Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  He didn’t mention her at the luncheon with twenty-odd book editors at Keens Steakhouse on West 36th Street. He said afterward that he’d made “a tactical decision.” But in his interview with Tom Junod, the literary editor of Esquire, he did. He was going through the likely responses to the novel: from the left (they will hate it because they are “essentially rationalistic” and don’t want the Devil taken seriously); the right (Mailer’s God is not all-powerful, a sacrilegious idea); the Jews (unhappy to see German responsibility for Hitler undermined); and Kakutani, “Princess of the cookie cutter” because she eviscerates all his books. Why she has “a hair up her immortal Japanese ass is beyond me,” he said, unable yet again to resist attacking her.

  Back in Provincetown, he was feeling more optimistic about the novel’s chances. He said that he had three things going for him: 1) Hitler, about whom there is always interest; 2) the ten-year gap since his last novel, which would make readers curious; and 3) Dieter, his demonic first person narrator, who is intermittently omniscient. Limiting his power are the Cudgels, God’s angels, who can shield the consciousness of certain people—Nicholas II, for example—so that Dieter cannot enter the person’s mind. But he can follow young Hitler’s thoughts easily, and can also use “dream-etchings” to suggest nefarious actions to his charge. Using a celestial figure as narrator allowed Mailer to retain the intimacy of the first person voice while not being bound by its limitations, a perspectival sleight-of-hand that parallels the clairvoyance of Meni in Ancient Evenings.

  With no interviews scheduled until the new year, he began to think about a new dramatic version of The Deer Park. Michael had been visiting and talking with his father about filming a staged reading of the play. Stephan Morrow, who had played Stoodie in Tough Guys Don’t Dance, had directed and acted in a staged reading of the play the previous year, which Mailer saw and liked. He invited Morrow to codirect, if the money could be raised, about $200,000 Michael estimated. Mailer wanted to do it at the Provincetown Theater with professional actors but no audience. Michael thought he could sell it to cable television. As Mailer was working on a new version of the play, a work that had engaged him, off and on, for a half century, word came that Bob Lucid had died of a heart attack on December 12.

  Mailer agreed to speak at the memorial service for his old friend at the University of Pennsylvania in April. He had also agreed to speak at the Boston memorial for Bill Styron, who had died a month earlier at the age of eighty-one. On December 14 he made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Provincetown to Boston, making several pit stops, some on the shoulder of the busy highway—Mailer was unfazed about public urination. He slept through a lot of the trip, but talked about both Lucid and Styron. He said he generally hated funerals because “people say all the wrong things.” He was one of the last speakers at the event, which was held at the Boston Public Library. Impatient and bored, he could hear little of what was said. But when he got behind the microphone, he was fully in charge, bantering with the audience, laughing at his own infirmities. He opened by saying, “On top of everything, I’m deaf,” and dominating the room. He told a funny story about playing croquet in Connecticut with Bill and Rose Styron and Howard Fertig. Rose was sitting in the front row and laughed heartily. Four months later, when the time came for Lucid’s memorial, he felt too weak to attend, and his remarks were read by Lennon.

  To what extent Mailer’s complaints registered at the Times is unknown, but Janet Maslin, longtime Times film and then literary reviewer judged The Castle in the Forest. Maslin’s blows are glancing; her tone is respectful. She almost seems to like Mailer’s extensive research on Hitler’s incestuous heritage, but turns up her nose at the excremental and apiary investigations, the former as too exhaustive, and the latter too obvious. Two days later, Lee Siegel, in a 6,200-word essay in the Times Book Review, thoughtfully examines Mailer’s entire career before giving unalloyed praise to the novel, which he calls “an utterly strange work of naked, wild empathy.” Mailer, he said, is “an immensely disciplined craftsman and stylist who has spent the larger portion of his life at the writer’s trade.” The Times, Mailer noted, had not pissed him off; indeed, Siegel’s review certainly helped Mailer’s novel become a bestseller. Nor was he displeased with J. M. Coetzee’s conclusion in The New York Review of Books: “Keeping the paradox infernal-banal alive in all its anguishing inscrutability may be the ultimate achievement of this very considerable contribution to historical fiction.”

