When Selden Rodman, the poet and art collector, came for a visit, Mailer showed him the book he had used as a guide, Fasting Can Save Your Life. He explained that by the fourth day of eating nothing and drinking only water, you lose your appetite, and “all your poisons are coming out as sweat.” The regimen was soothing, he said. “I began to get actually calm! No temper, no fighting anymore.” This clarity of mind made him think fasting might be beneficial for schizophrenics. Rodman watched Mailer spar, and he jogged along with him. At lunch one day, Carol told Rodman about the time Mailer had rushed to get his rifle to shoot a pesky raccoon, but then hesitated. “I, the great macho,” Mailer added, couldn’t pull the trigger.
He did no writing that summer, although he did begin to assemble his magazine work of the previous five years into a collection titled Existential Errands. Over 125,000 words in length, it contains “Ego,” essays on filmmaking, theater, and bullfighting, and a sampling of reviews and interviews. Departing from his method in the earlier miscellanies, he made no attempt to write a set of prefaces. He told Yamanishi that he “just lay fallow like an old field. But now I feel the stirrings of literary work. It would be nice if the time has come to begin a long book.” That summer he made some forays into Egyptian history and mythology. The two books that led him in this direction were André Schwarz-Bart’s novel The Last of the Just (especially the first thirty pages), and Will Durant’s chapter on ancient Egypt in The Story of Civilization. In early 1972, he would begin “the Egyptian novel,” and continue work on it for the next ten years, breaking away only when unable to resist some contemporary phenomenon. He would be forty-eight in January 1971, and was more than ready to begin.
After the children left, Mailer intended to get to work, but two public depictions of him, one comic and one not, made him too angry to write. The September 1971 issue of Esquire contained “My Mailer Problem,” Germaine Greer’s account of her various interactions with him. The cover bothered him more than her essay. Given his generally raspy, sometimes flirtatious relationship with Greer, it seems to have been almost inevitable that they would clash. Mailer, decked out in a gorilla suit, holds a miniature Greer, smiling seraphically, in his simian hands: King Kong Mailer and Fay Wray Greer. A year earlier, Harold Hayes had written to Mailer apologizing for the way Esquire had treated him, and promised “empathetic treatment” in the future. In his reply, Mailer recounted a recent conversation with an Esquire editor about a possible article on Fidel Castro. Mailer told the editor what would happen if he took the assignment.
I would spend two months getting ready to do the piece and a lot of time in Cuba and then I would work at writing the piece for another few months and maybe it would be the best thing I’d ever done and then Esquire would print a picture of Fidel Castro on the cover with Richard Nixon’s asshole installed on his forehead. And the kid said, “Do you really think Esquire would do that?” And I said, “Don’t you?”
He ended his letter by saying that there was a “philosophical gulf” between him and Hayes. The gulf widened after the King Kong cover appeared, and Mailer appeared in Esquire only a few times over the next twenty years. His allegiance was transferred to Playboy.
THE OTHER, MUCH more painful, depiction was a work by Vidal. In a July 1971 review of Patriarchal Attitudes by Eva Figes, Vidal linked Mailer with Henry Miller and Charles Manson, who had recently been convicted of masterminding the murders of nine people in California, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate. Vidal’s stated contention is that men hate women, and the three named men are emblematic of this loathing: “The Miller-Mailer-Manson man (or M3 for short) has been conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons; at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed.” During the Puritan era, “M3 was born, migrated to America, killed Indians, enslaved blacks, conned women.” In an interview the year before, Vidal had called Mailer a “deranged” American Legion commander; now he likened him to a “VFW commander in heartland America” who sees women “as a creature to be used for breeding.” Mailer seethed; he said he felt something blow in his brain. Instead of attempting to show that there were “startling and frightening similarities” between Mailer and Manson, he said, Vidal spoke of M3 as if it were an established fact. Mailer looked forward to engaging his erstwhile friend.
