My literary generation was under the umbrella of Maxwell Perkins—anyone who became an editor wanted to be like him. Young editors felt a loyalty toward their writers. There were spiritual marriages, if you will. It’s still true to a degree, but the odds against sustaining such loyalty are now much higher. Today’s publishing dictates that an editor has to bring in books which make money. This near-absolute has to enter the interstices of a young editor’s thinking. (And his or her intestines.) I imagine it would be hard for most young editors not to start pushing their authors just a bit in the direction of trying to be more popular. That, of course, strains the bond.
Right now the smart money would bet against the serious novel. The publishing houses are getting depressed about the future of good fiction, and the publishers are obviously the ones who most determine that future. Survival probably comes down to the young editors. When a serious novel by an unknown gets published these days, it’s usually because some young editor has made an issue of it. The publisher generally goes along. In effect, it’s the charitable side of publishing, and it will continue so long as publishers keep a little faith in their young editors, who, in turn, manage to hold on to their nerve.
Bookstore managers may ask, “Why don’t you write a short book?” They don’t have to state their motive. We both know. Short books are thin books, and so take up less space on shelves. Ergo, the shelves can bring in more income per foot. But short novels? Unfortunately, I was co-opted at an early age by Thomas Mann, who said that only the exhaustive is truly interesting. Trust Mann to make one a closet elitist.
REVIEWS, PUBLICITY,
AND SUCCESS
I treat bad reviews in the manner that a politician running for office treats a loss of support. A couple of friends called up after a very bad review of Ancient Evenings appeared in The New York Times Book Review and asked, “Are you all right?” I’d seen it a week before, so my unhappiness was now digested. I told them that it was like realizing the county chairman in Schenectady had decided against your candidacy. But to lose a primary in Schenectady doesn’t mean you stop running for governor. It isn’t my ego that’s hurt, it’s my damn pocketbook. Getting a bad review these days in the Sunday Times affects my wallet. My ego, however, remains relatively intact. Whereas, when I was younger, I used to consider a bad review a personal insult. The guy who wrote it was evil. In fact, however, I have never actually punched out a reviewer, which I say with a certain wistfulness. I did sit next to Philip Rahv after he had written an atrocious review of An American Dream. Rahv had his virtues, bless him, but physical courage was not one of them. So I made a point of installing myself beside him on a couch at a party, and while I smiled at him, I kept my body firmly pressed into his, leaning into him all the while that we had a long thirty-minute conversation about something else altogether. I was perfectly pleasant the entire time and everything seemed all right, except we were both tilted alarmingly from my leaning into him. He was in an absolute panic, waiting for me to strike. It must have seemed an odd sight from across the room: He was a heavy man, and the two of us probably looked like two doughnuts crushed together at one end of the box.
MICHAEL SCHUMACHER: Should a writer be concerned about looking foolish when taking risks?
NORMAN MAILER: You want to stay above that fear, but once in a great while, I’ll still think, “This is going to get the world’s worst reviews. I’m diving into something that’s going to make no one happy and will leave certain people very unhappy.” On the other hand, the good side of such risk is that it is exciting. You feel like a free man.
Sometimes, you can tell in advance you’re headed for trouble. Obviously, with a book about ancient Egypt, everyone would have been happier if some unknown author had written it. There might have been then a lively curiosity about the author. Who is this unknown and most curious talent? One hurdle I had to overcome with Ancient Evenings was knowing in advance that a lot of people would pick it up and spend the first fifty pages saying, “What is Norman Mailer up to?” It makes them uncomfortable, because these days we all pride ourselves on our acumen. We want to think we’re in control of the scene. When someone refutes our expectations, it does irritate the hell out of us.
MS: How do you deal with it?
NM: Professional confidence. Not arrogance—professional confidence. If I’m not, in the literary sense, smarter than the reviewer, I’m in a lot of trouble. After all, I should know more about my book than he or she does. So, I can read a very bad review and shrug it off. That works until it doesn’t work. If all the reviews are bad, it could feel like a catastrophe.
It usually doesn’t matter if your book is good or bad. Across the country, you’re going to get more or less the same number of good and bad reviews. A dreadful book will probably get three good reviews in ten, and a very good book may get six. Occasionally, a work will receive all good or all bad reviews across the board and this happens because something in its pages outrages or soothes some part of the national temper to which the media is sensitive.
Crude example: a work that is insensitive to 9/11.
Large literary success is so often a matter of fortuitous publication. The Naked and the Dead had the luckiest timing of my career. By 1946, people were no longer that interested in novels about the Second World War. But The Naked and the Dead didn’t come out until 1948, and by then readers were ready. If it had appeared earlier, I don’t know that it would have had equal impact.
On the other hand, when I wrote Ancient Evenings (and that novel took eleven years), I ended up wishing I had been a bit more productive on a few of those working days and so could have come out twelve months earlier. That might have offered me a following breeze. There was large interest in the Egyptian dynasties just the year before. New York had had a massive museum exhibit at the Metropolitan that then proceeded to travel all over the country. By the time Ancient Evenings appeared, I was in the wake. The curious had, for the most part, lost interest.
