The Spooky Art

by Norman Mailer

  At any rate, this early novel, holding to its virtues and staggering under its faults, went out to publishers with the blessing of my agent, Berta Kaslow, who was beginning at William Morris then and loved the book; before she was done it went to twenty publishing houses. I was in the Army by then, of course, at last! I went into the Army the week A Transit to Narcissus went out to the first publisher, and all through basic training and replacement depots and on troop transports and in Leyte and Luzon and Japan, I would receive letters from Berta. Another publisher or two had just turned the book down, but she had not lost faith. Nor had I. Maybe we burned longer in our hopes for that book because the first editor to read it, Robert Linscott of Random House, then comparable in distinction to Maxwell Perkins, had liked A Transit to Narcissus enough to think of publishing it. The other editors at Random House did not agree with him, however, and since I was in the Army and would not be able to work with him on editing it (and, I’m certain, condensing it), Linscott rejected the book reluctantly, and with a splendid letter to me that I carried through the war.

  Other readers were not to be as kind. Some editors thought the book more depressing than anything, others were aghast at the murkiness and/or depth of the sexual relations; the consensus suggested that the book had a power of a sort, and the author, considering his youth, might have yet a career, but the work itself was too unpleasant to see print.

  Oddly enough, there was, as I recollect, praise for the style. Let us hope it was not a collective lack of taste so much as a collective hypocrisy of editors; if one can find nothing much good to say about a manuscript, praise the style at least: It was obvious I was proud of my style. But what awful stuff it is today! No little word is ever used in A Transit to Narcissus when a polysyllabic slab of jargon will do, and the meaning is not only fuzzy in the pages but in the sentences. Maybe there has never been another novel where as many characters take their psychic temperature after every little event—where as many actually go out for walks to think things through. One is even brought to remember that the book takes place in the late Depression years of the thirties, when the average American city and mill town was still interesting to walk around and nobody had money for more.

  Yet if the style is monumentally bad, that is also a curiosity, for all through college I had been writing better stuff. A short story full of action and quick prose called “The Greatest Thing in the World” had won a nationwide college short-story contest two years before, and a short novel, A Calculus at Heaven, finished at the beginning of my Senior year (indeed, right after the play was written), had been far superior in style, if considerably less ambitious in theme. But then, in a couple of years, I would be writing simply again. The war squeezed more than a few ponderosities out of my fingers, and the lethargic dissonance of this prose is soon replaced by the more digestible stylistic flaws of The Naked and the Dead—the life of a soldier was good for one writer! What may be interesting now is that A Transit to Narcissus was done at a time when I was changing my literary gods, moving bag and borrowed baggage from Farrell, Hemingway, and Dos Passos to Faulkner, Proust, Mann, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James, and an intense dose of F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (which was the big book at Harvard my Junior and Senior years). So one’s sure taste for low life in literature had been temporarily overwhelmed by the cultural reflexes of a half-educated Harvard man. One senses a literary prig working at these pages. As is usually true of young writers and long novels, the prose suffers from every intellectual sloth of the author’s character. Indeed, without its operatic plot, the book would be close to unreadable.

  Yet now I agree to publish it. True, it will appear in facsimile, and for a most limited audience. The general public will be protected (by the price of this work—$100!) from my youthful indulgences in prose.

  But what is to be gained by showing it? My literary reputation is more likely to survive than be enhanced by this novel.

  The answer is curious to myself. I do not recognize the young man who wrote this book, I do not even like him very much, and yet I know that he must be me because his themes are mine, his ambition is as large for his age as my ambition would ever become, and I am not even without an odd regard for him. If I understand what he is trying to say, then he is close to saying the unsayable. The most terrible themes of my own life—the nearness of violence to creation, and the whiff of murder just beyond every embrace of love—are his themes also. So I can recognize myself and realize that if I had not gone to war, I probably would have kept writing books like A Transit to Narcissus, although, in time, better, I hope, and with good fortune might have ended like Iris Murdoch, a writer I greatly admire.

  Instead, my early talents, such as they were, went through the war, and the over-elaborated sinuosities and intercalations of that young man were hammered into shape by a crude anvil of American society—the American Army at war—and the social sense, lacking so conspicuously in A Transit to Narcissus, was now achieved. The writer would spend the rest of his working years in tension between two major themes rather than one, two mysteries to explore by literary means instead of a search for just one holy grail, and that, we may as well assume, was to his benefit. Maybe it is good to be aware early that society can be as much of a mystery as the individual, that Marx offers no more of a final answer than Freud, and that Satan is as profound an enigma as Jesus.

  I stray, however. The point is that despite all its flaws, I am probably glad to see A Transit to Narcissus published. I cannot pretend to like it, but curiously, I respect the profundity of its impulse. Like a badly twisted arthritic who nevertheless engages in rock-climbing, I respect the effort, the confidence, and the peculiar bravery (since I do not feel I am speaking about myself) of a young man who was living in some private depth of the psyche and so comprehended early, as some people never do, that the unsayable was indeed all that would save him. That can be a lot for a young man to know—that even in our chaos we are individual works of art, maybe even of design—it is, indeed, a theme to live with for your life, and I have lived with it, or tried to, and now feel, I suppose, that we may as well reveal where it all began.

