The media loved all this nastiness. Some commentators pointed out that the three old lions were hardly uninterested in the riptides of American culture, as even a cursory look at their numerous and notably realistic books demonstrated, for example, Irving’s The World According to Garp, Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, and The Executioner’s Song. Wolfe’s demeaning of Mailer’s book seemed especially trumped up. Asked how he could call Mailer inward-looking in the face of the immensely detailed societal portrait given in his Pulitzer Prize–winning narrative, Wolfe said that Mailer owed it all to “a remarkable Santa Claus named Lawrence Schiller,” and proceeded to imply that Mailer had sat at home while his friend did all the research. Schiller did wear out a lot of shoe leather, but Mailer did his share of interviewing, before transforming fifteen thousand pages of research into an unforgettable thousand-page story. Wolfe conceded nothing, however.
The three novelists held hands on one aspect of Wolfe’s novel: the flatness of his characters. Irving called him a journalist who “can’t create a character.” Updike said that Wolfe’s story is smothered by set pieces and subplots, “spreading like kudzu, sending eager tendrils everywhere,” and that he makes his laborious narrative too cluttered “for sustaining suspense and characters we can care about.” The hero, a sixty-year-old Atlanta multimillionaire named Charlie Croker, “is a specimen under glass,” and the novel is “a provincial curiosity.” Updike’s summary judgment: A Man in Full “amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form.” Mailer was no kinder.
Echoing Updike, he said that Wolfe’s general strategy, whenever he reached an impasse, was “to cook up new ingredients and excursions for his plot.” Some of it is excellent, but his plots are a way of covering up “an endemic inability to look into the depth of his characters with more than a consummate journalist’s eye.” When he enters the minds of his chief characters, as he must to establish motivation, the interior monologues “are surprisingly routine and insist on telling us what we know already. There is almost no signature quality of mind.” Wolfe, Mailer said, has the talent to write a major novel, but also possesses the ability to write a mega-bestseller and was unable to decide which he was writing. Mailer delivered the coup de grâce at the close of his review, calling Wolfe “certainly the most gifted best-seller writer to come along since Margaret Mitchell,” a barb that helps to explain Wolfe’s defensive, twenty-six-page-long rejoinder. Mailer punctuated the exchanges when he responded to a British journalist’s question about being called a jealous old bag of bones. “It’s true that I’m a bag of bones,” he said, “but if I’m going to be jealous, it will be of Tolstoy.”
RON ROSENBAUM’S 1998 study, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil intrigued Mailer when he read it. A novelist and journalist of wide experience and interests, Rosenbaum had spent ten years off and on interviewing Hitler experts in the United States and Europe. The book turned Mailer’s head. “Long after the details had faded from my mind the feeling of the book remained,” he said, and just as he was settling on his plan for the sequel to Harlot’s Ghost, “this little muse appeared in an apse of the literary church,” he recalled, “and wiggled her finger at me.” Until then, “I was absolutely intrigued with the idea of Montague as a Jungian,” intending to have him surface in Russia with “some mad notion” of converting the nation to a polity based on Jungian principles. But then the idea of a Hitler novel came to him. All through 1999 he researched, eventually deciding to write about Hitler’s childhood. “There were only a few good books. Just three or four really counted, and none of them of course could do more than satisfy a little bit.” In addition to Rosenbaum’s study, Mailer drew heavily on August Kubizek’s The Young Hitler I Knew and Franz Jetzinger’s Hitler’s Youth. He also read several books on apiary science. Beekeeping would play an important part in the novel that he would write over the next seven years.
As he continued to read and take notes, he also began another project with Schiller, a teleplay based on a number one bestseller that Schiller and James Willwerth had written about the highly controversial O. J. Simpson murder trial. Schiller paid him $250,000 for reshaping American Tragedy: The Uncensored Story of the Simpson Defense into a four-hour miniseries. Initially, Mailer had been uninterested in the trial, but he thoroughly enjoyed the Schiller-Willwerth book. “My old friend and colleague has come up with a book that is impossible to put down,” he said. He finished the teleplay in July 2000, and it was broadcast in mid-November. Simpson went to court to try to block the miniseries, claiming that Schiller had violated an agreement with him in which Simpson had the right to review the screenplay, but his claim was rejected and the program was aired as scheduled. It received fairly strong ratings.
