Mailer intended that “The Boat of Ra,” the second novel of his planned trilogy, would begin with the explosion that concludes Ancient Evenings. In “The Last Night,” his 1963 short story, a lone spaceship is propelled out beyond the sun’s gravity by a series of planned nuclear detonations that destroy the earth, sending “a scream of anguish, jubilation, desperation, terror, ecstasy” across the heavens. Aboard are eighty humans and some animals seeking a new home in distant galaxies. Most of the novel, beginning with this story, would take place aboard the ship. Meni will be aboard, reincarnated in one of the survivors of earth, which has been ravaged by corruption, plagues, and wars. Humans may have been “mismated with earth,” and “the beauty that first gave speech to our tongues commands us to go out and find another world,” one where the power of the word will have primacy. Mailer’s short story ends with “a glimpse of the spaceship, a silver minnow of light, streaming into the oceans of mystery, and the darkness beyond.” A decade later in the mid-1990s, he and Norris would collaborate on several versions of a screenplay based on this story, the last attempt to salvage something of the unwritten trilogy.
The final novel of the three, “Of Modern Times,” would introduce a last reincarnation of Menenhetet-Meni, now known as “Norman Mailer.” After the account of his conception and early years (taken from “The Book of the First-Born”), he would grow into the writer who would write Ancient Evenings, thus completing the circle. Mailer saw that it would be a vainglorious mistake to lay this out when the first novel was published, to reveal that Menenhetet was a fictional forebear or that Meni would fulfill “the power of the word” aboard the spaceship. He also didn’t know if he could pull it off, and as we now know, he could not.
Poirier was astute in ending his review by stating that what undergirded Ancient Evenings was “the desire, once and for all, to claim some ultimate spiritual and cultural status for the teller of tales, the Writer.” Poirier calls it “his most audacious book.” Ricks also found it to be a terrifically risky book, but endorsed Mailer’s gamble by quoting a passage from T. S. Eliot about another risk taker, Harry Crosby, the sun-worshipping American writer and editor who died in a murder-suicide pact in 1929: “Of course one can ‘go too far’ and except in directions in which we can go too far there is no interest in going at all; and only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out just how far one can go.”
Upon publication the novel jumped onto the bestseller list and stayed there for seventeen weeks before dropping off in mid-August. Without having read it, a Swedish publisher paid $100,000 for rights. It went for $120,000 in England. Other foreign editions brought in another half million. The paperback—sold to Warner for $501,000—did even better, reaching number two on the bestseller list the following spring. When income from foreign and subsidiary rights—over $750,000—is added to U.S. sales, the novel “earned out,” recouped its hefty advance.
Mailer’s pride was injured enough by the negative reviews for him to strike back at the novel’s detractors. He assembled negative excerpts from reviews of four of his novel’s major detractors and added to them ripe snippets from rotten reviews of four classic works: Moby-Dick, Anna Karenina, Les Fleurs Du Mal, and Leaves of Grass. Printed on poster board under the headline HIDEOUS REVIEWS, the assemblage was distributed to major bookstores as a counter display. A sampling: Captain Ahab is “a monstrous bore”; Tolstoy’s masterpiece is “sentimental rubbish”; Baudelaire’s poems are “filth and horror”; Leaves of Grass is “a mass of stupid filth.” For Ancient Evenings, he selected Benjamin DeMott’s pronouncement that the novel is a “disaster,” followed by James Wolcott’s “a muddle of incest and strange oaths . . . reducing everything to lewd, godly, bestial grunts”; Rhoda Koenig’s condemnation of “the vanity that permeates the entire work”; and Eliot Fremont-Smith’s summary: “holistic poop.”
