The reviews, Mailer said, were “the worst I’ve ever gotten for a book.” That is a slight exaggeration; they are almost as negative as those given to Barbary Shore. Kakutani again was in the lead, publishing her review two weeks before the book’s publication date. Echoing Richardson, she called it “an old-fashioned cut-and-paste job,” and criticized Mailer for promoting “the notion that art redeems, that the sins of a great artist can be rationalized, excused or glossed over.” Mailer does find heroic qualities in Picasso, but saying that he overlooks his faults reveals a cursory reading. Mailer takes pains to criticize Picasso for his betrayals of friends and mistresses. Two days after Kakutani’s review appeared, Mailer fired off a letter to the editor of the Times, complaining that she had rushed her negative review into print.
That does the job. If the first notice we see on anyone’s work is atrocious, it usually takes more than one good review to change a potential reader’s mind. Since Ms. Kakutani’s pieces are nationally syndicated, the damage is increased—and particularly for those small-city newspapers where she is the only reviewer some people will see. . . . Enough is enough. I would not wish to think that Ms. Kakutani has become personally if negatively addicted to my work, but there are signs.
Kakutani’s record on Mailer’s books is consistent. She panned his next three books, making it five consecutive negative reviews, four of them published before their publication dates. Mailer was riled.
IN NOVEMBER 1994 he flew to London for meetings with his publisher, and then went on to Paris to meet with the French publisher of Portrait of Picasso. He appeared with Jean Malaquais on ARTE, a French-German cultural television network. Their conversation, broadcast soon after, led to a serious breach between them. Malaquais sternly accused him of abandoning his ambition to be a history-changing writer and becoming “just a commodity,” a television celebrity. Seven months after the program aired all over Europe, Mailer’s oldest friend wrote to him dismissing the program as “poor,” but not apologizing for or retracting his comments. Mailer replied in June 1995, calling Malaquais’ letter “incomprehensible.”
You know perfectly well there’s unfinished business between you and me concerning that occasion. It’s one thing to say something insulting as you said in private. Then we can argue between us man to man. To announce it to the world, however, which in this case is somewhere between 100,000 to a few million people you’ve never met, who don’t know you and who don’t know me, and to do it at large in what was virtually a temper tantrum, I find damaging to the idea of friendship itself.
The comments Malaquais had made on the program were especially searing, coming, as they did, just after Mailer had acknowledged his debt to his mentor. He described him as “the last of his species,” and said he had “learned more from him than anybody I know.” We have been friends for forty-seven years, he said, “and love each other dearly.” He referred to Malaquais, warmly, as “an old goat,” and said that at their meetings “we argue back and forth but get nowhere, but have a fine time doing it.” Then it was Malaquais’ turn.
“You wanted to be a literary hero. What did you mean by hero?” Mailer replied that he was one of a group of writers who wanted to emulate engaged artists such as André Malraux. “We wanted to change the nature of American life,” he said, but “none of us ended up as heroes; we ended up as celebrities.” People know who I am, he said, mainly through television.
MALAQUAIS: Being a celebrity is your infantile malady.
MAILER: I would say that your insistence on keeping to a point that has no particular relevance to the discussion is a sign of your premature senility.
MALAQUAIS: There are no heroes in American life, just celebrities, and they are immediately transferred to television.
MAILER: You ask why do I go on television. The answer is it’s the only game in town.
MALAQUAIS: Television is unchristian, untrue, distorting, decelebrating. You participate in this de-celebration of people.
Mailer tried to change the subject, but Malaquais resumed the attack.
MALAQUAIS: There was a time when intellectuals were, so to speak, in opposition, in ideological opposition. Some of them were revolutionaries. All of them, you included, sold out.
MAILER: We didn’t sell out, sold out to what?
MALAQUAIS: To the establishment. You belong to the establishment. In France, all the former extreme leftists, the Maoists, all of them became pillars of society.