Torres’s book was to be published on October 15, and Mailer came up with the idea of a televised boxing exhibition to promote it. He contacted Dick Cavett and it was agreed that a prizefight ring would be created for Cavett’s program. On the program, aired October 7, he tried hard to hit Torres, a great defensive boxer, with a telling blow, and failing, took more than he gave, which was his boxing style. At one point, Torres was concerned that he had hurt Mailer with a punch, and paused, but his opponent was okay. Later, Torres called his former manager, Cus D’Amato, and told him, “Cus, I hit him hard in the stomach and he didn’t go down. Not hard, but hard.” Mailer wrote to his Uncle Louis and Aunt Moos that he had “boxed three moderately confident two-minute rounds with him, and I hope my enemies and detractors gnash their teeth. I know my friends did.” For many friends and foes, the exhibition seemed to be an attempt to link himself with Hemingway, which it certainly was, in part. But Mailer’s deeper view, as noted in his comments on Hemingway’s suicide, was that Papa was not particularly brave; rather, “the truth of his long odyssey is that he struggled with his cowardice.” So did Mailer, who saw the match with Torres as another rung on the ladder out of his fears. He wrote the following about Hemingway’s boxing: “There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will.” Hemingway was the latter, he said.
Mailer did not do a great deal of writing in 1971, but he published more titles than in any other year of his career: Of a Fire on the Moon had come out in January; King of the Hill (a paperback edition of “Ego” with photographs) in April; The Prisoner of Sex in May; Sting Like a Bee, with his preface, in September; Maidstone in early October; The Long Patrol, a 739-page collection of selections from twelve Mailer books, edited by Bob Lucid, appeared at the end of October; and in December, a paperback edition of Deaths for the Ladies, with a new introduction. Lucid’s edited collection of critical essays, Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work, which opened the floodgate of comment on his work, was also published in 1971. Mailer especially liked Lucid’s comment that although Mailer had yet to write a single work that would put him in the company of Faulkner or Hemingway, “he has accumulated a body of work which can be taken to have an overall unity—Mailer himself has often remarked on this unity—and which so considered is fine enough to be called an actual realization of Mailer’s soaring aspiration.” What remained to be accomplished, Lucid concluded, was “a huge novel, vast as his imagination is demonstrably vast.”
Twice more before the end of the year, he found himself in the public eye. Dotson Rader asked him to participate in a “Remember the War” benefit rally at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. The Episcopal bishop, Paul Moore Jr., welcomed the antiwar coalition. Rader, who was a close friend of Tennessee Williams’s, had also convinced the playwright to take part. Mailer decided to stage his one-act play, D.J., adapted from Why Are We in Vietnam? For this performance, Rip Torn, Beverly Bentley, and her boyfriend, Paul Guilfoyle, played the key roles. Six thousand people packed the church, and Mailer’s play followed speeches by Gloria Steinem and Williams. “It was a disaster,” Rader wrote. “Tennessee walked out halfway through the play’s performance, furious at hearing such filthy language profaning a great Christian house of worship.” Mailer was pleased with the event and told the crowd that it was “the first time in my life that students, a peace movement, ever succeeded in shifting a major empire from its military aims.”
According to Rader, the bishop almost lost his job as outraged Episcopalians around the country complained about what they regarded as a sacrilege. “It was intense,” the bishop said. “They wanted my head.” Williams was so distraugh
t by the situation that he never appeared at a political event again. Mailer wrote to Rader after the event to ask “why Tennessee acted like a ruptured dingleberry that night and give my regards to the Bishop, who is a gentleman.” But a few weeks later, he wrote a mea culpa letter to the bishop, saying, “I should have had the wit to recognize that the humor would be lost in the caverns of a public address system and that each word would quiver like a psychotic animal.” Years later, Rader visited Moore when he was dying, and the bishop asked about Mailer. He told Moore he would send him Mailer’s novel The Gospel According to the Son, which he said was “the best book I’ve ever read about Jesus.” Moore answered, “I know. I read it.”