The novel’s flaws—a tortured point of view, massive digressions, and the curtailed depiction of Menenhetet’s later lives—are balanced by its strengths, most notably the heroic ethos of the early reign of Ramses II and the story of Isis regenerating Osiris, which prefigures Ramses’ victory at Kadesh. Obscured by the narrative clutter is any clear sense of what critic Robert Begiebing, the novel’s finest interpreter, says is Mailer’s chief theme and “the deepest structural principle” of the novel: “the tragic conflict between vitality and entropy.” Ramses II does not share his victory at Kadesh with his generals, builds monument after monument to his personal glory (Ramses is Ozymandias to the Greeks), and treats his comrade-at-arms, Menenhetet, shamefully. Evil begets evil. “Ramses II,” Begiebing says in summation, “fails to maintain his earlier power as an Osirian king of fertility and civilization whose lands, people, and political systems all depend on him for continuous productivity and harmony.” Except for the brief final chapters, the novel ends bleakly. But Ancient Evenings was only the first phase of the dialectic for Mailer; Purgatorio precedes Paradiso. It seems likely that he planned to demonstrate counterpoint and resolution in the next two novels. We do know, however, that the “The Boat of Ra” would begin at the lowest point of entropy—the destruction of the planet—after which a saving remnant would re-create human life on a new planet. The final novel, “Of Modern Times,” we can speculate, would depict a return to Osirian harmony and vitality.
A year after the novel appeared, Philip Bufithis sent Mailer an essay he had published praising aspects and parts of the novel, especially the opening where Mailer displays a consciousness “not met with in any other fiction. The reader is pulled into the Ka’s strange cares and yearnings as it painfully orients itself to the shock of its nonmortal existence and meets the grim, awesome Ka of Menenhetet.” Bufithis takes reviewers to task for deciding that Ancient Evenings is a study of decadence, instead of recognizing that Mailer is “inveighing against American parochialism” by writing what might be “the most olfactory novel ever written.” It was “his way of assailing America’s ongoing obsession with sanitizing nature out of more and more areas of life.” But he finds fault with the lack of “richness, radiance, and imagination” in many of Mailer’s metaphors, and sees other weaknesses, the most important of which is characterization: “Its people are insufficiently people. They are not felt presences. Their emotions, therefore, seem empty. Graphic and frequent, for example, as the novel’s sexual episodes are, they remain tepid.”
Given Mailer’s belief in the primacy of character over plot in fiction, the essay, coming from Bob Lucid’s former graduate student, must have been painful to read. He wrote back to Bufithis right away, and said that his criticism “is, I fear, all too good. I confess it’s close to my own evaluation of the book when I feel depressed at all. I failed to ignite in every corner of the conception.” Mailer’s candor about a work that he described on publication as “the best book I’ve ever written” may seem extraordinary, but he was keeping faith with the pledge he made forty years earlier in his Harvard journal to probe for and admit to his sins and failures. His views shifted somewhat, however, especially after reading Begiebing’s laudatory essay on the novel, published in 1989. He wrote to him to say that it was “the best thing I’ve read so far on that weighty tome and I was pleased at the thoroughness and insight, and—dare I say it?—the understanding you brought to it.” In later years, when asked to name his best books, as he did on several occasions, Ancient Evenings was usually on the list, along with The Naked and the Dead, An American Dream, The Armies of the Night, The Executioner’s Song, and Harlot’s Ghost.
