The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

by Norman Mailer

  So we must conceive then of Lawrence arrogant with mother love and therefore possessed of a mind which did not believe any man on earth had a mind more important than his own. What a responsibility then to bring his message to the world, unique message which might yet save the world! We must conceive of that ego equal already to the will of a strong woman while he was still a child—what long steps had it taken since within the skull! He needed an extraordinary woman for a mate, and he had the luck to find his Frieda. She was an aristocrat and he was a miner’s son, she was large and beautiful, she was passionate, and he stole her away from her husband and children—they could set out together to win the world and educate it into ways to live, do that, do all of that out of the exuberance of finding one another.

  But she was a strong woman, she was individual, she loved him but she did not worship him. She was independent. If he had been a stronger man, he could perhaps have enjoyed such personal force, but he had become a man by an act of will, he was bone and blood of the classic family stuff out of which homosexuals are made; he had lifted himself out of his natural destiny, which was probably to have the sexual life of a woman, had diverted the virility of his brain down into some indispensable minimum of phallic force—no wonder he worshiped the phallus; he, above all men, knew what an achievement was its rise from the root, its assertion to stand proud on a delicate base. His mother had adored him. Since his first sense of himself as a male had been in the tender air of her total concern—now, and always, his strength would depend upon just such outsize admiration. Dominance over women was not tyranny to him but equality, for dominance was the indispensable elevator which would raise his phallus to that height from which it might seek transcendence. And sexual transcendence, some ecstasy where he could lose his ego for a moment, and his sense of self and his will, was life to him—he could not live without sexual transcendence. If he had had an outrageously unequal development—all fury to be a man and all the senses of a woman—there was a direct price to pay: He was not healthy. His lungs were poor, and he lived with the knowledge that he would likely have an early death. Each time he failed to reach a woman, each time he failed particularly to reach his own woman, he was dying a little. It is hopeless to read his books and try to understand the quirky changeable fury-ridden relationships of his men and women without comprehending that Lawrence saw every serious love affair as fundamental do-or-die: He knew he literally died a little more each time he missed transcendence in the act. It was why he saw lust as hopeless. Lust was meaningless fucking and that was the privilege of the healthy. He was ill, and his wife was literally killing him each time she failed to worship his most proud and delicate cock. Which may be why he invariably wrote on the edge of cliché—we speak in simples as experience approaches the enormous, and Lawrence lived with the monumental gloom that his death was already in him, and sex—some transcendental variety of sex—was his only hope, and his wife was too robust to recognize such tragic facts.

  By the time of writing Women in Love, his view of women would not be far from the sinister. One of the two heroines would succeed in driving her man to his death. His rage against the will of women turns immense, and his bile explodes on the human race, or is it the majority of the races?—these are the years when he will have a character in Aaron’s Rod, Lilly, his mouthpiece, say:

  I can’t do with folk who teem by the billion, like the Chinese and Japs and Orientals altogether. Only vermin teem by the billion. Higher types breed slower. I would have loved the Aztecs and the Red Indians. I know they hold the element in life which I am looking for—they had living pride. Not like the flea-bitten Asiatics. Even niggers are better than Asiatics, though they are wallowers. The American races—and the South Sea Islanders—the Marquesans, the Maori blood. That was true blood. It wasn’t frightened. All the rest are craven. …

  It is the spleen of a man whose organs are rotting in parts and so, owner of a world-ego, he will see the world rotting in parts.

  These are the years when he flirts with homosexuality, but is secretly, we may assume, obsessed with it. For he is still in need of that restorative sex he can no longer find, and since his psyche was originally shaped to be homosexual, homosexuality could yet be his peace. Except it could not, not likely, for his mind could hardly give up the lust to dominate. Homosexuality becomes a double irony—he must now seek to dominate men physically more powerful than himself. The paradoxes of this position result in the book Aaron’s Rod, which is about a male love affair (which never quite takes place) between a big man and a little man. The little man does the housework, plays nursemaid to the big man when he is ill, and ends by dominating him, enough to offer the last speech in the book.

  All men say, they want a leader. Then let them in their souls submit to some greater soul than theirs.… You, Aaron, you too have the need to submit. You, too, have the need livingly to yield to a more heroic soul, to give yourself. You know you have [but] perhaps you’d rather die than yield. And so, die you must. It is your affair.

  He has separated the theme from himself and reversed the roles, but he will die rather than yield, even though earlier in the book he was ready to demonstrate that platonic homosexuality saves. It is the clear suggestion that Aaron recovers only because Lilly anoints his naked body, lays on hands after doctors and medicines had failed.

  Quickly he uncovered the blond lower body of his patient, and began to rub the abdomen with oil, using a slow, rhythmic, circulating motion, a sort of massage. For a long time he rubbed finely and steadily, then went over the whole of the lower body, mindless, as if in a sort of incantation. He rubbed every speck of the man’s lower body—the abdomen, the buttocks, the thighs and knees, down to his feet, rubbed it all warm and glowing with camphorated oil, every bit of it, chafing the toes swiftly, till he was almost exhausted. Then Aaron was covered up again, and Lilly sat down in fatigue to look at his patient.

