Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Mallory says that she was in love with him and not merely interested in what he could do for her. Perhaps she was. She knew him but superficially, however. Convinced that he was an alcoholic, she took him to one of her AA meetings. He went out of curiosity. He invited her to see a gay porn movie, and she took this as evidence that he was bisexual. Mailer once took Norris to such a film at the Adonis Theater in Manhattan, a well-known gay porn outlet. When the woman selling tickets said to Norris, “Honey, do you know what kind of shows we have here?” Norris, said, “Yes, ma’am, I certainly do.” Dotson Rader was in the balcony when the Mailers came in, and was astounded to see them. He recalled his conversation with Mailer about gay sex.

  When I was very, very young and in New York I knew people like Parker Tyler and Glenway Wescott, Ginsberg and Auden. They were all gay guys older than me. . . . One of the things I was continuously warned about, by Tennessee and others, was homophobia. Norman was on the list. I was warned that he was homophobic. I knew Norman quite well and I never had a sense of that, quite the opposite. I feel he was fascinated, intrigued, by homosexuals and homosexuality. He would go into the very specific, raunchy details, and to me very embarrassing details, about exactly what physically you did as a gay person. And he wanted the moist specifics about the encounter. Sometimes I provided them, sometimes I would get my back up and say this is too much.

  As Mailer explained more than once, when he had two motives, good and bad, for doing something, he felt a surge of energy. He attributed this to God and the Devil, or their minions, who, for their own reasons, agreed on the desirability of the action. He was not singled out for these nudges; he believed that all humans received them, often unknowingly. Later on, he would feel guilt or even self-loathing, but this did not negate his choice, not entirely. Much depended on the results, the fruits, of the action. He told Mike Lennon that he learned something about venality from Mallory and used it in the creation of Chloe, the sexy waitress in the opening chapters of Harlot’s Ghost. “But,” as he told Farbar, “the idea that people can be promiscuous without exploiting their own sensitivity is impossible.” Promiscuity is a trade-off, and while you might gain knowledge, you also “take in waste from the other person’s system.” He continued, saying, “You pay for every last thing you get out of life.”

  Years ago, Calder Willingham told me a story about a situation where he tried every trick to make a woman leave him. Finally she began going with another man. Then he discovered he was jealous. He told this story on himself with great humor, and looked at me and said, “Norman, you can’t cheat life.” He said this in his inimitable Georgia accent. It’s not a remark one hasn’t heard before. But there’s such a thing as hearing a maxim at just the right moment for oneself. Then it goes all the way in. So that remark stayed with me. Whenever I’m trying to work out some sort of moral balance for myself, I find the thought useful.

  Mailer found some kind of moral balance in regard to Mallory, enough to continue with her for almost eight years. Like Faust, he was greedy for knowledge and ready to trade punishment to gain it. “The more prohibited the act, the greater the lure for Mailer,” according to Rader. “He wanted to know everything.”

  IN EARLY 1984 Mailer went alone to Russia on a Parade assignment, traveling there for two weeks in mid-March. He went first to Lithuania, and traveled by train from Kaunas to Vilnius, not far from the towns where his parents were born almost a century earlier. From there he traveled to Leningrad and Moscow. Everywhere he went, he saw the vestiges of World War II’s destruction. Buildings were crumbling, the people looked battered. “It’s a sad place,” he wrote in the Parade piece, “A Country, Not a Scenario.” “I felt as if I were back on the Lower East Side of New York 100 years ago. I could have been watching my grandparents walking by.”

  Schiller, who was in Russia filming Peter the Great, opened some doors for Mailer in Moscow. Mailer wanted to be relatively anonymous, so Schiller got him a room in the massive Rossiya Hotel, near Red Square. His tiny room had a sink and toilet but no bath or shower. Hot water was unreliable. The toilet paper was cut-up newspaper. With the aid of a bottle of vodka, Mailer persisted for three days, but when he could no longer endure the bad food, sandpaper towels, and rocklike soap, he called Schiller. “Get me out of here.” Schiller got him into the majestic National Hotel, overlooking the Kremlin. Built in 1903, the hotel hosted Russian royalty as well as famous artists. What impressed Mailer was that its guests had included Trotsky, Lenin, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Russian secret police. In his year of study under Malaquais, Mailer had learned of the critical role played by Dzerzhinsky’s organization, the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB. He would later write about Dzerzhinsky, an “evil artist” of counterespionage. Schiller got him booked into Room 107, where Lenin had stayed.