MAILER: Well, I’d hardly call myself a pillar of American society. To this day I’m seen in America as a bizarre creature who doesn’t fit categories comfortably. But when you say I sold out, that’s personally very insulting. I could say that you have sold out by being relatively inactive all these years and never doing anything but complain, but I’m not going to get into this. But saying one has sold out is the single most insulting thing you can say to someone.
MALAQUAIS: But I wanted to be insulting.
This thrust went deep. It all but ended the conversation, which sputtered along for a few minutes to its conclusion.
Mailer wrote to two friends of Malaquais’, Michael Seiler and Jean-Pierre Catherine, who had set up the ARTE conversation and told them his assessment of the program. “The general tone is somewhat unpleasant—fat, 72-year-old bully shuts up 86-year-old man for 45 minutes whereupon battered old fellow (whom I must say looks very good on the TV) strikes back and they have an unhappy exchange in which each denigrates the other. I was essentially charmless throughout.” The experience made him conclude, he wrote, that a long documentary about him that Seiler and Catherine had proposed was a bad idea. After countless television appearances over a forty-year span, he wrote, “There’s no desire to have still one more film made about me.” Seiler and Catherine were persistent, however, and two years later Mailer agreed to the documentary.
Malaquais’ second wife, Elisabeth, who had known Mailer since the 1960s, rebuked her husband for his public chastisement of Mailer during their television appearance. “To this day,” she said in 2010, “the ARTE show gives me goose pimples.” She felt that her husband was entitled to comment on “Norman’s confusion between heroism and celebrity,” but not publicly. Malaquais told her that he was sorry for the pain he had “apparently” caused, but was not ready to apologize. “Was it not the truth?” he asked. Realizing her husband’s “inflexibility,” she wrote to Mailer seeking a rapprochement. She argued that Mailer’s letter had hurt Malaquais, and Malaquais’ comments had hurt Mailer; the two injuries, therefore, canceling out each other. “There’s no equality in the deeds,” Mailer said in his reply. “Mine was a personal letter to my oldest friend, chilly as could be, with intent to wound, but finally, it was personal.” Malaquais’ “denunciation” was seen by a million people. He concluded his letter to Elisabeth:
Finally, for Jean’s own health (if I may presume to be a physician, and after all, why not? Do physicians know more than old friends?) he’s going, for the sake of his soul, which I believe he has even if he doesn’t, he’s going to have to apologize to someone or something or just once in his life say: I did something stupid and wrong and bad and I’m sorry. If he can’t do that, I really don’t want to see him anymore.
After Mailer’s death, Elisabeth provided a shrewd analysis of the relationship of Mailer and her husband, who died in 1998.
Norman had become a celebrity, feted and listened to, maligned also, all too often. Jean, who stayed in the shadows, then provided him with a mainstay: no competition to fear from him, a foreign writer, save of an intellectual kind (though Norman never was one to like losing an argument!), no underhand meanness, above all total frankness, especially when it came to the overall passion of them both: writing. The years passed. Norman never missed an opportunity to remind the public of his own existence; his “stunts” often irked Jean and, at times, amused him, when they did not cause him considerable anguish (the Adele episode) or downright anger (the political posturing), for instance. I cannot recall any sign ev
er of indifference on Jean’s part. Jean thought of Norman as a genuinely warm and kind man, demonstrably generous (not only vis-à-vis his friends) and incredibly attuned to the life of his country, intellectually of course, but emotionally in particular.
The two old friends resolved their differences less than a year after their public fight. Mailer “overcame his anger,” she said, and “was generous and to the end showed Jean much affection.” He and Norris visited Elisabeth and Jean in Geneva, where they were living, in 1996 and 1997. A short time after Malaquais’ passing, his novel, Planet Without Visa, was reissued and Mailer attended the book party. “I was extremely touched,” she said, “by the public homage he paid to his friend posthumously at the party given by Jean’s publisher, Phébus, on the occasion.”
