Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Mailer wrote another letter to the publisher of the New York Times, with copies to Kakutani and fourteen other Times writers and editors, complaining about her consistently early reviews and asking for a meeting with her. He also pointed out that she was in error when she said in her review that dates for items in the book were not supplied, since the main text is followed by ten closely printed pages of source notes. The Times acknowledged this error in its corrections column, but Kakutani did not reply to Mailer’s request for a meeting. A few weeks later, he said in an interview that he had a female literary enemy at the Times whom he described as “a posterior aperture.” He would continue to up the ante.

  In the same interview, he named his other enemy: President George W. Bush. The invasion of Iraq was imminent and Mailer was stoked up in opposition in a way not seen in the previous decade, a period when “I really didn’t have anything to say about America.” His uncertainties disappeared with the 9/11 attacks. The nation’s guilt over what he called “economic gluttony,” and its growing imperial ambitions had been smoldering for years; the 9/11 attacks lit the flame. Mailer put aside the Hitler novel, and began giving speeches and interviews and writing a series of antiwar, anti-Bush essays. “I know I’m going to have to pay for it,” he said, and using a typical Mailer analogy added, “but if you don’t use freedom of speech, it’s like an unused dick. It tends to dwindle.”

  Invited to address the Commonwealth Club of California, Mailer carefully prepared a speech, and told his sister the occasion was a great opportunity. He drew on some of the rhetoric of Cannibals and Christians for his address, titled “Only in America,” and also displayed the same empathy for the poor described in The Gospel According to the Son. He opened with an indictment of the “manic money-grab” of the 1990s, something that God did not approve of, he surmised.

  For certain, Jesus did not. You weren’t supposed to pile up a mountain of moolah. You were obligated to spend your life in altruistic acts. That was one half of the good American psyche. The other half, pure American, was, as always: beat everybody. One can offer a cruel, but conceivably accurate remark: To be a mainstream American is to live as an oxymoron.

  Despite the contrived evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, and lack of proof of his collusion with Osama bin Laden, the fears generated by 9/11 were powerful enough for Bush to declare war against evil, a word he used “as a narcotic for that part of the American public which feels most distressed,” Mailer said. Saddam Hussein was an excuse, Mailer argued, for establishing an overwhelming American military presence in the oil-rich Middle East, an essential first step in the inevitable struggle for world dominance. “Flag conservatives truly believe America is not only fit to run the world, but we must. Without a commitment to Empire, the country will go down the drain.” Mailer was not alone in his analysis. Vidal wrote his own short book on American imperialism, and numerous foreign affairs commentators issued the same warnings. Mailer quoted one of them, Paul Brookman, who said that after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992, a document came out of the Defense Department that “envisioned the United States as ‘a Colossus astride the world, imposing its will and keeping world peace though military and economic power.’ ”

  With a few refinements, “Only in America,” was reprinted in The New York Review of Books at the end of March and, combined with excerpts from his interview with Dotson Rader on 9/11 and another interview on the dangers of empire from American Conservative, appeared as a 111-page paperback in April 2003. Why Are We at War? was reviewed along with Vidal’s collection of essays Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, which came out a few months earlier. Both books make many of the same arguments. Both were well received, at least on the left-liberal side, and Mailer’s made the paperback bestseller list. After witnessing the president’s triumphant arrival via navy jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier where he announced, prematurely, the end of major combat operations in Iraq, Mailer shifted from a geopolitical to a psycho-political stance in his attacks on Bush.

  In his NYRB essay titled “The White Man Unburdened” (nod to “The White Negro”), Mailer points to white male insecurity as one of the buttresses of Bush’s war. A successful effort in Iraq would provide “psychic rejuvenation” to those white males who were “spiritually wounded” by 9/11, he wrote. White males had been taking “a daily drubbing over the last thirty years. For better or worse, the women’s movement has had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego has withered in the glare.” Rooting for white sports heroes was no longer the same, unless you were a fan of tennis, ice hockey, skiing, and a few other sports. “Black genius now prevailed” in football, basketball, boxing and a lot of baseball, “and the Hispanics were coming up fast; even the Asians were beginning to make their mark.” But white Americans could still root for “an extraordinarily good, if essentially untested, group of armed forces, a skilled, disciplined, well-motivated military.” The military could prove to be “quintessential morale-builders to a core element of American life”—the average American male who “had very little to nourish his morale since the job market had gone bad.” If watching your favorite sports teams was not what it used to be, then tune in to the war—“sanitized but terrific.” Mailer’s invective had not been as good since he went after LBJ.

