After one particularly bad confrontation just before Norman’s bar mitzvah in February 1936, a distraught Fan contemplated leaving Barney and confided in her son. He said, “How can you do that to us, when we’re kids?” Fan then gave him a blunt report of the extent of Barney’s gambling. “I knew my father was an irresponsible gambler,” Mailer said. “I always heard it from her side, never from his.” But Fan never spoke again of a divorce because, Mailer said, it “went against every tradition in her. In those days, you got married and took what you got and didn’t complain. To her, a divorced woman was a whore.”
She had a great anger at my father—it was almost implacable—for not being a provider. But at the same time, she loved him in her way. After that one attempt, she gave it up. If the children didn’t want it, then she was not about to do it against our will. Years later, I used to think, “Gee, maybe I did her a terrible injustice and cut off her life and her possibilities.” On the other hand, when I think of a stepfather and how it would have torn her. I didn’t brood about it . . . except for those awful nights which went on until I went away to college; those dreadful nights when my uncle came to the door and I could see by his face: “Uh-oh, one of those nights.”
At some point, he told his sister that Barney was a gambler. She “resented it more. And so she was cool toward him; she stayed cool and angry toward him. Which broke his heart. He adored her.” Barbara was “closer to my mother,” he said. “It was that feminist business: my mother was working so hard and this man’s not responsible.” From the mid-1930s on, Fan ran a small oil service and delivery firm, the Sunlight Oil Corporation, which Dave Kessler had set up, partly to provide oil to his candy company and partly to help out the Mailers. Initially, Barney worked there, but after he began tipping the till, he was out and Fan took over entirely, working with one driver. “She really lived and breathed for that business,” Mailer said, taking late night calls from customers with broken furnaces and empty tanks while earning a quarter of a cent per gallon profit.
Barbara explained that her mother’s hard work and financial anxiety, combined with her loathing of Barney’s addiction to games of chance, “leached the complexities out of her and made her monolithic.” No surprise that she referred to herself, as did her children, as the Rock of Gibraltar, “deep and large, and all there to see. The metaphor for Dad, on the other hand, could be a tidal pool—charming on the surface, and teeming with a secret life in the shallows beneath.” Barney gambled when he could and worked when he could, but usually lost his bets and was rarely employed. “One of my recollections in the depth of the Depression,” Mailer recalled, “is my father coming home after looking for work all day and Barbara and myself running to the door and saying, ‘Did you get a job today, Dad?’ And he sadly shaking his head no. . . . How sad we all were about that. ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime’ is one of my favorite songs.”
In addition to his parents’ precarious financial situation and the possibility of a divorce, he was buffeted by a cross-hatch of other pressures. On the one hand, there was his mother’s unshakable belief in his talents, buttressed by the approval of his tight-knit extended family, with Anne and Dave Kessler acting as a second set of parents. He was also enthralled by the gangster films of the 1930s (especially the brash energies of James Cagney) and the romantic novels of Rafael Sabatini and Jeffery Farnol, which he had begun to devour. On the other side of the ledger were his fear of the Irish toughs a few blocks outside the Jewish cocoon and a sharp sense of his puny physicality (“We also had a sense,” he remarked decades later, “of not being as tough as the Irish”). Vying for primacy with Fan in defining his emerging ego was his father’s “prodigious double life,” as he later described it, a life he pondered with awe. Nine months before he died, he told a friend about Barney’s influence: “Everything that is adventurous in me came from him.” These opposed pressures opened a fissure in the adolescent Mailer’s personality that widened as time passed until it became a gaping divide.
“Very intense” is how his sister remembers him as a boy; their older cousin Osie, she said, called him “Desperate Ambrose,” after the comic strip character. His friend Robert F. Lucid compared the young Mailer to Alexander Portnoy, “the most fabulous kid who ever lived,” but one who had been given a “tremendous sense of mission.” Mailer put it this way: “I’d been frightened in the womb by my mother’s dream of having a little Einstein in her belly.” His sister recalls that his family regularly referred to him as a genius from the time he took the Stanford-Binet IQ exam in third grade. He excelled in all his classes and even skipped the latter halves of grades seven and eight. Fan’s hopes were confirmed when, according to Barbara’s friend Rhoda Lazare, the principal announced at his eighth grade graduation that Norman Mailer had an IQ of 170, the highest ever recorded at P.S. 161.
If on the lip of puberty his inner life was a narcissistic moil, his pursuits were ordinary. After school, he spent most of his time studying, attending Hebrew School (through eighth grade), reading, playing stickball and Monopoly, building model airplanes and experimenting with his chemistry set. He also went to see gangster movies at Loew’s Kameo and the Savoy on Eastern Parkway, often bringing his sister along. He often said that he felt he knew Humphrey Bogart as well as a favorite uncle. Summers were spent in Long Branch, where he observed the feats of his cousin Cy, eight years his senior.