Meanwhile, Mailer did research for the Hitler novel secretly, as he explained to one of his admirers, Morton Yanow.
I have not told anyone what the private idea of it is, not even my wife or Judith, both of whom, being excellent private detectives, are trying to find out but will not necessarily know until I begin the writing. The reason I don’t want to talk about it is I think it would spook this work and would be even more dangerous than the usual pitfall of talking a book away. So I wrap silence around me and austerity, as if I were a grand old man, which for better and for worse, I am not.
Judith typed this letter and soon learned the secret. She did, after all, order books for him, and she and Norris surmised what the novel would be about. The specifics—the portion of Hitler’s life to be depicted, the point of view, beekeeping, and life in rural Bavaria—were still evolving. Mailer ended his letter to Yanow with a metaphor about his condition that reveals his weakening health, his determination, and his self-dramatizing imagination.
The pleasure of writing a long letter to an old friend is no longer mine, and I don’t regret it since as you get older, the analogy of one’s own mind and body, one’s working corpus, comes closer and closer to the notion of a heavy old freighter, seriously overloaded, in an uncertain sea, and therefore, discarding ballast as it goes. You are at least 20 years from that, but I want to tell you, it’s not a gloomy situation, since one is pleased with all the clarity of mind that is left and that takes care of one’s mood.
With the help of a German-speaking friend, Elke Rosthal, Mailer began studying German, aided by his memory of the Yiddish his parents spoke at home. His reading was not limited to books about Hitler and World War II; he also read German philosophy (Herder, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche) and poetry (Goethe, Heine, and Rilke). He particularly enjoyed Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Ekermann, and saw parallels between himself and the German polymath. Both he and Goethe, he said, essayed a variety of literary forms, were interested in science, politics, government, and led active social lives. The Faust myth was something else that connected them. “I’m raising the bar higher than ever before,” he said about the new novel. “It will contain every idea I ever had.” It would have “some of the magical aura” of the Egyptian novel, but it would also be more documentary, historical, objective—less so than Oswald’s Tale and The Executioner’s Song, however. After he completed the Simpson script, he was ready to begin.
He wanted a different location to begin writing, a place completely free of interruptions. A few years earlier, Lennon and his wife Donna had purchased a condo about half a mile from the Mailer home. Mailer knew the area well and called it P-Town’s suburbs, a place atop a modest hill away from the noise of the town’s center. He liked the view of the monument and the harbor from the third floor studio. The condo was vacant except on some weekends and its owners were happy to give Mailer a key. In mid-December 2000, Norris dropped him off there with his notes, a ream of paper, and a fistful of pencils, and he began writing. If the weather was bad, she would drive him back and forth; otherwise he walked four or five days a week and, if the condo was free, also on weekends. He could do a mile with his canes, one third of a mile without them. By the beginning of April, when h
e returned to his study at home, he had written 150 typescript pages.
This was Mailer’s writing routine, taken from Lennon’s “Mailer Log” for July 15, 2005:
When I first spent a lot of time with him, in the 80s, he had dinner at a reasonable hour—around 7:30. But then he began working later and later, often not coming down from his study until close to 9 P.M., while his family and guests waited and starved. But he has changed his pattern now and does not work much after 6 P.M. “It was just too hard,” he told me a couple of months ago, “so I am working shorter periods.” He normally gets up between eight and nine, but takes a long time to get downstairs. Then he has his breakfast, often two poached eggs and dry white toast, sometimes fruit and oatmeal. Hearty breakfast with o.j. and coffee. He reads the papers as he eats—the Boston Globe and the New York Times, and does the Times crossword puzzle every day, until they get really difficult on Friday. The Globe publishes a daily epigram by Dr. Johnson or Emerson, Montaigne, etc., and NM often writes a rejoinder to them (a collection of these is now in the hands of his agent). He goes to the loo around 11 and sits on the can reading for a long time. His last act before going up to his study is to play a couple of hands of solitaire—“combing my mind,” he calls it. Then, somewhere between 11 and 12, he climbs slowly up the two flights to his study and begins to work. He has a late lunch, around 2:30 or 3:00, and then takes a nap. He has always pushed himself, and rarely broke routine unless he was traveling to promote a book, speak, or be on a panel, etc. When he isn’t working, he told me, he gets into trouble. True.