  “I’m still trying to keep on working on a big novel,” he wrote in August 2003. “The worst thing about Bush at times—from my point of view—is how much time he consumes writing about him and his gang.” Giving interviews, writing op-ed essays and letters to the editor kept Mailer occupied through much of 2003. He and Norris also did a third benefit for the Provincetown Theater, a staged reading of excerpts from Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Provincetown Town Hall. Mailer was James Tyrone, an actor famous for playing the leading role in The Count of Monte Cristo, an adaptation of the Dumas novel. He enjoyed being the overbearing father who spoke with “a touch of the very edge of an Irish accent.” He was joined by Norris as Tyrone’s wife, Mary, a morphine addict, with Stephen and John Buffalo as the Tyrone brothers, Jamie and Edmund, and Kate as the maid Cathleen. The one-night performance on August 15 went off flawlessly—although Stephen, an accomplished actor, had some boisterous disagreements with his father about the way Mailer cut the play—and the Mailers raised another slug of money for the theater. Norris resigned as artistic director after the performance in order to work on Cheap Diamonds, the sequel to Wind-chill Summer, in which her heroine moves to New York City and begins a modeling career.

  Another project was a collection of approximately one hundred captioned head drawings, “droons,” which were interspersed with poems from his 1962 collection, Deaths for the Ladies, and a few new ones. Mailer kept his assistant, Dwayne Raymond, busy for three months printing out various page layouts and cover designs for the softbound volume of 276 pages, titled Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings. The cover consisted of the title and a five-stroke sketch of Norris’s features, which also could be seen as birds in flight. Mailer often studied the formation flying of a flock of pigeons swooping around his house and over the harbor. He remarked more than once that its movements were so acrobatically precise that the pigeons must be inhabited by the spirits of departed Army Air Force pilots. He insisted that there be no publicity campaign for the collection, published on October 23, and it was hardly noticed.

  Mailer also agreed to a series of conversations with Lennon about his theological ideas and beliefs, and during the last half of 2003, they taped three of them. His only proviso was that he not be given questions beforehand so that his answers could be spontaneous. “Improvisational,” he said, “is still my favorite word.” The interviews would continue every few months until mid-2005 when they had exhausted the subject. Mailer thought it might be a good book to appear after he “got on the bus,” the euphemism used by family and friends to refer to his death. But he would change his mind as boarding time neared.

  In September, George Plimpto
n died. Mailer spoke at the memorial at St. John the Divine in Manhattan. Philip Roth also attended and later transferred his memory of Mailer’s eulogy to a character in his novel Exit Ghost.

  Guy’s eighty now, both knees shot, walks with two canes, can’t take a stride of more than six inches alone, but he refuses help going up to the pulpit, won’t even use one of the canes. Climbs this tall pulpit all by himself. Everybody pulling for him step by step. The conquistador is here and the high drama begins. The Twilight of the Gods. He surveys the assemblage. Looks down the length of the nave and out to Amsterdam Avenue and across the U.S. to the Pacific. Reminds me of Father Mapple in Moby-Dick. I expected him to begin “Shipmates!” and preach upon the lesson Jonah teaches. But no, he too speaks very simply about George. This is no longer Mailer in quest of a quarrel, yet his thumbprint is on every word. He speaks about a friendship with George that flourished only in recent years—tells us how the two of them and their wives had traveled together to wherever they were performing a play they’d written together, and of how close the two couples had become, and I’m thinking, Well, it’s been a long time coming, America, but there on the pulpit is Norman Mailer speaking as a husband in praise of coupledom. Fundamentalist creeps, you have met your match.

  After the service, Mailer headed for the men’s room. “Urination had become one of my preoccupations,” he said. As he was cranking along on his canes he saw Roth, with whom he’d had “an edgy relationship for thirty or forty years.” Roth asked him where he was going in such a hurry. Mailer told him, and added, “Let me warn you, when you get to my age, you’re going to be looking around for telephone booths in which you can relieve yourself.” That time had already arrived, Roth informed him. “Well, Phil,” he said, “you always were precocious.” It was the only time they had ever laughed together, Mailer said. He attributed the warm moment to Plimpton’s spirit. He had liked George enormously, admiring the way he moved with ease through such a range of projects and pursuits while managing to edit a leading literary quarterly for a half century. After the memorial he wondered aloud about how much time he still had, considering all his ailments, if someone with George’s vigor could die at seventy-six.

  EVERY YEAR, THE Mailers spent less time in New York and more in Provincetown, and the children, grandchildren, and friends visited there in all seasons, not just the summer as in earlier years. By the summer of 2003 five of Mailer’s children had married (Susan, Danielle, Betsy, Kate, and Stephen), and produced eight grandchildren. They all visited regularly, as did Al and Barbara, her son, Peter, and other members of the family. The increase in visits was prompted to some extent by the fact that Mailer was eighty and had a weakening heart. Susan recalled her father during this period.

  He was in dire need of care, felt lonely, but was too proud to acknowledge it. During that period he made more phone calls than he ever had, he who hated speaking on the phone! He actually asked us to visit him, two or three times, when he called us in Chile. As I write this I’m sad Marco and I didn’t visit more often. Those last four years, his overall mood changed, he had more time for his children, and especially, was more in need of us, something he’d kept well hidden before. We, his older children, have commented among us how he finally became the gentle, accessible dad we had wanted in our childhood. He told me many times during this period that he now enjoyed being with his kids and having family dinners almost more than anything else.