  Mailer spent most of his time discovering the capital on his own, but Schiller introduced him to Vladimir Posner, the son of a Russian spy and a spokesperson for the Soviet Union in the 1980s. He also met Genrikh Borovik, a former KGB agent and journalist, who spent many years in the United States as head of Russian news agencies and wrote a book on Soviet double agent Kim Philby. Through them, Mailer met a number of Soviet intelligence figures who explained the structure and operation of the country’s competing spy agencies. The Parade essay contains his initial observations on the KGB and the surveillance of citizens. Russia was much less of a police state than he expected, and he walked around Moscow unimpeded for several hours every day for a week. He met dissidents and questioned them about the reign of terror under the previous regimes. Glasnost, the open and frank discussion of the past, was about to commence under Mikhail Gorbachev, who became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985. In June, he returned to Russia, this time with Norris, and they spent three weeks touring.

  In a letter to Abbott after they returned, Mailer said that he was “lying around and thinking, wondering whether a new book is starting in me.” That summer in Provincetown he did no writing. He gave interviews for Tough Guys Don’t Dance, spent time with his children, swam, relaxed, and spent a month deciding what he would write next. He told a reporter that he had narrowed the field to three possibilities. “The Boat of Ra,” promised to Random House, was the first. Learning enough science to make the intergalactic voyage of a spaceship credible worried him, however. He felt that an understanding of astrophysics, a fast-changing and complex field, would be essential, but giving some realistic notion of traveling at the speed of light would be a challenge.

  The second novel he was considering was “The Castle in the Forest.” It opens in 1945 when a U.S. Army unit arrives at a German castle used as a concentration camp. “The leading characters,” according to Scott Meredith, “are an American Jewish doctor and a German doctor who confront each other and clash over contending philosophies.” In 1954, Mailer had made a false start on this novel, which he then called “The City of God.” The third possibility was a CIA novel. The Russian trips and the end to the Cold War influenced his decision, as did his 1973 essay on Watergate, “A Harlot High and Low.” His continuing obsession with the assassination of JFK played a part, as well as his own opposed identities: family man and philanderer, Left-conservative, activist and observer, rationalist and transcendentalist, to name the most important. All these coalesced in his decision to embark on a huge circumambient novel of the Cold War and the bifurcated lives of spies. His title, Harlot’s Ghost, came later.

  In July, he appeared at the tenth anniversary celebration of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, a Buddhist-inspired educational center. He was invited by Allen Ginsberg, one of the founders, to appear with William Burroughs. A few months earlier Mailer had sent a contribution to a Festschrift for the poet’s sixtieth birthday.

  Years ago I wrote a poem about Allen which went something like—I quote from memory—

  Sometimes I think, “That ugly kike,

  That four-eyed faggot,

  Is the bravest man in America.”
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  Well, over the years, Allen’s gotten considerably better looking and has doubtless earned that most curious position of being a major and near to elder statesman in homosexual ranks and his poetry, bless it, goes on forever.

  Mailer and Ginsberg had become close when both of them were on the antiwar ramparts, but their friendship had begun tentatively. “Ginsberg and I met in a strange way,” Mailer said. “Like scientists who are each working on the same problem—far apart in every other way.” But now, he continued, “I have a lot of respect for him. He is truly one of the few honorable men I have known in the literary world.” He also respected Burroughs, whom he called “the shyest man in the world.” They did not have a close relationship, however. After Burroughs’s death in 1997, Mailer said that he had spent perhaps the equivalent of six evenings with Burroughs, all told. At Naropa, the three men took part in a discussion titled “American Soul? What Is It?” Mailer had warm memories of the session: “We had the damnedest time out in Colorado,” he said. “Being on with Burroughs is like being with W. C. Fields. He is one of the funniest men alive. He can say, ‘It is eighty degrees today in Kansas,’ and the audience is wiped out.” He added that he still admired Naked Lunch.