His other moment in the public eye was his public debate with Gore Vidal on The Dick Cavett Show. The December 1, 1971, program was his most memorable television appearance, one that challenged the rules of the talk show. Appearing with him and Vidal was Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s longtime Paris correspondent, who was seventy-nine at the time. Before the show, Mailer had had several drinks at a publication party and was well oiled as he waited in the Green Room. Vidal caressed the back of Mailer’s neck and got a slap to the cheek, which Vidal returned. Then Mailer head-butted him “between half and three-quarter throttle,” after which Vidal called him crazy and left the room. Mailer came on stage after Vidal and Flanner. Cavett described his entrance: “His hands were fists and carried high, and he had the tousled look of having visited a favorite bar or two en route. His suit was disheveled, his bow to Miss Flanner courtly, and his refusal to shake Vidal’s extended hand caused a murmuring in the audience.” Mailer’s plan was to confront Vidal about the review, but he undercut himself by passing a copy of the magazine to Vidal and ordering him to “read what you wrote.” Vidal demurred, and then Flanner leaned over to whisper something to him. Mailer complained about this breach of decorum.
MAILER: Hey, Miss Flanner, are you workin’ as the referee or as Mr. Vidal’s manager? [laughter] I’m perfectly willing to accept you in either role . . . my mind is fragile, and I find it very hard to think, and if you’re muttering in the background, it’s difficult.
FLANNER: I made only the slightest mutter. [laughter] You must be very easily put off center.
MAILER: It’s true, you made only the slightest mutter.
FLANNER: A tiny mutter.
MAILER: Yes, yes, but I listen to you spellbound.
FLANNER: I won’t bother you anymore. [laughter]
Mailer reported later, according to Cavett, that after this exchange “he began to wonder whether anything he did was going to work, and that he made a small vow never to drink again before going on TV.”
Louis Menand summed up the situation at this juncture: “Mailer was entitled to think that he had wrestled with the questions raised by the women’s movement honorably, and that Vidal was high-handedly slandering him; but he was unable, in the condition in which he had entered the ring, to lay a glove on his opponent. Vidal feigned perplexity at Mailer’s distress, joined forces with Flanner (who clearly found him très gentil), and made Mailer look ridiculous the way a cat makes a dog look ridiculous.” At this point, Mailer went after Cavett.
MAILER: Why don’t you look at your question sheet and ask a question?
CAVETT: Why don’t you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don’t shine.
[Following this exchange, wild, sustained laughter. Mailer, eager to reply, can only stab the air with his finger until it subsides.]
MAILER: Mr. Cavett, on your word of honor, did you just make that up, or have you had it canned for years, and you were waiting for the best moment to use it?
CAVETT: I have to tell you a quote from Tolstoy?
[Mailer turns his chair away from the others and to the audience.]
MAILER: Are you all really, truly idiots or is it me?
[A chorus replies, (You!) Then applause.]
The rules of talk shows at that time were as strict as the codes of a Cistercian monastery, and as the television audience watched in amazement, Mailer flouted them, pushing the genre in a new direction. He assumes, or tries to assume, the host’s position as moderator, punctures the format’s drawing-room civility, brings in private quarrels, and roundly insults the other guests. “Finally,” as one television historian has pointed out, “Mailer also challenges the studio audience. He refuses to let it play its role as an invisible surrogate for the audience at home, an unquestioned presence and responsive but essentially silent chorus to the talk on the stage. Mailer forces the audience to articulate its own position.” He was booed more than once.
Writing to a friend a few weeks after the show, Mailer said that he had “never received so many letters on any single thing in my life, and well-written or pretty poorly, sympathetic or critical, what gets me is that they are penetrating.” As one correspondent wrote to him: “The studio audience was not aware (monitors notwithstanding) of the stark terror in Vidal’s eye and your own basilisk glance. And, if they had read his article in The New York Review they would have noted his woeful sense of wrong-doing.” Mailer said he had been charged up that night “to meet any one of ten people (like Germaine Greer, you know, who has been putting ice-picks in my wax doll all summer) and Gore happened to be the one; but I think I would have commenced an ulcer in my stomach that night if I had found myself on the show playing ping-pong with Gore.” Television critics, for the most part, raved about the show. The New York Post critic said the program was “the kind of plain-spoken talk-show that all three networks should be carrying, free of the incessant stars plugging plays and movies and records with inconsequential small-talk. Call the Cavett show with Vidal and Mailer nothing less than honest.” Mailer wouldn’t see Vidal again until 1977.