NM always sits in the same chair at the dining room table—the center of all activity at the Mailer home—with his back to the living room and facing a wall, not the glare from the sun and sea to his right. Visitors will often sit to his left at the head of the long wood table that seats ten. The table is full of the day’s projects: piles of mail, manuscripts, books and magazines, photographs and piles of newspapers. When it gets too cluttered, the papers are thrown away and the rest moved to the six-foot wide, three-foot deep shelf before the Oriel window. When the shelf is packed a foot or two high, the stuff is shunted to the basement. It is fascinating to go through this stuff; last week I saw the following: letters from other writers or editors seeking endorsements of a ms., books to be signed for fans, copies of newly published editions of NM’s work from around the globe, contracts for film and literary work, letters and cards and drawings from old friends, Poetry magazine, Nation, Stop Smiling, American Conservative, New York Review of Books, Provincetown Arts, as well as the black box containing poker chips and cards for the nightly Texas hold ’em game. A green felt poker board, folded up into sections, leans on the wall near the window. A lot of this stuff spills into the bar, which adjoins the dining room. From the telephone there, NM speaks to Judith several times a day. In the afternoon after lunch, he goes through the mail, makes phone calls to Judith, and usually to a few of his nine kids. Hardly a day goes by without some of them calling.
THE SPAT WITH Tom Wolfe brought Mailer into closer contact with John Irving. Mailer admired The World According to Garp, but had met Irving only a few times. In March 2001, Irving wrote to ask if he and Norris would do a benefit reading for a private school in Manchester, Vermont. He suggested A. R. Gurney’s Love Letters, in which a man and a woman read aloud their fifty-year correspondence. Mailer didn’t think it was a role he could do well, and Norris thought perhaps that George Plimpton might substitute. When Mailer called him, Plimpton came up with a different play, Zelda, Scott, & Ernest, which he and Tom Quinn had written, based on the letters of the Fitzgeralds and Hemingway, as well as excerpts from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Zelda’s novel, Save Me the Waltz. “Norris can be Zelda,” Plimpton said. “She’s an actress and from the South.” Mailer, who would of course play Hemingway, read the script and liked it. Over the next eighteen months, Plimpton and the Mailers would perform the play more than a dozen times, beginning in Vermont. In the summer and fall of 2002, the trio performed it in seven European cities, beginning in Paris and ending in London.
All of their performances drew sell-out crowds. After the first one in Vermont, a man in the audience yelled out. “This should be in every high school and college in the country.” Mailer wore khaki pants and a safari shirt, Plimpton a sport coat and a Princeton tie, and Norris tied on a flapper head scarf. The play could have been commercially successful, but the estates of the writers would permit it to be done only as a fundraiser for not-for-profits. “In other words,” Mailer said, “I’m safe from becoming James Tyrone,” the character in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (based on O’Neill’s father) who played the same role thousands of times. Mailer found the role to be “damn interesting. As I’m doing it I’m thinking of the ways that Hemingway is Hemingway and I am not, and the ways in which there are similarities.” Physically, he said, “we each have spindly legs and we’re barrel-chested.” Mailer said Papa was a writer who
changed the ways in which we perceived things, and he changed the way in which we write. That’s two pretty powerful jobs. Either one is enough to make you a great writer. What he lacks—all great writers lack something—is a certain charity of mind. He was very narrow-minded, and that shows in his work. But on the other hand, it also gives that intensity, that luster, that patina that you think of when you read Hemingway’s prose. So it’s a delight to read him. In George’s play, the speeches are all terrific. You can’t go wrong.
Norris was less enthusiastic about her role. She had the fewest lines and interacts only with Scott, not Hemingway. She was also miffed about being given less notice in reviews of the play and in joint interviews with Mailer. “I’m not much like Zelda in temperament or mind or anything else, but our situation is the same,” she said. “I’m married to a famous writer, and I’m trying to be a writer herself”—she had begun work on a sequel to Windchill Summer. Mailer interrupted the conversation at this point. “So far I haven’t stolen any of your stuff,” he said. “No, you haven’t stolen my stuff,” she answered. “Scott lifted Zelda’s diary. He lifted whole passages of her work and put it in his work and didn’t attribute it to her.” You’re exaggerating, Mailer said, adding that since Zelda was in a mental hospital when he took the passages, and Fitzgerald “was thinking she’s never going to do it, so I might as well use it.” Norris pushed back: “Well, you’d be above stealing my work?” His reply: “Well, I hope I would be.” Ever since the crisis in their marriage, and especially after the publication of her first novel, Norris was less willing to act merely as the dutiful domestic manager of the household and more eager to present herself as a writer. They jousted more now in public.