  The Mailers also opened their home to his friends in the Norman Mailer Society (founded in 2003), which met in Provincetown from 2004 to 2007. The Mailers invited the keynote speakers for lunch every year. Neil Abercrombie, a Democratic congressman from Hawaii (now governor), spoke in 2004. He had written his Ph.D. thesis on Mailer, and they had been friends for decades. Ed Doctorow, who was one of the editors of An American Dream, was the 2005 speaker, and William Kennedy spoke in 2006. Mailer thought it would be gauche to listen to speeches and panels about him and his work, so he had never attended any of the conference events, but hosted the closing party. Kennedy had met Mailer in 1968 when he was editing Maidstone, and written a warm review of Beyond the Law. They saw each other many times in the 1980s—at PEN meetings, fundraisers at the New York Public Library, and at the Actors Studio. Mailer introduced him to Paul Newman, who wanted to play Francis Phelan in the film version of Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Ironweed, but Jack Nicholson already had sewn up the role. Newman was a bit too cerebral for Phelan, Kennedy said, “and he didn’t look like a bum. Jack had a magical way of transforming himself into the slouch of a bum.” Nicholson was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal, which Mailer admired. The Kennedys and Mailers enjoyed each other’s company.

  For his keynote, Kennedy wrote a half-comic, half-serious dialogue among him, his uncle “Billy,” an unnamed interviewer, and Mailer. When he learned that the Mailers didn’t plan to be at the luncheon where he would read it, he quickly cajoled them into attending. Mailer said it would be like Huck Finn listening to the eulogies at his own funeral, but Kennedy told him he would regret missing the jokes. The Mailers came and laughed as hard as everyone else at Kennedy’s piece, “Norman Mailer as Occasional Commentator in a Self-Interview and Memoir.” Toward the end of the dialogue, Mailer notes that American novelists have failed to do the imaginative work of defining America, and Kennedy responds, using Mailer’s published words.

  KENNEDY: I soon realized I wasn’t up to the task and throttled down to the individual, for instance in a novel about a pool hustler very like my favorite uncle. I called him Billy Phelan and he comes to a crisis during a political kidnapping when he refuses to be an informer. If I may, I’d like to invite Billy into this conversation, buy him a drink. Will you have a drink, Billy?

  BILLY PHELAN: The last time I refused a drink I didn’t understand the question.

  INTERVIEWER: I think we should get back to the serious novel.

  NORMAN: The serious novel begins from a fixed philosophical point—the desire to discover reality—and it goes to search for that reality in society, or else must embark on a trip up the upper Amazon of the inner eye.

  KENNEDY: What I take home from that remark is that the novel’s choices are scope versus self. Norman also says Hemingway and Faulkner both gave up scope.

  NORMAN: Their vision was partial, determinedly so; they saw that as the first condition for trying to be great—that one must not try to save. Not souls, and not the nation. The desire for majesty was the bitch that licked at the literary loins of Hemingway and Faulkner: The country could be damned. Let it take care of itself.

  KENNEDY: I remember a critic panning a self-absorbed novelist and saying rather neatly that literature wasn’t about the self, but what came home to the self through experience. Norman has written extensively about the self, about writing, about the self, and against writing about the self. Norman seems to have written about every choice a human being can make. . . .

  INTERVIEWER: Norman has Hitler as a character in his new novel. No narcissism there.

  A year later, at the Institute for Writers at the State University of New York—Albany, Mailer read from the Hitler novel, The Castle in the Forest, and engaged in a dialogue with the audience. During the visit, the Kennedys hosted a reception for Mailer, as described in Lennon’s “Mailer Log.”

  Kennedy was a great host and hosted a cocktail party at his city house, the Albany row house where Legs Diamond was shot in 1931. NM talked about the problems of writing the sequel to Castle, the largest being the vast amount of material to be covered. He wants to write about Hitler as a struggling student-artist in Vienna, about his affair with his cousin and her mysterious death, about the events after the 1933 seizure of power when Hitler, and of course the war, the concentration camps and his suicide in the bunker. He offered one possibility for handling all this and more: move the story to Russia and Rasputin for a time to avoid chronicling every major milestone in Hitler’s life. He explained that he thought of doing something like this with Mont
ague in the unwritten sequel to Harlot’s Ghost.

  Mailer was reading biographies of Grigory Efimovich Rasputin, Czarina Alexandra’s confidant, and had become fascinated with the divisions in his psyche. Asked what the good-evil split was in the Mad Monk, he said, “Fifty-fifty, and that is why he is so interesting to me.”

  Dick and Doris Kearns Goodwin were also regular visitors to Provincetown. Whenever either of the Mailers had to go to Boston for medical work, they invariably stayed at the Goodwins’ home in Concord, twenty miles outside Boston. The Goodwins are dinner conversationalists of some repute, and the Mailers loved Dick’s memories of the Kennedy White House, Castro, and Che Guevara, and Doris’s tales of interviewing LBJ at his Texas ranch in his final years. Mailer’s opinion of Johnson improved after reading her book Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, based on her extensive interviews with the former president. Mailer relished her account of how LBJ carried on long conversations with “delicate Kennedyites” while sitting on the toilet.