  Soon after finishing A Transit to Narcissus, I entered another existence. It lasted for hardly more than two years but felt like a decade. I was a private in the Army. That gave real experience as opposed to the too-quick experience I was searching for in the week I spent working in the mental hospital. It’s the life you can’t escape that gives you the knowledge you need to grow as a writer.

  STEVEN MARCUS: Can you say something about your methods of working?

  NORMAN MAILER: They vary with each book. I wrote The Naked and the Dead on the typewriter. I used to write four days a week—Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.

  SM: Definite hours?

  NM: Yes, very definite hours. I’d get up about 8:00 or 8:30 and I’d be at work by 10:00. And I’d work until 12:30; then I’d have lunch. I’d get back to work about 2:30 or 3:00 and work for another two hours. In the afternoon, I usually needed a can of beer to prime me. But I’d write for five hours a day. And I wrote a great deal. The average I tried to keep was seven typewritten pages a day, twenty-eight pages a week. The first draft took seven months; the second draft, which was really only half a draft, took four months. The part about the platoon went well from the beginning, but the Lieutenant and the General in the first draft were stock characters. If it had been published at that point, the book would have been considered an interesting war novel with some good scenes, no more. The second draft was the bonus. Cummings and Hearn were done in the second draft. If you look at the book, you can see that the style shifts, that the parts about Cummings and Hearn are written in a somewhat more developed vein. Less forceful but more articulated. And you can see something of the turn my later writing would take in the scenes between Cummings and Hearn.

  SM: Well, how did the idea of The Naked and the Dead come to you?

  NM: I wanted to write a short novel about a long patro
l. All during the war I kept thinking about this patrol. I even had the idea before I went overseas. Probably it was stimulated by a few war books I had read: John Hersey’s Into the Valley, Harry Brown’s A Walk in the Sun, and a couple of others I no longer remember. Out of these books came the idea to do a novel about a long patrol. And I began to create my characters. All the while I was overseas a part of me was working on this long patrol. I even ended up in a reconnaissance outfit which I had asked to get into. A reconnaissance outfit, after all, tends to take long patrols. Art kept traducing life. At any rate, when I started writing The Naked and the Dead I thought it might be a good idea to have a preliminary chapter or two to give the readers a chance to meet my characters before they went on patrol. But the next six months and the first 400 pages went into that, and I remembered in the early days I was annoyed at how long it was taking me to get to my patrol.

  SM: Do you keep notes, or a journal? What’s your preparatory material?

  NM: That varies. For The Naked and the Dead I had a file full of notes and a long dossier on each man. Many of these details never got into the novel, but the added knowledge made me feel more comfortable with each character. Indeed, I even had charts to show which characters had not yet had scenes with other characters. For a book which seems spontaneous on its surface, The Naked and the Dead was written mechanically. I studied engineering at Harvard, and I suppose it was the book of a young engineer. The structure is sturdy, but there’s no fine filigree to the joints. And the working plan was simple. I devised some preliminary actions for the platoon in order to give the reader an opportunity to get to know the men, but the beginning, as I said, took over two-thirds of the book. The patrol itself is also simple, but I did give more thought to working it out ahead of time.

  SM: People have commented on the pleasure you seem to take in the military detail of The Naked and the Dead.

  NM: Compared to someone like James Jones, I’m an amateur at military detail. But at that time I did like all those details, I even used to enjoy patrols, or at least did when I wasn’t sick with jungle rot or Atabrine (which we took to avoid malaria). I was one of the few men in the platoon who could read a map and once I gave myself away. We used to have classes after a campaign was over. We’d come back to garrison—one of those tent cities out in a rice paddy—and they would teach us all over again how to read maps and compasses or they would drill us on the nomenclature of the machine gun for the eighth time. One day, very bored, I was daydreaming, and the instructor pointed to a part of the map and said, “Mailer, what are those coordinates?” If I had had a moment to think, I would never have answered. It was bad form to be bright in my outfit, but I didn’t think: He caught me in a daze, and I looked up and said, “320.017 dash 146.814” and everyone’s mouth dropped open. It was the first time anybody ever answered such a question thus briskly in the history of infantry map reading. At any rate, that was the fun for me, the part about the patrol.

  I think I suffered more, however, from the reviews of The Naked and the Dead than any other of my books. I wanted to sit down and write a letter to each and every critic to tell how my work had been misinterpreted. I felt this way even when they enthused over the novel. It probably takes twenty years to appreciate book reviewing for what it is—a primitive rite. By then, you are able to ingest unkind reviews, provided they are well written. Sometimes, an off-the-wall review can be as nourishing as a wild game dinner. (And, by times, as indigestible.) I’d never dream, however, of not reading reviews. It would be like not looking at a naked woman if she happens to be standing in front of her open window. Whether ugly or lovely, she is undeniably interesting under such circumstances.

