James Baldwin is too charming a writer to be major. If in Notes of a Native Son he has a sense of moral nuance which is one of the few modern guides to the sophistications of the ethos, even the best of his paragraphs are sprayed with perfume. Baldwin seems incapable of saying “Fuck you” to the reader; instead he must delineate the cracking and the breaking and the melting and the hardening of a heart which could never have felt such sensuous growths and little deaths without being emptied as a voice. It is a pity, because Baldwin is not without courage. His second novel, Giovanni’s Room, was a bad book but mostly a brave one, and since his life has been as fantastic and varied as the life of any of my fellow racketeers, and he has kept his sensitivity, one itches at times to take a hammer to his detachment, smash the perfumed dome of his ego, and reduce him to what must be one of the most tortured and magical nerves of our time. If he ever climbs the mountain, and really tells it, we will have a testament, and not a noble toilet water. Until then he is doomed to be minor.
I have a terrible confession to make—I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillée in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn.* Since I’ve never been able to read Virginia Woolf, and am sometimes willing to believe it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict may be taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure—that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls. If to this, I add that the little I have read of Herbert Gold reminds me of nothing so much as a woman writer, well I do not know that I have to be aware now of still another such acquaintance.
There are fifty fine writers who could be mentioned, and the odds are not that the first of us to become major will come from their host. More likely we are to hear from writers altogether unknown, working in silence, here, nowhere, and there.† But since I can speak only of people with whose work and/or person I am knowledgeable, I can do no more than tip my hat to such men and boys of good repute as William Gaddis, Harvey Swados, Harold Humes, William Humphrey, Wright Morris, Bernard Malamud, John Philips, and all the other respected old and new styles of our piggish time.
I will cease with the comment that the novelists will grow when the publishers improve. Five brave publishing houses (a miracle) would wear away a drop of nausea in the cancerous American conscience, and give to the thousand of us or more with real talent the lone-wolf hope that we can begin to explore a little more of that murderous and cowardly world which will burst into madness if it does not dare a new art of the brave.
* * *
* With a sorry reluctance to spoil the authority of this verdict, I have to admit that the early work of Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, and Carson McCullers gave me pleasure.
† The ten episodes from Naked Lunch that were printed in Big Table were more arresting, I thought, than anything I’ve read by an American in years. If the rest of William Burroughs’s book is equal to what was shown, and if the novel proves to be a novel and not a collage of extraordinary fragments, then Burroughs will deserve rank as one of the most important novelists in America, and may prove comparable in his impact to Jean Genet.
The Mind of an Outlaw
(1959)
IN HIS REVIEW OF The Deer Park, Malcolm Cowley said it must have been a more difficult book to write than The Naked and the Dead. He was right. Most of the time, I worked on The Deer Park in a low mood; my liver, which had gone bad in the Philippines, exacted a hard price for forcing the effort against the tide of a long depression, and matters were not improved when nobody at Rinehart & Co. liked the first draft of the novel. The second draft, which to me was the finished book, also gave little enthusiasm to the editors, and open woe to Stanley Rinehart, the publisher. I was impatient to leave for Mexico, now that I was done, but before I could go, Rinehart asked for a week in which to decide whether he wanted to do the book. Since he had already given me a contract which allowed him no option not to accept the novel (a common arrangement for writers whose sales are more or less large), any decision to reject the manuscript would cost him a sizable advance. (I learned later he had been hoping his lawyers would find the book obscene, but they did not, at least not then in May 1954.) So he had really no choice but to agree to put the book out in February, and gloomily he consented. To cheer him a bit, I agreed to his request that he delay paying me my advance until publication, although the first half was due on delivery of the manuscript. I thought the favor might improve our relations.
Now, if a few of you are wondering why I did not take my book back and go to another publishing house, the answer is that I was tired. I was badly tired. Only a few weeks before, a doctor had given me tests for the liver, and it had shown itself to be sick and depleted. I was hoping that a few months in Mexico would give me a chance to fill up again.
But the next months were not cheerful. The Deer Park had been done as well as I could do it, yet I thought it was probably a minor work, and I did not know if I had any real interest in starting another book. I made efforts of course: I collected notes, began to piece together a few ideas for a novel given to bullfighting, and another about a concentration camp. I wrote David Riesman Reconsidered during this time, and The Homosexual Villain; read most of the work of the other writers of my generation (I think I was looking for a level against which to measure my third novel), went over the galleys when they came, changed a line or two, sent them back. Keeping half busy I mended a bit, but it was a time of dull drifting. When we came back to New York in October, The Deer Park was already in page proof. By November, the first advertisement was given to Publishers’ Weekly. Then, with less than ninety days to publication, Stanley Rinehart told me I would have to take out a small piece of the book—six not-very-explicit lines about the sex of an old producer and a call girl. The moment one was ready to consider losing those six lines they moved into the moral center of the novel. It would be no tonic for my liver to cut them out. But I also knew Rinehart was serious, and since I was still tired, it seemed a little unreal to try to keep the passage. Like a miser I had been storing energy to start a new book: I wanted nothing to distract me now. I gave in on a word or two, agreed to rewrite a line, and went home from that particular conference not very impressed with myself. The next morning I called up the editor in chief, Ted Amussen, to tell him I had decided the original words had to be put back.