  He saw a change. The spark had come back into the sick eyes, and the faint trace of a smile, faintly luminous, into the face. Aaron was regaining himself. But Lilly said nothing. He watched his patient fall into a proper sleep.

  Another of his heroes, Birkin, weeps in strangled tones before the coffin of Gerald. It is an earlier period in Lawrence’s years of homosexual temptation; the pain is sharper, the passion is stronger. “He should have loved me,” he said. “I offered him.” And his wife is repelled, “recoiled aghast from him as he sat … making a strange, horrible sound of tears.” They are the sickly sounds of a man who feels ready to die in some part of himself because the other man would never yield.

  But homosexuality would have been the abdication of Lawrence as a philosopher-king. Conceive how he must have struggled against it! In all those middle years he moves slowly from the man who is sickened because the other did not yield, to the man who will die because he, himself, will not yield. But he is bitter, and with a rage ready to set fire to half the world.

  Then it is too late. He is into his last years. He is into the five last years of his dying. He has been a victim of love, and will die for lack of the full depth of a woman’s love for him—what a near to infinite love he had needed. So he has never gotten to that place where he could deliver himself to the unknown, be “without reserves or defenses … cast off everything … and cease to be, so that that which is perfectly ourselves can take place in us,” no, he was never able to go that far. By the time he began Lady Chatterley, he must have known the fight was done; he had never been able to break out of the trap of his lungs, nor out of the cage of his fashioning. He had burned too many holes in too many organs trying to reach into more manhood than the course of his nerves could carry, he was done; but he was a lover, he wrote Lady Chatterley, he forgave, he wrote his way a little further toward death, and sang of the wonders of creation and the glory of men and women in the rut and lovely of a loving fuck.

  “When a woman gets absolutely possessed by her own will, her own will set against everything, then it’s fearful, and she should
be shot at last.”

  “And shouldn’t men be shot at last, if they get possessed by their own will?”

  “Ay!—the same!”

  The remark is muttered, the gamekeeper rushes on immediately to talk of other matters, but it has been made, Lawrence has closed the circle, the man and the woman are joined, separate and joined.

  A LAGNIAPPE

  FOR THE READER

  Name any great novel that didn’t weary you first time through. A great novel has a consciousness that is new to us. We have to become imbued with this new consciousness before we can enjoy the work. I’ve been bored in part by Moby-Dick, The Red and the Black, Anna Karenina, The Scarlet Letter, Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain. Hell, even The Sun Also Rises. Of course, I was a Freshman then.

  James Jones and I used to feel in the early Fifties that we were the two best writers around. Unspoken was the feeling that there was room for only one of us. I remember that Jones inscribed my copy of From Here to Eternity “For Norman, my dearest enemy, my most feared friend.”

  Capote wrote the best sentences of anyone of our generation. He had a lovely ear. He did not have a good mind. I don’t know if a large idea ever bothered him. While he wrote poetically, he did not think like a poet. But he did have a sense of time and place. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, for example, is a slight book. Looking at it with a hard eye, it’s a charlotte russe. On the other hand, if you are looking to capture a particular period in the Fifties in New York, no other book may have done it so well. In that sense, Capote is a bit like Fitzgerald. If I were to mount them on one wall, however, I’d certainly put Truman under Scott.

  All the same, Truman Capote was wonderful when all was said. I think of that tiny man who lived through his early years with the public laughing at him. To go from being a pampered little darling with a few friends who catered to him egregiously on to mustering the balls, the enormous balls, to decide he was going to be a major figure in American life—that was his achievement. To hell with writing. He was going to give up writing in order to be a major social figure, and in doing this, I think he sacrificed the last ten or twenty years of his talent.

  Kurt Vonnegut and I are friendly with one another but wary. There was a period when we used to go out together fairly often because our wives liked each other, and Kurt and I would sit there like bookends. We would be terribly careful with one another; we both knew the huge cost of a literary feud, so we certainly didn’t want to argue. On the other hand, neither of us would be caught dead saying to the other, “Gee, I liked your last book,” and then be met with silence because the party of the second part could not reciprocate. So we would talk about anything else—we would talk about Las Vegas or the Galápagos Islands. We only had one literary conversation and that was over an evening in New York. Kurt looked up and sighed, “Well, I finished my novel today and it like to killed me.” When Kurt is feeling heartfelt, he tends to speak in an old Indiana accent. His wife said, “Oh, Kurt, you always say that whenever you finish a book,” and he replied, “Well, whenever I finish a book I do say it, and it is always true, and it gets more true, and this last one like to killed me more than any.”

  Reading Toni Morrison, I say to myself: I know so little of black women who don’t have a voice, and after all, I should know more. Toni certainly has a deep sense of such women, no question. But how good is she on black men? I feel less certain of those portraits. Finally, I decide that what she does with black women is an education and I respect her for that. I’ve only read one or two of her novels, by the way, so I may be reacting on too narrow a base.