  A majority of the other reviews praised the subtlety of Mailer’s insights into Hitler’s diseased psyche, and the story’s singular provenance. Many reviewers found Alois, Hitler’s father, to be a more compelling figure than his son, much as the father figures in his earlier novels were so judged. According to Ebershoff, early sales were strong. Second and third printings were ordered, bringing the number of hardcovers in print to over 100,000. Mailer enjoyed following the novel’s sales figures as they rose and fell with reviews and public appearances. After appearing on Charlie Rose’s show on February 3, he saw the novel’s ranking at Amazon and Barnes & Noble jump the next day. The Castle in the Forest made the bestseller list for three weeks, reaching number five on February 11, 2007, just after Mailer’s eighty-fourth birthday. It was his eleventh bestseller. He had now had at least one in each of seven decades, 1948 to 2007.

  DURING HIS WEST Coast swing for Castle in the Forest, Mailer, accompanied by John Buffalo, arranged to meet Lois Wilson for dinner at his hotel on the Embarcadero waterfront in San Francisco. After John Buffalo was introduced, he left them sitting in a booth. “We had the end section of the restaurant,” Wilson recalled in a conversation with her daughter. “It was very dark. And we talked and talked.” They had trouble seeing the menu, she said. “They turned the lights way down, and we had sweeping curtains around, and he talked about how he was so sick.”

  They pulled all his teeth because they were afraid his mouth would get infected and that was something that wasn’t necessary, but it made a big difference. He said, “Did you ever know anybody who lost his teeth?” [Lois getting very emotional here, having trouble breathing and talking] And I said, “Yes,” and he said, “What was their reaction?” and I said, “Desolation.” [Lois very upset and serious during this part of interview] That was my father. He was so proud of himself—handsome—and they pulled his teeth and they never fit and they moved around in his mouth, and so I said, “No, I know it’s terrible.” And Norman said, “It sure is,” and he’d had a lot of his vital parts operated on, I don’t know what’s what, and the same thing happened to Norris. So, then he said, “How would you characterize me?” I didn’t say a word.

  A little later, he asked her the same question, but she still couldn’t come up with anything. At the end of the meal he got up on his two canes and said, “Would you like to come up to the room?” She said, “If I come up, I’ll fall asleep.” He replied that he would too, and walked her to the lobby to get a cab. “Norman and I exchanged, at a distance, noisy kisses [she makes a smack noise], like one does with one’s husband.” She went home alone, “kind of drunk.”

  The next day, February 5, she called him on his cell phone.

  I got him at KQED about to be interviewed by Mike Krasny. And he said, “I’ll call you in an hour.” And he did, exactly in an hour. And I said, “I’ll never see you again.” I knew that that was it. And he said, “Yes, I’ll be here, I’ll be back here in a year. I will have finished the next book and I’ll be talking to Mike Krasny about it.” And I said, “That’s good, I look forward to it.” And that was that [long silence]. I’m not sure I have anything else to say about Norman. I tried to think of a way of characterizing him in a word or two, but you know, I can’t. That’s not how you go about Norman. He’s very—he’s magnificent and rare. Nothing else like him.

  Shortly after Mailer returned from the West Coast, Norris told him that she was going to move to Brooklyn. They had talked earlier about selling the Provincetown house and buying a place in Conne
cticut to be near family and New York doctors, but nothing came of it. By the spring of 2007, Mailer had lost over fifty pounds, and his breathing was as bad as before the bypass surgery, perhaps worse. His doctor prescribed asthma medicine, but Norris suspected it was something else. He believed the sea air was sustaining him, and refused to go to the city.