HOWEVER HAMPERED BY the first person point of view in Ancient Evenings, Mailer was not ready to abandon it. He used the same perspective—minus the telepathy exercised by Meni—in his next novel, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, a murder mystery set in contemporary Provincetown. It is narrated by Tim Madden, a thirty-eight-year-old bartender with literary ambitions who spent three years in prison for selling cocaine. As Mailer explained after completing the novel, the first person was amenable because a good novel
, he said, “can come out of the simplicity of an interesting, intelligent voice, full of unexpected turns and agreeable perceptions.” Madden’s colloquial American is welcome after the orotund locutions of Menenhetet. Conversant with literary and philosophical topics, Madden is well traveled on both sides of the tracks. He attends séances, collects coincidences, and is sensitive to the stark beauty of the Provincetown Spit, which he describes as “the fine filigree tip of the Cape [that] curls around itself like the toe of a medieval slipper.” All of his senses are unsheathed, especially his olfactory abilities, which come close to matching those of Menenhetet. His vision is sharp enough to distinguish among the dozen shades of dun in the winter woods of the Cape; and his ears subtle enough to discern “the rustle along the beach that comes with the turning of the tide.” He lives on the water side of Commercial Street in the quiet East End of town (near, therefore, to 627 Commercial Street, the three-story brick house Mailer rented from 1970 to 1972 and purchased in the early 1980s). The house is owned by Madden’s wealthy wife, Patty Lareine, who on the “drear” November morning on which the novel opens, has been gone for twenty-four days. She has left him for a tall, powerful black man, a sexual athlete named Bolo.
Provincetown has a summer crowd of tourists, artists, college kids, a large LGBT contingent, and assorted eccentrics. It’s a party town, but it also has some real history, and its colonial roots are impeccable since the Pilgrims spent three miserable weeks on the dunes near Race Point before settling in Plymouth. They made landfall on November 11, 1620, the Mailers’ wedding day 360 years later. He liked to give lectures on the town’s history to visiting friends, sometimes while standing before the observation window at the top of the Pilgrim Monument, a 252-foot stone tower that resembles the one at the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence. Dotson Rader recalled hearing such a lecture a few years before Mailer died.
He climbed, I mean he literally pulled himself up the steps, and we stood on this platform that overlooks the cape. I was very excited listening to a spiel that he had given probably five hundred times to other people that had been up there. He was very proud of Provincetown. And he was going on about this thing, and he was making this point. He was making this very strong, almost angry, point, a very emphatic point that Provincetown was the first place they landed. That the whole Pilgrim story was wrong, and that somehow Provincetown had been robbed of its true place in American history. And I thought listening to him, “Norman always had gripes, but this really hits home to him.” It’s the first time, after all the time I knew Norman, that it suddenly occurred to me that Brooklyn wasn’t really home to him emotionally anymore. Home to him was Provincetown.
The oldest art colony in the United States, Provincetown also has white gabled houses and dune shacks, a dozen fine fish-and-chowder restaurants, and a huge harbor running the length of the town. There is also a sizable community of Portuguese fishermen, many of whom Mailer had known for years and drank with in local watering holes. In the fall, as the weather changed, people stayed indoors, as Madden explains,
with everyone gone, the town revealed its other presence. Now the population did not boil up daily from thirty thousand to sixty, but settled down to its honest sentiment, three thousand souls, and on empty weekday afternoons you might have said the true number of inhabitants must be thirty men and women, all hiding. There could be no other town like it. If you were sensitive to crowds, you might expire in summer from human propinquity. On the other hand, if you were unable to endure loneliness, the vessel of your person could fill with dread during the long winter.
All that remains are some year-rounders, including a clutch of burnt-out cases. One of these is Madden, who drinks alone every night at the bar of a local restaurant, the Widow’s Walk. Christopher Ricks compares him to the hero-villains of Jacobean tragedy who have been “in complicity with evil. Like them he has wit and humour and courage, and a little grain of conscience keeps him sour.” Distraught but not despairing, he sips bourbon, writes in his notebook, and recalls how twenty years earlier, “held in the grip of an imperative larger than myself,” he tried to climb the side of the monument. Near the top, he froze and had to be rescued by the fire department. The effort buoyed his spirit, however, and he slept better afterward. “The importance of the journey must be estimated by my dread of doing it,” he concludes. Risk taking is the engine of Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which Mailer often referred to as an “entertainment.”