Something of the same happened with Harlot’s Ghost. When it was published in 1992, the Cold War was over. Much direct attention was gone. When I’d begun seven years earlier, people were still fascinated (as I certainly was) by the CIA. My point is, don’t write a book with the idea people are going to be attracted by the subject and therefore you have a good chance to do well with your sales. The situation is bound to be different by the time the work is ready to show itself. No need to calculate. It’s a crapshoot.
Ah, publicity! One has written a book and the publisher intends to do a bit with it—the faint hope arises that it will become a best-seller—and so the author is ready to do a tour and excite some attention.
I think for any novelist who’s had a great deal of early success, as Capote did and Vidal did and Styron and I did, it was not automatic or easy to look upon other people with simple interest, because, generally speaking, they were more interested in us. One is never more aware of this vanity than when on a publicity tour. You are the center of attention. But there is a price. You are also an object to be manipulated as effectively as possible. The career of media interviewers conceivably rises or falls a little by how well they handle you.
Moreover, count on it: Three out of four interviewers will not have read your book. That tends to make them ask questions which cost them 2 percent and you 98 percent. For example: “Tell me all about your book.” After you’ve answered that a few times, you begin to feel as if the limousine in which you are traveling is out of gas and you have to push it up the hill.
For literary people who are on a tight budget, buying a good hardcover book does bear some slight relation to a sacramental act, so it’s best if they feel a certain respect, even a touch of awe, for you as the author. If you’re unsavory in public life, it doesn’t matter that everyone knows your name—you are not going to sell as many hardcover books as you should. The good authors who do well are usually careful not to be in the public eye—Saul Bellow and John Updike for two. Very few can flout that law. Capote has
. So has Vidal. I certainly haven’t.
Every time a story about me appears in a newspaper, I am injured professionally. I don’t think there’s anything to do about it. One of the reasons I’m in all the time is that the columns keep using the same people. It’s a game, and there may not be many more than a few hundred players on the board. If I were in a Tarot deck, I’d be the Fool. I used to try to keep a stern separation between the public legend and myself, but you know, you get older, and after a while, you can feel at times like an old gink in Miami with slits in his sneakers. At that juncture, it’s pointless to fight the legend. The legend has become a lotion for your toes.
If you are ever in a situation where you’ve had enough commercial success to be dealing with a movie company—don’t worry about the number-one man or woman. Do your best to have Number Two approve of what you’re doing. Because if Number One likes what you offer him and Number Two doesn’t, Number One will almost never give the go-ahead. It’s to his or her advantage to go along with Number Two’s declared opinion.
We can approach it as a logical proposition. If One insists on doing your book and the movie that comes out doesn’t do well, then Two now has a real edge. Conceivably—if the stakes have been high—he or she might someday be in a position to take over One’s job. On the other hand, if One was right in going ahead with you and your property does well for the company, then Two may never forgive One for exhibiting superior acumen.
On the other hand, if One turns to Two and says, “Okay, we won’t take it on,” and the film that is made by others from your book or script does not do well, then Two can feel genial enough to say, “I’m working for a pretty good guy. He pays attention to me; he respects me. That is because he knows I’m usually right.” Of course, if the company who picks it up makes real money, Two is left at a whole disadvantage.
Ergo, the rule suggests: Get to the number-two man and hope he likes your work.
On the other hand, if you’ve written your best, forget about these matters. It’s taken me fifty years to learn this sort of thing. In that sense, it’s not worth learning. After all, I still have to find out how to get to Number Two.
On this practical note, let me add another tip: An American Dream was originally published in Esquire in 1964 and had a scene where a black man said shit about twenty times. Now, I didn’t really need all twenty. Twelve would have been better, but I also knew that if I put in twelve, the editors would take out five, so I put in twenty. And the editors screamed, but I ended up with my twelve. They were happy and I was happy.
THE BITCH
I remember, years ago, talking about the novel with Gore Vidal. We were reminiscing in mutually sour fashion over the various pirates, cutthroats, racketeers, assassins, pimps, rape artists, and general finks we had encountered on our separate travels through the literary world, and we went on at length, commenting—Gore with a certain bitter joy, I with some uneasiness—upon the decline of our métier in recent years. We were speaking as trade unionists. It was not that the American novel was necessarily less good than it had been immediately after the war so much as that the people we knew seemed to care much less about novels. The working conditions were not as good. One rarely heard one’s friends talking about a good new novel anymore; it was always an essay in some magazine or a new play which seemed to occupy the five minutes in a dinner party when writers are discussed rather than actors, politicians, friends, society, or, elevate us, foreign affairs. One could not make one’s living writing good novels anymore. With an exception here and there, it had always been impossible, but not altogether—there used to be the long chance of having a best-seller. Now with paperback books, even a serious novel with extraordinarily good reviews was lucky to sell thirty or forty thousand copies—most people preferred to wait a year and read the book later in its cheap edition.