  Norris was insistent about her move. She told friends that she was tired of “rattling around in this big house while Norman rattles around in his head.” She told Raymond, “People are going to think I’m just the worst,” but eventually her absence would make him “understand how much more sensible it is for us to be in Brooklyn.” On March 9, with the help of friends she packed her clothes, books, the manuscript of her new novel, and her computer—a sign that the move was not temporary—and left with her mother for New York in a rental car. He made no fuss but was clearly sad, and had a tear in his eye. She was tearful but firm. When Lennon arrived the next evening to take him to dinner, Mailer was sitting alone in the dark. At Michael Shay’s, nearly deserted, he ate sixteen oysters, and as usual pondered the shell faces. Back at the house for a nightcap, he said that his eyes were going from macular degeneration and that he could be blind in eighteen months. “I’m not worried about it,” he said. Norris e-mailed friends that she was as happy as she had been for a long time. Mailer said he would like her to spend at least ten days a month with him.

  Norris left their Toyota sedan in case he needed it, but Raymond or friends usually drove him wherever he needed to go. But on April 17, he announced to Raymond that he was taking a day off from working on the revision of The Deer Park—A Play, and going to lunch at the Wicked Oyster in Wellfleet. Raymond was a bit worried about his boss driving and offered to accompany him, but Mailer said he preferred to go alone. As soon as Mailer left, Raymond called Norris in Brooklyn, and she said there was nothing to be done. Raymond drove by the house at 7:45 P.M., but the car wasn’t there. He learned later that Mailer had gotten home safely, after dinner at the Lobster Pot, the big tourist restaurant. He’d left the Toyota when he had trouble starting it, and taken a cab home. Norris e-mailed Raymond that she was proud of Norman, “and you can tell him that for me.”

  The next day, Mailer told Raymond about his lunch in Wellfleet, and how he’d driven around the country roads in Truro before going to the Lobster Pot for dinner, and then a final drink at the Old Colony. Mailer had done all this, but not alone. He had been saying goodbye to another old friend. Eileen Fredrickson had flown in from Chicago for a two-day visit, and Mailer had picked her up at her motel and squired her around. After she returned to Chicago, Fredrickson recalled, Mailer called her and told her it was “a perfect visit.” He called her again a few days later and told her that he loved her and talked of another visit in October. It was to be their last conversation.

  Norris came to Provincetown regularly in the spring, and Mailer traveled to New York for a few events—to receive the Hadada Award from The Paris Review on April 23, presented by E. L. Doctorow, and on June 27 to appear in conversation with Günter Grass and Andrew O’Hagan at the New York Public Library. He had lost more weight, and was subsisting on oysters, red wine mixed with orange juice, and Dove Bars. “He couldn’t walk more than a few steps, even with two canes, without resting,” Norris wrote. “He could hardly breathe. The audience gasped when he walked out on stage at the Public Library.” When Kate saw her father looking like King Lear at the promised end, she said, “We shouldn’t let Dad do this. We have to take him to the hospital right now.” But when he got on stage and began talking, Norris said, “He was astounding in his clarity and scope of thought.” Barbara, sitting next to Norris, said, “If we can keep him on stage, he’ll live forever.”

  Grass had just published a memoir, Peeling the Onion, in which he revealed that as a teenager in wartime Germany he had been a member of the Waffen-SS. He had been criticized for hiding this affiliation for sixty years, and O’Hagan was pressing him on the matter. Mailer rose to his defense, saying “How many of us would have the courage at age seventeen to go against the reigning government and fight it alone? Especially one as brutal as the Nazis?” Grass’s situation, he said, had caused him to reflect on something that “I have held on to for a long, long time, and never written about”—the stabbing of Adele. He said he now knew that he never would. “I’m happy to be here tonight with him, and I honor the man,” Mailer said. Grass was visibly moved by his statement.

  Mailer told the audience at the beginning of the program that this would probably be his last public appearance. But he would travel back to New York for one more event, a showing of Tough Guys Don’t Dance and Maidstone at Lincoln Center on July 22. In between the films there was a discussion on stage with film critic Michael Chaiken, Lincoln Center programmer Kent Jones, and Lennon. “He spoke powerfully and eloquently about his years directing,” Chaiken recalled, “the pleasure it had brought him, and the seriousness with which he endeavored to make” his films. After the discussion, Maidstone was shown. Mailer said that the second half was “repetitive and self-indulgent,” with too much histrionic foreshadowing. In the Green Room afterward, a number of friends and admirers stopped by. He knew that this was his last public outing, and drew out his conversations.