AS HIS RELATIONSHIP with Malaquais sank to its nadir, Mailer saw the sales of Oswald’s Tale trail off badly. He had hoped for a modestly strong showing, but the book failed to reach the bestseller list. He attributed its weak sales to its $30 price, its length, dislike of the “insect” Oswald, and the recently concluded trial of O. J. Simpson. Mailer said that the trial and Simpson’s not guilty verdict had satisfied America’s interest in forensics. He assumed that Picasso’s sales would be worse, and this proved to be the case. Added to these disappointments was the anxiety produced by the protracted contract negotiations with Random House conducted by his new agent, Andrew Wylie. At this inopportune time, Carole Mallory nudged her way back into his life.
In the summer of 1995, she contacted the “Page Six” gossip columnists of the New York Post to announce that she was almost done with a memoir of her affair with Mailer. At Norris’s insistence, Mailer called a score of close friends and family members to tell them about the Post story before they heard about it. After summarizing the item, he intoned gravely, “You pay for your sins; you pay for your sins.” He then explained that his affair with Mallory had been over for several years—his family knew this, but not all his friends—and that he and Norris were thoroughly and happily reconciled. His merry life was over, he said.
The situation at Random House was more complicated. He owed the firm over $3 million, and the sequel to Harlot’s Ghost. For the first time in his career, he said, his fate was mainly in the hands of “suits,” corporate people who didn’t see him as a writer but as an asset, a commodity. Epstein and Evans could put in a good word for him, but they had no real say in the matter. Alberto Vitale, a former banker who was then CEO at Random House, had the final say on major author contracts. If, Mailer explained, Wylie was able to get him only a one-book deal (nullifying the contract negotiated by the late Scott Meredith), he would leave Random House and the firm would lose the possibly large returns from the books he wrote after the sequel. The possibilities he was considering included an anthology made up of excerpts from many of his books and some uncollected essays, two volumes of autobiography, and another novel. But signing him to a multi-book contract was also a gamble, given his age and health. By this time, he said, Random House had sunk over $1 million into Oswald’s Tale, $30,000 a month for over three years. In some years, he earned $750,000, but after paying his agent, alimony, college tuitions (at one point six of his children were in college), mortgages on two homes, and rent for two studios, to name the major expenses, he needed every penny of it. He had no retirement fund.
According to Harry Evans, it was S. I. Newhouse, the chairman of Advance Publications (which included Random House and the Condé Nast magazines The New Yorker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair), who ultimately struck the deal with Wylie and his associates. (Mailer later described them as “my keen and formidable agents.”) Evans said that Newhouse believed that it was important to keep Random House’s major writers happy. The new contract called for him to continue to receive $30,000 a month for the rest of his life, in return for which all of his royalties from all of his publishers would go to Random House until the monthly payments had been covered. If, at his death, the monthly stipends totaled more than the grand total of his royalty income, the debt would be canceled. But to maintain his household, he needed another $300,000 a year. For each of the next twelve years he would earn approximately that amount from a combination of fees for magazine pieces, consultations, speeches, and screenplays.
The new contract meant that Mailer needed to focus on the sequel to Harlot’s Ghost. But the enormity of the task and the reception of Portrait of Picasso and Oswald’s Tale weighed on him, dulling his resolve. He was also dubious about the literary choices he had made over the past four years. John Aldridge, one of his most stalwart supporters, had written a middling review of the Oswald book, and Mailer wrote back saying it was obvious that Aldridge thought it was not the sort of book he should have written at this point in his life. “And in truth,” he said, “and this is between us, I don’t know that I disagree with you.” In a letter to his daughter Susan, he said he was “angry and bruised” by the reception of Picasso. “What irks the hell out of me is that it’s really a nice book and I really think it will last, at least if any of my books do. When you read it, let me know what you think. If your reaction is negative, dare to tell me so,” adding that this was a “safe offer” because he recalled that she had liked the book in manuscript. The only other thing he had to report was that he was “trying to build up the intellectual capital and the energy to start the second volume of Harlot’s Ghost, and in the meantime I look for distractions, do a piece about this, do a piece about that, whatever comes through. I truly know how old fighters feel when they want to avoid championship bouts.” He ended this gloomy dispatch by sending love and noting that “all is relatively OK here.” But it wasn’t. He would be seventy-three in two months, and needed a victory.