“PROVINCETOWN IS BEAUTIFUL now: grey days with lights of pearl and sunlight with pink and blue of diamonds,” he wrote to his Cape Cod friend Eddie Bonetti, adding that he and Carol would spend the winter there. “It is five years since I tried fiction,” he said. “Who knows if the steam is there?” If there was no economic pressure, “I wouldn’t write for another two years.” He had to produce 100,000 words to get another payment from Little, Brown. To bring in some money in the meantime, he had come to an understanding with Life about writing about the upcoming political conventions. He also contracted with a professional agency to arrange speaking engagements at various colleges and universities, where he was much sought after. Underwriting Maidstone (in part by selling most of his Village Voice shares) had proven to be the worst financial mistake of his life. “I was looking for fuck you money,” he told his cousin Basil Mailer (son of Uncle Louis and Aunt Moos) “and was ready to gamble my all on my ability to make a million dollars profit.” What he also disliked about the ordeal ahead was that writing “is so bad for your vanity. You get fat; you get soft; you get out of condition; and it takes you a number of drinks at a party before you feel even moderately agreeable.” A small wave of self-pity came over him as he commenced writing.
In another letter, he gave a clue to the kind of book he was embarking on. “I have come to a place where I think it is almost impossible to go on with a novel unless one can transcend the domination of actual events—invariably more extraordinary and interesting than fiction.” Accordingly, the locus Mailer chose for his new novel is the reign of Ramses IX, an obscure pharaoh, who ruled from 1123 to 1104 B.C. As Lucid argued in 1986, Mailer was “following his navigator toward a novel that he himself found bewildering: a novel set so far back in time as to be out of history altogether.” Moving back over three thousand years gave him the freedom to create a society unfettered by the ruling beliefs of Western culture—Judaic monotheism, Christian compassion, Faustian progress, romantic love, and Freudian guilt. He knew it was time to write the novel of his life, or give it up and be satisfied with the primacy first accorded him by Robert Lowell: the nation’s finest journalist.
Another prompting, a bit more than a nudge, came from a new critical study by Richard Poirier, who
had already given Mailer’s work high praise in an essay in his collection The Performing Self. Mailer had liked it well enough to write to Poirier’s publisher in April 1971 to say he was “on his way to becoming America’s first authoritative critic in many a year.” By then, Poirier was writing a critical study of Mailer, and shortly afterward sent him the manuscript for his response, which Mailer provided, prompting Poirier to thank him for the “detailed usefulness of your comments.” He ended his letter by saying that when Mailer was “writing or talking about writing there’s no one alive who is better.” This mutual esteem notwithstanding, Mailer undoubtedly read a troubling summative statement in Poirier’s book, Norman Mailer, published in 1972. Despite the merit of his hugely varied books, Poirier says, “Mailer now is like Melville without Moby-Dick, George Eliot without Middlemarch, Mark Twain without Huckleberry Finn.” In Mailer’s recent work—Of a Fire on the Moon and The Prisoner of Sex—Poirier said, he seems locked into a system of dualisms and needs to escape. He could escape, Poirier says, because he is an inveterate critic of his past efforts, and so “is always implicitly proposing for himself some fresh start in the future.” Mailer later acknowledged to Poirier that he got this message, but there would be no departure from his system. It was at age 49 a permanent reflection of his double selves.
After only five weeks of work, Mailer broke away from the novel. Over the next three weeks, he spoke at two dozen universities. He showed Maidstone at almost every stop, and also got into some heated discussions about Women’s Liberation. The crowds were large, and he felt like “a carpetbagger because each day you pick up a fat lecture fee.” Mailer told Lucid that he felt something was wrong with his approach to college audiences. Lucid wrote back to say that unlike the students of the 1960s, who were sympathetic to the new order promoted by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the SDS, their younger brothers and sisters were more worried about graduating with marketable skills and were less interested in drugs than careers. Writing about ancient Egypt was not a bad idea at this juncture, Lucid said.
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