  Fifty years after its publication in 1948, and thirty-two years after the interview with Steven Marcus, I wrote the following as a foreword to a new edition of the book.

  I think it might be interesting to talk about The Naked and the Dead as a best-seller that was the work of an amateur. Of course, as best-sellers go, it was a good book, and the author who began it at the age of twenty-three and completed it in fifteen months had already written more than a half million words in college and so could be considered a hardworking amateur who loved writing and was prepared in the way of a twenty-four-year-old to fall on his sword in defense of literature.

  He was naïve, he was passionate about writing, he knew very little about the subtle demands of a good style, he did not have a great deal of restraint, and he burned with excitement as he wrote. He hardly knew whether he should stand in the shadow of Tolstoy or was essentially without talent. He was an amateur.

  He was also a writer of what soon became a big best-seller. Indeed, The Naked and the Dead was his only prodigious best-seller. It had a good story that got better and better, it had immediacy, it came out at exactly the right time, when, near to three years after the Second World War ended, everyone was ready for a big war novel that gave some idea of what it had been like—it thrived on its scenes of combat—and it had a best-seller style. The book was sloppily written (the words came too quickly and too easily), and there was hardly a noun in any sentence not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly available adjective—scalding coffee and tremulous fear are the sorts of things you will find throughout.

  The book also had vigor. This is the felicity of good books by amateurs. They venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether. The Naked and the Dead took chances all over the place and more of them succeeded than not. It was rightly a best-seller; it fulfilled one of two profiles of such a category—for invariably these books are written by bold amateurs or by niche professionals, who know more about a given subject than they ought to.

  All this said, one may now ask the professional what virtue he might ascribe to the work he did as an amateur. The answer is that he had the good luck to be influenced profoundly by Tolstoy in the fifteen months he was writing the opus back in 1946 and 1947—he read from Anna Karenina most mornings before he commenced his own work. Thereby, his pages, through the limited perceptions of a twenty-four-year-old, reflect what he learned about compassion from Tolstoy. For that is the genius of the old man—Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say that we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful. In any case, good or bad, it reminds us that life is like a gladiators’ arena for the soul and so we can feel strengthened by those who endure, and feel awe and pity for those who do not.

  That fine edge in Tolstoy, the knowledge that compassion is valueless without severity (for otherwise it cannot defend itself against sentimentality), gave The Naked and the Dead whatever enduring virtue it may possess and catapulted the amateur who wrote it into the grim ranks of those successful literary men and women who are obliged to become professional in order to survive—no easy demand, for it would insist that one must be able to do a good day’s work on a bad day, and indeed, that is a badge of honor decent professionals are entitled to wear.

  STEVEN MARCUS: What methods did you pursue in your second novel?

  NORMAN MAILER: Well, with Barbary Shore, I began to run into trouble. I started it in Paris about six months after I finished The Naked and the Dead and did about fifty pages. It was then called Mrs. Guinevere and was influenced by Sally Bowles in Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. Mrs. Guinevere never went anywhere. It stopped, just ground down after those first fifty pages. I dropped it, thought I’d never pick it up again, and started to work on another novel. Did all the research, went to Indiana to do research.

  SM: On what?

  NM: On a labor novel. There was a union in Evansville with which I had connections. So I stayed for a few days in Indiana, and then went to Jamaica, Vermont, to write the novel. I spent four to five weeks getting ready to begin, made a great push on the beginning, worked for two weeks, and qu
it cold. I didn’t have the book. I didn’t know a damned thing about labor unions. In desperation (I was full of second-novel panic) I picked up Mrs. Guinevere and looked at it. And I found something there I could go on with. So I worked on it all through the spring of 1949, and then moved out to Hollywood for the summer. I finished the second half in Hollywood. Barbary Shore is really a Hollywood novel. I think it reflected the impact of Hollywood on me in some subterranean fashion. Certainly the first draft is the wildest draft of the three; it’s almost insane, and the most indigestible portions were written in the first couple of months I was in Hollywood. I never knew where the book was going; I had no idea where it would be by tomorrow. I’d wake up and work the typewriter in great dread, in literal terror, wondering when this curious and doubtful inspiration was going to stop. It never quite did. It ground along at the rate of three pages, three difficult pages a day. I got a first draft done and was quite unhappy with it; it was a very bad book at that point. When I rewrote it later, in Provincetown, a summer later, again it went at the rate of three pages a day. The revision was different from the first draft, and I think much better. But working on Barbary Shore, I always felt as if I were not writing the book myself but rather as if I were serving as a subject for some intelligence which had decided to use me to write the book. It had nothing to do with whether the work was good or bad. I just had to make do with the fact that I had absolutely no conscious control of it. If I hadn’t heard about the unconscious, I would have had to postulate one to explain this phenomenon. For the first time I became powerfully aware that I had an unconscious, which seemed to have little to do with me.