So we went on about that, and the professional mediocrity of book reviewers and the indifference of publishers, the lack of community among novelists themselves, the backbiting, the glee with which most of us listened to unhappy news about other novelists, the general distaste of the occupation—its lonely hours, its jealous practitioners, its demands on one’s character, its assaults on one’s ego, its faithlessness as inspiration, its ambushes as fashion. Since we had both begun again to work on a novel after some years of taking on other kinds of writing, there was a pleasant irony to all we said. We were not really as bitter as we pretended.
Finally, I laughed. “Gore, admit it. The novel is like the Great Bitch in one’s life. We think we’re rid of her, we go on to other women, we take our pulse and decide that finally we’re enjoying ourselves, we’re free of her power, we’ll never suffer her depredations again, and then we turn a corner on a street, and there’s the Bitch smiling at us, and we’re trapped. We know the Bitch has still got us.”
Vidal gave that twisted grin of admiration which is extracted from him when someone else has coined an image that could fit his style. “Indeed,” he said, “the novel is the Great Bitch.”
Every novelist who has slept with the Bitch (only poets and writers of short stories have a Muse) comes away bragging afterward like a G.I. tumbling out of a whorehouse spree—“Man, I made her moan” goes the cry of the young writer. But the Bitch laughs afterward in her empty bed. “He was so sweet in the beginning,” she declares, “but by the end he just went, ‘Peep, peep, peep.’ ”
A man lays his character on the line when he writes a novel. Anything in him which is lazy, or meretricious, or unthoughtout, complacent, fearful, overambitious, or terrified by the ultimate logic of his exploration will be revealed in his book. Some writers are skillful at concealing their weaknesses; some have a genius for converting a weakness into an acceptable mannerism of style. Nonetheless, no novelist can escape his or her own character altogether. That is, perhaps, the worst news any young writer can hear.
One more note on the Bitch. A friend, after reading the above paragraphs, said, “There’s the title for your book—I Made Her Moan.” I assured him that I never had a day so brave as to be ready to use that title.
SOCIAL LIFE,
LITERARY DESIRES,
LITERARY CORRUPTION
One of the cruelest remarks in the language is: Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. The parallel must be: Those who meet experience, learn to live; those who don’t, write.
The second remark has as much truth as the first—which is to say, some truth. Of course, many a young man has put himself in danger in order to pick up material for his writing, but as a matter to make one wistful, not one major American athlete, CEO, politician, engineer, trade-union official, surgeon, airline pilot, chess master, call girl, sea captain, teacher, bureaucrat, Mafioso, pimp, recidivist, physicist, rabbi, movie star, clergyman, or priest or nun has also emerged as a major novelist since the Second World War.
What with ghostwriters, collaborators, and editors hand-cranking the tongues of the famous long enough to get their memoirs into tape recorders, it could be said that some dim reflection can be found in literature of the long aisles and huge machines of that social mill which is the world of endeavor—yes, just about as much as comes back to us from a photograph insufficiently exposed in the picture-taking, a ghost image substituted for the original lights and deep shadows of the object. So, for every good novel about a trade union that has been written from the inside, we have ten thousand better novels to read about authors and the social activities of their friends. Writers tend to live with writers just as automotive engineers congregate in the same country clubs of the same suburbs around Detroit.
But even as we pay for the social insularity of Detroit engineers by having to look at the repetitive hump of their design until finally what is most amazing about the automobile is how little it has been improved in the last fifty years, so literature suffers from its own endemic hollow: We are overfamiliar with the sensitivity of the sensitive and relatively ignorant of the cunning of the strong and the stupid, one—it may be fa
tal—step removed from good and intimate perception of the inside procedures of the corporate, financial, governmental, Mafia, and working-class establishments. Investigative journalism has taken us into the guts of the machine, only not really, not enough. We still do not have much idea of the soul of any inside operator; we do not, for instance, yet have a clue to what makes a quarterback ready for a good day or a bad one. In addition, the best investigative reporting of new journalism tends to rest on too narrow an ideological base—the rational, ironic, fact-oriented world of the media liberal. So we have a situation, call it a cultural malady, of the most basic sort: a failure of sufficient information (that is, good literary information) to put into those centers of our mind we use for assessment. No matter how much we read, we tend to know too little of how the world works. The men who do the real work offer us no real writing, and the writers who explore the minds of such men approach from an intellectual stance that distorts their vision. You would not necessarily want a saint to try to write about a computer engineer, but you certainly would not search for the reverse. All too many saints, monsters, maniacs, mystics, and rock performers are being written about these days, however, by practitioners of journalism whose inner vision is usually graphed by routine parameters. Our continuing inability to comprehend the world is likely to continue.
Being a novelist, I want to know every world. I would never close myself off to a subject unless it’s truly repulsive to me. While one can never take one’s imperviousness to corruption for granted, it is still important to have some idea of how the world works. What ruins most writers of talent is that they don’t get enough experience, so their novels tend to develop a certain paranoid perfection. That is almost never as good as the rough edge of reality. (Franz Kafka immaculately excepted!)
The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing Page 7