“Well, fine,” he said, “fine. I don’t know why you agreed to anything in the first place.”
A day later, Stanley Rinehart halted publication, stopped all ads (he was too late to catch the first run of Publishers’ Weekly, which was already on its way to England with a full page for The Deer Park) and broke his contract to do the book. I was started on a trip to find a new publisher, and before I was done the book had gone to Random House, Knopf, Simon & Schuster, Harper’s, Scribners, and unofficially to Harcourt Brace. Someday it would be fine to give the details, but for now little more than a few lines of dialogue and an editorial report:
Bennett Cerf: This novel will set publishing back twenty years.
Alfred Knopf to an editor: Is this your idea of the kind of book which should bear a Borzoi imprint?
The lawyer for one publishing house complimented me on the six lines, word for word, which had excited Rinehart to break his contract. This lawyer said, “It’s admirable the way you get around the problem here.” Then he brought out more than a hundred objections to other parts of the book. One was the line, “She was lovely. Her back was adorable in its contours.” I was told that this ought to go because “the principals are n
ot married, and so your description puts a favorable interpretation upon a meretricious relationship.”
Hiram Haydn had lunch with me some time after Random House saw the book. He told me he was responsible for their decision not to do it, and if I did not agree with his taste, I had to admire his honesty—it is rare for an editor to tell a writer the truth. Haydn went on to say that the book never came alive for him, even though he had been ready to welcome it. “I can tell you that I picked the book up with anticipation. Of course I had heard from Bill, and Bill had told me that he didn’t like it, but I never pay attention to what one writer says about the work of another.…” Bill was William Styron, and Haydn was his editor. I had asked Styron to call Haydn the night I found out Rinehart had broken his contract. One reason for asking the favor of Styron was that he sent me a long letter about the novel after I had shown it to him in manuscript. He had written, “I don’t like The Deer Park, but I admire sheer hell out of it.” So I thought to impose on him.
Other parts of the account are not less dreary. The only generosity I found was from the late Jack Goodman. He sent me a photostat of his editorial report to Simon & Schuster, and because it was sympathetic, his report became the objective estimate of the situation for me. I assumed that the book when it came out would meet the kind of trouble Goodman expected, and so when I went back later to work on the page proofs I was not free of a fear or two. But that can be talked about in its place. Here is the core of his report:
Mailer refuses to make any changes.… (He) will consider suggestions, but reserves the right to make final decisions, so we must make our decision on what the book now is.
That’s not easy. It is full of vitality and power, as readable a novel as I’ve ever encountered. Mailer emerges as a sort of post-Kinsey F. Scott Fitzgerald. His dialogue is uninhibited and the sexuality of the book is completely interwoven with its purpose, which is to describe a segment of society whose morality is nonexistent. Locale is evidently Palm Springs. Chief characters are Charles Eitel, movie director who first defies the House Un-American Committee, then becomes a friendly witness, his mistress, a great movie star who is his ex-wife, her lover who is the narrator, the head of a great movie company, his son-in-law, a strange, tortured panderer who is Eitel’s conscience, and assorted demimondaines, homosexuals, actors.
My layman’s opinion is that the novel will be banned in certain quarters and that it may very well be up for an obscenity charge, but this should of course be checked by our lawyers. If it were possible to recognize this at the start, to have a united front here and treat the whole issue positively and head-on, I would be for our publishing. But I am afraid such unanimity may be impossible of attainment and, if so, we should reject, in spite of the fact that I am certain it will be one of the best-selling novels of the next couple of years. It is the work of a serious artist.
The eighth house was G. P. Putnam. I didn’t want to give it to them, I was planning to go next to Viking, but Walter Minton kept saying, “Give us three days. We’ll give you a decision in three days.” So we sent it over to Putnam, and in three days they took it without conditions, and without a request for a single change. I had a victory, I had made my point, but in fact I was not very happy. I had grown so wild on my diet of polite letters from publishing houses who didn’t want me that I had been looking forward to collecting rejections from twenty houses, publish The Deer Park at my own expense, and try to make a kind of publishing history. Instead I was thrown in with Walter Minton, who has since attracted some fame as the publisher of Lolita. He is the only publisher I ever met who would make a good general. Months after I came to Putnam, Minton told me, “I was ready to take The Deer Park without reading it. I knew your name would sell enough copies to pay your advance, and I figured one of these days you’re going to write another book like The Naked and the Dead,” which is the sort of sure hold of strategy you can have when you’re not afraid of censorship.