Locked into what he calls “the dungeon of my massive self-absorption,” Madden stumbles through day 24. In the early evening he returns to the Widow’s Walk. There, while brooding over his decamped blond wife, he meets another blonde, Laurel Oakwode, and her escort, a bisexual lawyer named Lonnie Pangborn, in town to look at real estate. They drink, Oakwode and Madden flirt, and all three leave together. The next morning, Madden finds himself with a ferocious hangover, a splintered memory of seeing his wife the night before, another of Oakwode, an erection premised on it, and a new, crusty, tattoo on his arm—a heart enclosing “Laurel.” The telephone rings and Police Chief Alvin Luther Regency, a macho Vietnam veteran who collects guns and knives, tells him to clean up the passenger seat of his car. Madden finds it covered with blood. At a meeting with Regency—who describes himself as half enforcer, half maniac—the chief suggests that he check his marijuana cache buried in a burrow in the woods of nearby Truro. He does and is terrified to find a plastic bag containing the severed head of a woman, a blonde. Unable to look at the face, he reburies it. The next time he checks, it is gone. When he checks again, there are two blond heads.
The situation at this juncture is compelling, worthy of novels by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, which he read before beginning Tough Guys. Madden has many questions: Did he have sex with Oakwode? Did Pangborn, who has gone missing, kill Laurel after watching them have sex? Did Regency, who somehow knew the burrow’s location, kill Laurel or both women? The darkest possibility is that Madden himself is responsible. He can’t remember. As he sorts through the possibilities, he finds that his mind “is a book where pages are missing—no, worse, two books, each with its own gaps.” One part of him wants to solve the crime, one doesn’t.
The first person point of view works smoothly for the novel’s first hundred pages, as Madden provides backstory—a tissue of coincidences—and ponders the identity of the decapitator(s). But from that point on Mailer runs into the same problem he encountered in The Deer Park: first person narrators can’t be everywhere at once—unless they possess the clairvoyance of Meni. Because Madden was not present at many key events, Mailer was forced to use long conversations between him and several of the principal characters to get answers to his questions, along with detailed descriptions of their sexual activities. “The book is interested,” Mailer said, in “the spectrum of male behavior,” and hetero-, homo-, and bisexuality are explored more thoroughly in Tough Guys than anywhere else in his work. In an interview in 1983 Mailer said that his plots never came easy. “I have to work them out bit by bit, and eke them out.” In this novel, the plot is the weakest element. The last third, he admitted, “drifts heavily and ponderously from revelation to revelation.”
There was no time for meaningful revision. “I had been trying to start all year and I hadn’t been able to get near it,” he said. “And it was as if suddenly my mind cleared. It was one of those joke situations where they give Popeye the can of spinach. It took 61 days.” With the exception of a day off to bring Michael to Harvard for his freshman year, he worked from eleven to nine every day through the late summer of 1983. During this time, his relationship with Little, Brown began to fray, and before he was done with the novel, he had severed his ties, quite amiably, with the firm he had been with for fifteen years and seven books. As he explained in one of his regular letters to Jack Abbott, Little, Brown had suggested that he find a new publisher. The arrangement “was too rich for their blood,” he said, “and in more ways than one.” Scott Meredith said that Mailer felt that havin
g a New York–based publisher (Little, Brown was in Boston) was desirable.
In early August, Mailer signed a four-novel deal with Random House, reported in the New York Times to be $4 million. His new editor, Jason Epstein, said, “I don’t know where that figure came from, certainly not from us,” and called it “Mailer’s agent’s advertisement for himself.” But he acknowledged that Mailer could make over $3 million, all told, from the four novels—nonfiction books would require separate negotiations. The key provision of the contract, continued from Little, Brown, called for a $30,000 monthly advance against royalties. Mailer would collect it from Random House, his last publisher, for twenty-four years. When annual income from other projects—essays and screenplays, readings and lectures—was added, he would finally be able to pay his debts and support his family, although he carried sizable mortgages on his homes to the end of his life. “Money,” Madden says, “was the game other people played that I tried to avoid by having just enough not to play it.” The same was true for Mailer.
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