  Picasso had his bleak, dark, ugly view of women. On the other hand, he had the same hard view of other men and of himself. If you can pass through Picasso and still have a little love left for humanity, then you have arrived at some kind of peace. Picasso is like a doctor who’s cleaning out a very ugly wound, the filth embedded in humanity.

  It’s the guys who pen wonderfully sweet books, however, who are the real monsters. You know—they kick the wife, cuff the kids, and have the dog shrinking in horror. Then their books come out: “X once again delights the reader with his sense of joy.”

  Back in school, we had a joke we used to repeat. It went:

  “Whom are you talking about?”

  “Herbert Hoover.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Never heard of whom?”

  “Herbert Hoover.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s the man you mentioned.”

  “Never heard of Herbert Hoover.”

  So it went. So goes Catch-22. It’s the rock and roll of novels. One finds its ancestor in Basic Training. We were ordered to have clean sheets for Saturday inspection. But one week we were given no clean sheets from the Post laundry, so we slept on our mattress covers, which got dirty. After inspection, the platoon was restricted to quarters. “You didn’t have clean sheets,” our sergeant said.

  “How could we have clean sheets if the clean sheets didn’t come?”

  “How do I know?” said the sergeant. “The regulations say you gotta have clean sheets.”

  “But we can’t have clean sheets if there are no clean sheets.”

  “That,” said the sergeant, “is tough shit.”

  Which is what Catch-22 could have been called. The Army is a village of colliding bureaucracies whose colliding orders cook up impossibilities. Heller takes this one good joke and exploits it into two thousand variations of the same good joke, but in the act he somehow creates a rational vision of the modern world. Of course, the crisis of reason is that it can no longer comprehend the modern world. Heller demonstrates that a rational man devoted to reason must arrive at the conclusion that either the world is mad and he is the only sane man in it or (and this is the weakness of Catch-22—it never explores this possibility) the sane man is not really sane, because his rational propositions are without existential reason.

  On page 178, there is a discussion about God.

  “… how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation.… Why in the world did He ever create pain?”

  “Pain?” Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife pounced upon the word victoriously. “Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers.”

  … “Why couldn’t he have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs?”

  Right there is planted the farthest advance of the flag of reason in Heller’s cosmology. There is, however, an answer, which might go that God gave us pain for the same reason the discovery of tranquilizers was undertaken by the Devil: If we have an immortal soul, some of us come close to it only through pain. A season of sickness can be preferable to a flight from disease, for it discourages the onrush of a death which begins in the center of oneself.

  Some of the best prose in America is graffiti found on men’s-room walls. It is prose written in bone, etched by acid, it is the prose of harsh truth, the virulence of the criminal who never found his stone walls and so settles down on the walls of the john, it is the language of hatred unencumbered by guilt, hesitation, scruple, or complexity. Burroughs must be the greatest writer of graffiti who ever lived. His style has the snap of a whip, and it never relents. Every paragraph is quotable. Here’s a jewel among a thousand jewels:

  DR. BENWAY … looks around and picks up one of those rubber vacuum cups at the end of a stick they use to unstop toilets … “Make an incision, Doctor Limpf.… I’m going to massage the heart.” … Dr. Benway washes the suction cup by swishing it around in the toilet-bowl.…

  DR. LIMPF: “The incision is ready, doctor.”

  Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and down. Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall.…

  NURSE: “I think she’s gone, doctor.”

  DR. BENWAY: “Well, it’s all in the day’s work.”

  Punc
h and Judy. Mr. Interlocutor and Mr. Bones. One, two, three, bam! two, four, eight, bam! The drug addict lives with a charged wire so murderous he must hang his nervous system on a void. Burroughs’s achievement, his great achievement, is that he has brought back snowflakes from this murderous void. Burroughs is the surgeon of the novel.

  Yet he is something more. It is his last ability which entitles him to a purchase on genius. Through the fantasies runs a vision of a future world, a half-demented welfare state, an abattoir of science fiction with surgeons, bureaucrats, perverts, diplomats, a world not describable short of getting into the book. The ideas have pushed into the frontier of an all-electronic universe. One holds on to a computer in some man-eating machine of the future that has learned to use language. The words come out in squeaks, spiced with static, sex coiled up with technology like a scream on the radar. Bombarded by his language, the sensation is like being in a room where three radios, two television sets, stereo hi-fi, a pornographic movie, and two automatic dishwashers are working at once while a mad scientist conducts the dials to squeeze out the maximum disturbance. If this is a true picture of the world to come, and it may be, then Burroughs is a great writer. Yet there is sadness in reading him, for one gets intimations of a mind which might have come within distance of Joyce, except that a catastrophe has been visited on it, a blow by a sledgehammer, a junkie’s needle which left the crystalline brilliance crashed into bits.