  Shortly after returning from Colorado, he went to a meeting of the American chapter of PEN, the international association of writers. He had served on the organization’s executive board from 1968 to 1973. On July 25, he was elected president for a two-year term, and would preside over the 1986 International Congress in New York. “I always wanted to be president of something,” Mailer said. For the next eighteen months, he would help plan the world congress, mostly by raising the money to underwrite it.

  THE PEN PRESIDENCY forced Mailer to shelve his writing projects so that he could preside over committee meetings, twist the arms of potential givers, give speeches, and deal with media. One reason he accepted the job was that “men like myself in small towns who’ve been reprobates all their lives go into church work” when they reach sixty. After several years of monkish work, Mailer looked forward to the interactions that went along with the presidency.

  Just as he was beginning his PEN presidency he was elected to the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, a group of 250 distinguished creators in literature, music, art, and architecture. He was installed on December 7, taking the seat of Tennessee Williams, who had recently died. He said he was glad to have Williams’s seat and hoped some of his talent would rub off. Coming on the heels of his election as PEN president, the honor was recognition of his status as “one of the giants—if at times a wounded giant—of our age,” as Arthur Schlesinger said in the official academy citation. He began it by noting that Mailer had “a career of living dangerously.” There would be more risk taking over the remaining twenty-three years of his life. Now, however, Mailer was on the brink of becoming a senior citizen. His knees were sore, his breath getting short. He said that during his first trip to Russia, while crossing Red Square, he saw that everyone was passing him, yet he was walking as fast as he could.

  His oldest children—Susan, Danielle, Betsy, and Kate—had all finished college, Michael was a sophomore and Stephen was in prep school; Maggie and Matt were in high school, and John Buffalo, the youngest, was in first grade. For the first time in twenty years, there were no babies crawling around the floor of 142 Columbia Heights—except when the grandchildren from Chile were visiting. Susan and Marco had their second child, Alejandro, in 1985. Norris now had more time and was doing a lot of painting, including several commissioned portraits. She had several shows, including her first in Little Rock. She introduced Mailer to Hillary and Bill Clinton—now governor of Arkansas—and they got a private tour of the governor’s mansion. Dotson Rader and Pat Kennedy Lawford flew in for Norris’s show and like everyone else were impressed when the Clintons attended the reception at the gallery. Lawford and Mailer saw Clinton as a potential presidential candidate. Hillary also impressed him. Later, he said, “That might be the brightest woman I ever met.”

  Through the spring of 1985, he worked on fundraising for the January 1986 PEN congress. Over two hundred distinguished writers from eighty-five countries were invited, plus eight hundred writers from the United States. Paying for the expenses of the foreign writers was the largest item on the budget. Mailer came up with the idea for a series of readings to be held in the fall of 1985, two writers a week at a Broadway theater that was dark on Sunday evenings. A series ticket would sell for $1,000, and if 1,000 people subscribed, the gross would be $1 million. Even after expenses, the budget for the congress would be covered. Selecting and pairing the writers, all from the United States, would require diplomatic skills of a high order. Mailer began writing letters and making calls.

  There was no way not to include Gore Vidal, whose literary reputation was at its peak. His masterful novel Lincoln, the second volume of a heptalogy covering American history from the founding of the republic through the 1950s, was a bestseller for the latter half of 1984. Mailer had not seen Vidal since their fight at Lally Weymouth’s party seven years earlier and knew that inviting him would require a sensitive rapprochement. Instead of making direct contact, he asked Mickey Knox to speak with him during one of Vidal’s visits to Rome from his home in Rapallo. Find out, he told Knox, “whether his hatred for me is still essentially one of his first passions.” Mailer now shared an editor, Jason Epstein, with Vidal, and Mailer thought Epstein “for his own self-interest, if nothing other, would like the feud to end.” He asked him to float the idea to Vidal about appearing at one of the fundraisers. A month later, Mailer wrote to Vidal. “Our feud, whatever its roots for each of us, has become a luxury,” he said. “It’s possible in years to come that we’ll both have to be manning the same sinking boat at the same time. Apart from that, I’d still like to make up. An element in me, absolutely immune to weather and tides, runs independently fond of you.” Mailer gave him the roster of eleven writers who had already agreed to appear: Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, John Updike, I. B. Singer, John Irving, William F. Buckley, Tom Wolfe, Arthur Miller, and himself. He offered Vidal a solo night, or a joint appearance. Vidal accepted.