But one thing was clear, Norris said, her husband “always made me feel terribly important.” She told Larry Shainberg, a Cape Cod friend who accompanied them on part of the European tour, that some of the dialogue between Scott and Zelda “makes you want to cry. Part of it, of course, is the era. Women didn’t have the vote. They were totally subjugated to men.” For the last eighteen years of her life Zelda was in and out of mental hospitals, and then died when a fire burned down the institution where she was confined. Zelda told Scott that being in a mental hospital was better than being with him because at least they allowed her to write. “It was as if she had no right to her own life,” she told Shainberg. “Their life together was Scott’s material. ‘I’m the writer,’ he said. ‘How dare you use the name Fitzgerald?’ ” Her own life was nothing like this, Norris said. “Norman has been completely supportive. He’s never held me back at all. He’s not that kind of person.” She agreed that he had made some dumb statements about feminists, but also felt that feminists had unfairly made him into a punching bag. “He’s no enemy of women,” she said.
Shainberg spent many evenings with the Mailers in Provincetown, especially during the gray winter months, and observed their exchanges, which he said were “sometimes nasty, sometimes playful, often both, as if testing each other’s toleranc
e and patience and, together, how near they can get to the edge of the cliff without going over.” Norris said, “He wins a few, I win a few.” Mailer said, “Marriage is an excrementitious relationship. One can take all that’s bad in oneself and throw it at one’s mate. She throws it back at you and you both shake hands and go on with your business—you can’t do that when you’re out in the world.” Mailer often said that people overlooked his playfulness, missed his wink, and Shainberg noted that “even when he’s angry, it’s not clear how much he means to be taken seriously.”
Riding in a limo in Vienna with the Mailers before a performance of Zelda, Scott, & Ernest, Shainberg heard Mailer serve up another metaphor for their verbal tussles: “Norris and I are like two old gym rats. Fighting is our hobby.” He paused a moment, and then gave a demonstration.
“When you’re my age and you’ve been married as long as I have, your wife can have half your IQ and twice your rage and you still argue like equals.”
“Did you say half?”
“Maybe 55%.”
“Fuck you, Norman.”
“Fuck you too, baby. You act like my older sister. Christ, I’ve got to be the only 80-year-old in the world who’s treated like a six-year old. When I leave you, I’ll say it’s ’cause you have frustrated my late adolescence.”
“If you leave me, who’ll arrange for your wheelchair at the airport?”
Shainberg became concerned, but then an expression—half grin, half scowl—appeared on Mailer’s face.
What happened to wild man Mailer, the gent who butted heads in bars and got into boisterous scrapes on television? “Well,” Mailer said, “he finally ran into a woman who was exactly his equal, which I think is very important. People only get domesticated when they meet their equals.”
BETWEEN PERFORMANCES OF the play, he continued working on the Hitler novel, as well as working on still another Schiller project. In February 2001 Robert Hanssen, a longtime FBI agent with an unblemished record, was arrested for passing classified information to the Russians in exchange for cash and jewels. He was only the third FBI agent to be accused of spying. Hanssen was a devout Catholic and member of Opus Dei, a conservative institution for rank-and-file members of the Church. The father of six who brought his family to Sunday Mass at the same church attended by FBI director Louis Freeh, Hanssen had been passing secrets to the Russians for fifteen years. What made the situation of larger interest was the fact that Hanssen’s job at the FBI was counterintelligence, and one of his responsibilities was to design a plan to ensnare a suspected mole inside the FBI—himself. Mailer could hardly ignore the story of a man who gave the following description of his secret life to his Russian handlers: “I am either insanely brave or quite insane. I’d answer neither. I’d say, insanely loyal. Take your pick. There is insanity in all the answers.”
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