passions: boxing and protesting the war. In mid-July, before two thousand at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, he gave the same speech he had at Berkeley. Martin Peretz, the Harvard instructor who chaired the teach-in, said the crowd was more than twice as large as the turnout for McGeorge Bundy, President Johnson’s national security advisor. Mailer also produced an entirely new antiwar essay for PR, where it appeared with those of thirteen other intellectuals, including Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, and Susan Sontag. He began the essay by mocking the moderation of the editors: “Three cheers, lads. Your words read like they were written in milk and milk of magnesia. Still your committee didn’t close shop until close after this extraordinary remark: ‘The time has come for new thinking.’ Cha cha cha.” Mailer was all for pouring oil on the fires of antiwar protest, and was now the unappointed spokesman for The Family in this regard.
At the end of July, Mailer made a quick trip to San Juan to see Torres successfully defend his light heavyweight title against a strong contender, Tom McNeely. Muhammad Ali fought in an exhibition match before the main event, and the next day Mailer arm wrestled with him on the balcony of the San Jerónimo Hilton. The photo of the mock contest, with Mailer smiling and Ali appearing to strain mightily, has been reprinted endlessly. Henceforth, Mailer would be identified with Ali, even more so than with Torres. Mailer encouraged the connection and while in San Juan called himself Ali’s “intellectual precursor.”
Also that summer, Mailer was interviewed several times by Brock Brower, a regular contributor to Esquire, who was writing a profile of Mailer for Life. He also interviewed Beverly, Mailer’s parents and sister, and a number of his friends. Mailer was uneasy about the piece, and wondered if Life would actually publish it. If it didn’t, he told Brower, “We would each become quietly famous as a result, and quiet fame is always, repeat always, superior to public renown. How else account for the happy progress of John Updike.” On September 24, Life published “In This Corner, Norman Mailer, Never the Champion, Always the Challenger.” It is now hard to imagine an American writer receiving this kind of attention—Oprah Winfrey notwithstanding—and, with the exception of Hemingway, it was rare enough at the time. William Buckley was impressed enough to devote his National Review column to Brower’s piece, stating that it was “final confirmation” of Mailer’s status. “He is probably,” Buckley said, “the single best-known living American writer.” Two things make him interesting, he said. First, “he makes the most beautiful metaphors in the business,” and second, “he represents present-day America. He expresses their feelings that America today is shivering in desolation and hopelessness, is looking for her identity after a period of self-alienation.” Although Buckley said he would pay “a week’s wages” to avoid listening to anyone who spoke “more predictable nonsense” than Mailer on foreign policy, he nevertheless believed him to be “in his own fashion, a conservative.” He based this judgment on Mailer’s disdain for big government and liberal ideology. Buckley concluded by noting that there was a good deal of hope in Mailer’s “turbulent emotions” although he had scant regard for “the emunctory noises of psychic or physical human excesses” in his novels.
Mailer responded immediately, “What the hell does emunctory mean?” and then turning to Buckley’s comment about a week’s wages: “Sailor Bill, I come close to loving you here. When the hell did you ever earn a week’s wages, you bleeding plutocrat.” Buckley, who was independently wealthy, was then running for mayor of New York on the Conservative Party ticket, and Mailer said he’d consider voting for his old debating partner if he wasn’t such “a hopeless ass on foreign policy.” Buckley wasn’t given much of a chance, but “his flair for arch phrase-making” helped enliven what would have been a dull race for a position that had belonged to Democrats for decades. Asked what he would do if he won, Buckley said, “Demand a recount.” His quixotic campaign rekindled Mailer’s own desire to be mayor. But Mailer was supporting Republican John Lindsay over both Buckley and the Democratic candidate, Abe Beame.
A week before the election, Mailer’s article extolling Lindsay and chiding Buckley appeared on the front page of The Village Voice. Buckley is “majestically unsuited” for the position “since it is possible Old Bill has never been in a subway in his life.” But he was also “majestically suited for spoiling Lindsay’s campaign. Buckley’s personality is the highest Camp we are ever going to find in a mayoralty. No other actor on earth can project simultaneous hints that he is in the act of playing Commodore of the Yacht Club, Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum, Maverick, Savonarola, the nice prep-school kid next door, and the snows of yesteryear.” Mailer was correct about Buckley’s strength. He drew 13 percent of the vote and is given credit by many political observers for nudging Lindsay into a victory over Beame. The two men relished opportunities to tweak each other for perceived errors and vanities. A few years later, Buckley sent a copy of a collection of his columns to Mailer, but did not inscribe it. Knowing that Mailer would look up his name in the index, Buckley wrote next to it, “Hi Norman.”
Another marker of Mailer’s stature at the end of 1965 came in a poll conducted by the New York Herald Tribune Book Week. Richard Kluger, the editor, had written to Mailer and two hundred other leading literary figures, asking them to fill out a form noting the most important works of fiction by Americans in the twenty years after World War II. In his letter, Kluger said that President Johnson “was genuinely pissed off by your piece on him for us,” referring to Mailer’s review of Johnson’s My Hope for America. Douglass Cater, the president’s special assistant, called Book Week and “bawled the hell” out of a staff member for publishing the review two days before the presidential election. “Lady Bird was particularly pissed,” Kluger said. Mailer had again gained the attention of a sitting president and his wife.
When the results of the poll, based on the comments of 117 respondents, were published, Mailer was one of the most mentioned writers, ahead of Hemingway, Flannery O’C
onnor, Styron and Updike, but behind Bellow, Nabokov, Salinger, and Ellison. Kluger sent Mailer the results before publication, and he wrote back to say that there were no surprises. “Just think when Time magazine gets a hold of all this, just think when they start making All-Star teams out of us, just think when they start having mass polls, just think of how James Jones feels to come in behind John Updike, just think how fat Saul’s ass is now (fat as his head) just think of all the needless enemies Ellison has made with no desire at all. You are a warlock, Richard.”
THE MAILERS REMAINED in Provincetown until the beginning of October. Beverly learned she was pregnant several weeks before they returned to Brooklyn. Mailer was calling his new miscellany Cannibals and Christians, his names for two mutant forces in contemporary life arising from the political right and left, respectively. The former stretch from the Republican Party to “the ghosts of the Nazis,” he wrote, and the left covers a spectrum from LBJ to Mao Tse-tung. Mailer’s dualisms are rarely simple and invariably contain vigorous tinctures of their opposite, “the minority within,” to borrow the astute phrase of critic Richard Poirier. A number of reviewers had difficulty understanding the Cannibal-Christian opposition. But, as Poirier noted, the first key to understanding Mailer’s mind (and his life) is to realize that he “is quite unable to imagine anything except in oppositions, unable even to imagine one side of the opposition without proposing that it has yet another opposition within itself” that needs to be discovered and illumined. The collection examines Cannibals and Christians, these “two huge types” and the historical whirlpools from whence, like sea monsters, they have emerged. It contains Mailer’s latest political and Vietnam pieces, his book reviews and literary criticism, three long self-interviews (two of them reprinted from Presidential Papers), and fifty-four poems. The only fictional pieces he could find to include were two previously published short stories.
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