  Next he turned to the notoriously prickly Saul Bellow. Mailer’s sharp criticisms of his work had not been forgotten, as he had learned the last time he had seen him in 1975. Bob Cromie was interviewing them, back to back, on his Chicago radio show and raved to Mailer about Bellow’s new novel, Humboldt’s Gift. Mailer recalled how he had tried to compliment the immaculately dressed Bellow when he bumped into him in the hallway. “Well, Saul,” he said, “I hear you’ve written a terrific novel.” Bellow looked up and down at the rumpled Mailer, paused two beats, and said, “Well, Norman, why not?” Then he strode off, Mailer said, “looking like an Italian count.” Mailer wrote to Bellow about the purposes of the upcoming congress, and offered him a solo evening if he preferred. Bellow wrote back to say that the invitation, and the urging of Vonnegut, had made him decide, reluctantly, to give a reading, even though he was “not strong on civility.” Mailer was pleased, as he wrote back to Bellow, but because of theater costs he could no longer give him an evening to himself. Four more writers had been added—Woody Allen, Alice Walker, Vidal, and Eudora Welty—and “I shudder to think of the matchmaking maneuvers that will ensue, but rush to offer you, esteemed colleague, your private pick of stablemate” from the list of fifteen.

  Mailer gave Vidal the same perk of choosing his partner. Vidal had told him that he didn’t think the audience would like what he had to say. Mailer replied, “Fine. Be lugubrious, be scalding and appalling, be larger than Jeremiah.” He also gave him a choice of dates, and Vidal selected November 17, and for a partner, Mailer. The “PEN Celebrations” would take place on eight Sunday evenings from September 22 to December 15, 1985. Bellow and Welty would open, Allen and Updike would close, and Mailer and Vidal would appear in the middle. The sixteen writers were, arguably, the most impressive assemblage of literary tale
nt ever gathered in the United States. Mailer did not pull it off singlehandedly; many others were involved—Sontag, Styron, Talese, and Vonnegut, in particular—but Mailer did have good enough relations with most of the roster, save Arthur Miller (still unhappy with him about Marilyn), Welty, and Walker (neither of whom he knew), to get everyone he wanted. He said that the pressure to raise $500,000 over the next year left him feeling “brusque and jagged.”

  He had continued writing to Abbott and encouraged several people to write to him, including Malaquais. Abbott didn’t like Mailer’s recent books and wrote him a ten-page letter, which ended, “Do you want to end our friendship?” It was clearly falling apart, as was Abbott’s relationship with Malaquais. In Mailer’s reply he said that Abbott, like Malaquais, didn’t like to lose an argument. “I would just as soon lose a discussion as win it,” Mailer said, because

  it’s the ones you lose that teach you more, and change your ideas, and I don’t like living with the same idea too long because it gives me the feeling I’m inhabiting a subway. Anyway, I did my best to ponder it more and more, and finally could come to only one conclusion: guys who hate to lose arguments as much as you and Jean Malaquais must have some deep, unconscious conviction that their karma will be permanently altered if they do. Jack, if anyone wants to end our friendship it’s you. That’s your right. You can end it anytime you want. But don’t put the onus on me.

  It must be added that few individuals who argued with Mailer felt that he welcomed rejoinders. Sometimes he did; sometimes he sought them, but he could also be immodestly self-assured and dismissive. Endlessly curious, he was also terribly opinionated. Susan, his eldest, commented on this trait a few years after he died.

  If I had a problem and needed to talk to Dad about anything personal he was always ready to listen and on many occasions surprised me with his insights. But if we happened to discuss say, politics, religion or psychoanalysis, it was tough because he easily got impatient. I don’t think he was really interested in what I had to say; he wanted to talk and be heard. Many times I didn’t agree with him, but he expressed himself with such force my voice usually got lost along the way. Once in a while I’d surprise him with a fast rejoinder or a smart-ass remark, but usually our conversations turned into lengthy monologues. He had the same attitude with all my siblings. I’d watch him with his friends, with Norris; same thing. So I lost interest and I’m very sorry about this. If you ask me what I regret, I’d say the lost opportunities are close to the top of my list.