  Back in Provincetown, Mailer was up and down—weak and dispirited one day, feisty and grumpy the next. There was talk of him getting an electroshock treatment. He said that if it didn’t help, “I will be an invalid for the rest of my life.” He continued to work. The success of Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great was a key factor in his decision not to postpone the theology conversations book. Random House was eager to publish it as soon as it was edited. After much discussion, he approved the title: On God: An Uncommon Conversation. It was scheduled for publication on October 16.

  Norris returned to Provincetown for the summer, and all the children sensing this could be his last summer, visited. On August 1, Norris left on a three-week promotional tour for her new novel, traveling to Atlanta, Chicago, and the West Coast. She planned to return in time for the September wedding of Maggie and John Wendling on the low-tide flats behind the house. For an hour or two a day, Mailer went over the final changes and jacket design for On God. He also read and was impressed with Andrew O’Hagan’s review of Don DeLillo’s new novel about 9/11, Falling Man. He said that perhaps it would be DeLillo who replaced him as the writer who takes on all the big themes and events in American life. He went on to say, “There was a time when I felt completely secure in tackling all the big topics. I was totally confident.” In 2010 DeLillo said that it was Mailer’s “ambition, risk, broad vision, wide range—aspects of the American tradition—that put me on the path I’ve been following all these years.”

  On Norris’s instructions, Mailer’s three upcoming speaking engagements were canceled. He was angry that this was done without his knowledge, but admitted that he wasn’t up to long trips anymore. He still planned, however, to go ahead with the filming of The Deer Park—A Play in November. Michael hadn’t yet raised the necessary production money, so Mailer planned to use the next big check from the University of Texas. Norris didn’t know of his plan, and he knew she would be furious when she learned. One obvious reason that he continued to take on new projects was to keep the adrenaline flowing. But he was realistic enough to know that he probably wouldn’t be able to write the next Hitler novel.

  He wrote his last letter on August 3 to help honor an old friend. “James Jones is one of the few major American novelists to emerge here since the Second World War. He was immensely talented and I think it is a splendid idea to endow a chair in his name at Eastern Illinois University. He would have grumbled, but I think it would have given him true pleasure.” He wanted to begin the sequel to Castle. “It’s all there,” he said, pointing to his head, “a helluva novel. Hitler was so human, and I’d love to cook him to a turn.” Now he was only functioning five or six hours a day, sleeping the rest. In mid-August, he stopped climbing to his study, and worked
sporadically at the dining room table.

  His breathing continued to get worse and he went to Massachusetts General Hospital for an exam. One lung was partially collapsed and there was fluid in the other. There were other problems, including some sort of lesion on his pancreas. The doctors thought it might be best to keep him in Boston, which meant missing Maggie’s wedding on September 8. Norris asked the doctors to tell him the seriousness of his condition. “He is going down; it’s just a question of when,” she said to friends. Against medical advice, he came home two days before the wedding, after eight days in the hospital. The afternoon he arrived he got into a conversation with Susan and Lennon about the way elderly Eskimos and Indians wandered into the woods so they would not be a burden.

  Mailer asked, “But how would they die?”

  “By not eating or drinking,” Lennon said.

  “Or eaten by a wild beast,” Susan said.

  “That would be the way to go,” he said, “fighting a wild animal. I am whipped by time.”

  Norris, sad and worried, wanted to bring him to Brooklyn, where he would be near a hospital, but he resisted.

  Carol Stevens, the bride’s mother, attended the wedding, with about a hundred others. Norris and Carol had become good friends—“almost like sisters,” Carol said—and e-mailed each other almost every day, but Mailer had seen her only a few times in the past few years. He spent a few minutes in a quiet conversation with her. Mailer’s sons got him down to the beach for the brief ceremony. He looked wretched sitting in the brisk wind on the flats with a flower in his lapel. Afterward, he had a glass of champagne, posed for photos with the newly married couple, and then went upstairs to lie down.