One of the pieces he took on was a conversation with his son Michael about the recently concluded murder trial of O. J. Simpson, sometimes described as “the trial of the century.” On October 3, 1995, Simpson was found not guilty of the murders of his wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ronald Goldman. Two weeks later, the conversation, titled “Black and White Justice,” appeared in New York magazine. Mailer’s conclusions centered on the anger felt about the verdict. Many believed that the jury (nine blacks, one Hispanic, two whites) ignored the evidence presented, but whites, Mailer said, “are not taking account of the attitude of most blacks toward American justice. Blacks see it as white justice; therefore it’s not justice. It’s a game waged by players, sometimes very skillful players.” Blacks are usually represented by court-appointed defenders. “So they see it as a game they usually lose.” O.J. had top talent, and he won, and blacks generally approved.
In a commencement address several weeks later, on May 27, 1995, Mailer was more upbeat. Speaking at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he spoke of the end of the Cold War. “Looking back on it, we were like magnetic filings in the power of a huge electromagnet, the Cold War, and almost all of us pointed in the same direction.” But when Communism collapsed, “the great switch on this great electromagnet was released and now all the fragments went in all directions.” Those who built their lives under the overhang of the Cold War “are now superannuated; myself among the others,” and many Americans “don’t have a clear sense of the future.” But this dislocation had an upside, he told the graduates. “You will go forth in the rare position of being—in the spiritual sense—of being pioneers because you are going into a new and undiscovered frontier,” a place where “all the guide rules of the 19th and 20th century have been used up.” Perhaps, he concluded, you can regain the dream on which the nation was founded. “If you believe that there is more good than evil in the sum of humanity, then democracy can prevail,” a sentiment that could be traced back a half-century to “The White Negro.” For the future, he said, “exciting and fearful and incredible days and years await you.” Mailer had already begun thinking about a book that would speak to the new millennium.
DURING THE WEEK in Paris when Mailer had his unhappy conversation with Malaquais, he stayed at the George V
, one of his favorite hotels. Norris was not with him, and one night, unable to sleep, he found a Gideon Bible in English in the night table and began to read the New Testament. It was the first time he had looked at it for many years, although he had read parts of it in college. “I couldn’t make head or tail of it,” he said, adding that he was “a stranger to Christianity.” This was not a result of overt anti-Semitism of the kind faced by his mother, who was called “sheeny” and “Christ killer” by Irish kids in Long Branch (an experience that made her wonder how her son could have so many Irish friends). Rather, he felt “subtly excluded.”
Christmas is not for you, and you don’t know anything about Jesus Christ. You haven’t grown up with him. When I was a kid, it was almost as if Christ was the enemy, the renegade Jew, the one who brought all the trouble down on the Jews. At least that was the mentality of the immigrant first-generation and second-generation Jews I grew up with. And then, of course, later in life one became sophisticated about it; Christ was certainly not the enemy, but he was still very much a stranger.
A few years earlier, he and Norris were visiting her family in Atkins, Arkansas. On this occasion, Norris’s father, James Davis, a deacon at the local Freewill Baptist Church, invited Mailer to attend the adult Sunday School. “To my knowledge, no other Jew had ever come to that Sunday school,” he recalled, adding that he had also been the first Jew that Norris had ever met. “They were so excited,” he said, “because they’d been reading about Jesus the Jew for thirty, forty, fifty years. They’d been living with it. And they’d never seen a Jew. And now there was one among them. So they approached me with the most curious kind of respect.” He felt the welcome was particularly warm. As he learned, they assumed that he might be better equipped to interpret some difficult lines in the Old Testament concerning Abraham and his son Isaac. Mailer did his best, and afterward kept pondering “this odd moment, where they felt that being Jewish gave me an authority in relation to the Bible.” Perhaps, he thought, he might also have something to say about the New Testament.
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