Now I’ve tried to water this account with a minimum of tears, but taking The Deer Park into the nervous system of eight publishing houses was not so very good for my own nervous system, nor was it good for getting to work on my new novel. In the ten weeks it took the book to travel the circuit from Rinehart to Putnam, I squandered the careful energy I had been hoarding for months; there was a hard comedy at how much of myself I would burn up in a few hours of hot telephone calls; I had never had any sense for practical affairs, but in those days, carrying The Deer Park from house to house, I stayed as close to it as a stagestruck mother pushing her child forward at every producer’s office. I was amateur agent for it, messenger boy, editorial consultant, Machiavelli of the luncheon table, fool of the five-o’clock drinks; I was learning the publishing business in a hurry, and I made a hundred mistakes and paid for each one by wasting a new bout of energy.
In a way there was sense to it. For the first time in years I was having the kind of experience which was likely to return some day as good work, and so I forced many little events past any practical return, even insulting a few publishers en route as if to discover the limits of each situation. I was trying to find a few new proportions to things, and I did learn a bit. But I’ll never know what that novel about the concentration camp would have been like if I had gotten quietly to work when I came back to New York and The Deer Park had been published on time. It is possible I was not serious about the book, it is also possible I lost something good, but one way or the other, that novel disappeared in the excitement, as lost as “the little object” in Barbary Shore, and it has not stirred since.
The real confession is that I was making a few of my mental connections those days on marijuana. Like more than one or two of my generation, I had smoked it from time to time over the years, but it never had meant anything. In Mexico, however, down in my depression with a bad liver, pot gave me a sense of something new about the time I was convinced I had seen it all, and I liked it enough to take it now and again in New York.
Then The Deer Park began to go like a beggar from house to house and en route Stanley Rinehart made it clear he was going to try not to pay the advance. Until then I had had sympathy for him. I thought it had taken a kind of displaced courage to be able to drop the book the way he did. An expensive moral stand, and wasteful for me; but a moral stand. When it turned out that he did not like to bear the expense of being that moral, the experience turned ugly for me. It took many months and the service of my lawyer to get the money, but long before that the situation had become real enough to drive a spike into my cast-iron mind. I realized in some bottom of myself that for years I had been the sort of comic figure I would have cooked to a turn in one of my books, a radical who had the nineteenth-century naïveté to believe that the people with whom he did business were (1) gentlemen, (2) fond of him, and (3) respectful of his ideas, even if in disagreement with them. Now, I was in the act of learning that I was not adored so very much; that my ideas were seen as nasty; and that my fine America which I had been at pains to criticize for so many years was in fact a real country which did real things and ugly things to the characters of more people than just the characters of my books. If the years since the war had not been brave nor noble in the history of the country, which I certainly thought and do think, why then did it come as surprise that people in publishing were not as good as they used to be, and that the day of Maxwell Perkins was a day which was gone, really gone, gone as Greta Garbo and Scott Fitzgerald? Not easy, one could argue, for an advertising man to admit that advertising is a dishonest occupation, and no easier was it for the working novelist to see that now were left only the cliques, fashions, vogues, snobs, snots, and fools, not to mention a dozen bureaucracies of criticism; that there was no room for the old literary idea of oneself as a major writer, a figure in the landscape. One had become a set of relations and equations, most flourishing when most incorporated, for then one’s literary stock was ready for merger. The day was gone when people held on to your novels no matter what others might say. Instead o
ne’s good young readers waited now for the verdict of professional young men, academics who wolfed down a modern literature with an anxiety to find your classification, your identity, your corporate literary earnings, each reference to yourself as individual as a carloading of homogenized words. The articles which would be written about you and a dozen others would be done by minds which were expert on the aggregate and so had senses too lumpy for the particular. There was a limit to how much appraisal could be made of a work before the critic exposed his lack of the critical faculty, and so it was naturally wiser for the mind of the expert to masticate the themes of ten writers rather than dissect the difficulties of any one.
I had begun to read my good American novels at the end of an era—I could remember people who would talk wistfully about the excitement with which they had gone to bookstores because it was publication day for the second novel of Thomas Wolfe. My adolescent crush on the profession of the writer had been more lasting than I could have guessed. I had even been so simple as to think that the kind of people who went into publishing were still most concerned with the few writers who made the profession not empty of honor, and I had been taking myself seriously. I had been thinking I was one of those writers.
Instead I caught it in the face and deserved it for not looking at the evidence. I was out of fashion and that was the score; that was all the score; the publishing habits of the past were going to be of no help for my Deer Park. And so, as the language of sentiment would have it, something broke in me, but I do not know if it was so much a loving heart as a cyst of the weak, the unreal, and the needy, and I was finally open to my anger. I turned within my psyche I can almost believe, for I felt something shift to murder in me. I finally had the simple sense to understand that if I wanted my work to travel further than others, the life of my talent depended on fighting a little more, and looking for help a little less. But I deny the sequence in putting it this way, for it took me years to come to this fine point. All I felt then was that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it, I liked it a good sight better than trying to be a gentleman, and with such a set of emotions accelerating one on the other, I mined down deep into the murderous message of marijuana, the smoke of the assassins, and for the first time in my life I knew what it was to make your kicks.
Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays Page 10