I worshipped him (with enormous funds of love and envy) because he was a hero. He was one of the few people I’ve ever known who had a happy look on his face when he came to bat in the late innings with men on base, his side behind, and the need for a homer prominent in everyone’s head. Indeed he had his smile because it was slightly better than even money he was going to hit that homer. In fact, he would. This is not hyperbole. If I saw him in a hundred baseball games, there must have been fifty late-inning spots of exactly the sort I describe: he probably hit thirty-six homers out of fifty. . . . These were Depression years. Much gloom abounded in everyone, but he was the bright spot.
Cy Rembar remained Mailer’s hero (later becoming his lawyer) and one of his most important role models. His cousin’s string of victories on the playing fields contrasted glaringly with his father’s run of defeats at the poker table.
In a memoir written just before he died, Barbara described her brother as generous, encouraging, and always interesting. “He loved to teach,” she said, and often recommended books to her. She remembers that in high school he got a book that diagrammed the fox trot and they practiced together. “I learned to dance,” she said. “I’m afraid he did not.” Mailer recalled going with his father, who cared little for baseball, to see the Dodgers play. Mailer was not a recluse, but as a friend recalled, he did not hang around much at the candy store on the corner of Crown Street and Kingston Avenue with the other boys. By the time of his bar mitzvah in February 1936 at the Temple Shaari Zedek in Brooklyn, Fan had long since transferred her hopes from Barney to her brilliant son. She guarded him like a mother hawk.
Coached by his Hebrew teacher, who had leftist sympathies, Mailer wrote, memorized, and delivered a five-hundred-word bar mitzvah speech that was, with two exceptions, conventional. He began by thanking his family, citing the commandments, and stating his joy at becoming “a member of the people of Israel.” He lauded some great Jews—Moses Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Baruch Spinoza, and Karl Marx. Naming these last two—a freethinking excommunicant and an atheist radical—raised a few eyebrows and “the rabbi looked very pale” after his speech, Mailer remembered. In the second notable remark in his speech, he said, “Yes, my friends! From now on I become a Jew, but not a MAYOFIS JEW, with a bent back to receive innocently the inhuman Nazis. I become a Jew to uphold the ideals and strengths of Judaism, and the rights of my country.” In an interview he gave in connection with his final novel, about Hitler’s youth, The Castle in the Forest, Mailer remembered his mother’s warnings about the Nazis from three quarters of a century earlier.
Hitler has be
en in my mind since I was nine years old. By 1932, my mother was already sensitive, and intensely so, to the dangers he presented. After Hitler came to power in 1933, everything that happened in Nazi Germany used to cause my mother pain. It was as if she knew in advance what was going to occur. She’d grown up with the knowledge of the anti-Semitism her father had had to face in Lithuania. Then, as a child going to school in Long Branch, New Jersey, kids on the street would call her “Christ killer”—no surprise, then, if Hitler was immensely real to her.
His bar mitzvah speech, including the reference to the Nazis, pleased the family, most of whom had come up from Long Branch despite a storm that left more than a foot of snow. Millionaire Uncle Louis in South Africa sent a $500 gift, which enabled Fan to put out a fine buffet at 555 Crown Street after the ceremony. But Barney’s secret life again intruded. His bookie sent the gift of a watch. Fan didn’t hesitate to reply: “I phoned his home, his wife answered. I did not spare either of them, I cursed him out of existence. She begged me not to say those things, that her husband had a weak heart, so I followed it up by saying he could drop dead that minute and I hung up.” Fan took no prisoners.
LESS IS KNOWN of Mailer’s high school years than any other period of his life. He had stopped writing stories the year before he entered and wrote few letters before going away to college. We do know that like most of the Crown Heights boys, he took the Tompkins Avenue trolley to Boys High in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, or walked to save a nickel. We also know that because he had skipped a primary school grade, he was one of the youngest boys in his class, entering his freshman year at age 12. He later recalled, “I felt straddled between my friends who were my age at home and were two years behind me at school. So I didn’t feel I belonged particularly in one life or another.” His interest in his chemistry set and sports waned, but his passion for model airplanes, some with tiny gasoline engines, burgeoned during his high school years, 1935–39. He was a devoted member of the aviation club in high school and his first piece in print, “Model Airplanes,” appeared in a mimeographed school publication, Physical Scientist, in December 1938, when he was a senior. Occasionally, on weekends, his parents would drive him out to the open fields in Canarsie where he could launch his fragile creations. The largest of these, which took him six months to build, had an amazing six-foot wingspan. “When launched,” he recalled, “it soared briefly, but then its wings suddenly folded up—like an umbrella.”
Mailer seldom wrote about his childhood. In 2004, he said that he had avoided writing about Long Branch and Brooklyn because “too many crystals are there” and “you don’t want to write about the material. . . . Preserve it because it’s endlessly fruitful.” Crystals, as he explained several times, are memories of wrenching or exhilarating experiences, epiphanies in one’s past that, properly considered, are illuminating. When a crystal is aligned just so, it casts an imaginative beam that clarifies a new experience, acting as a kind of emotional spectrometer. We can only speculate on his childhood crystals, but given the instances of childhood fear and timidity already noted, it seems quite possible that he was referring to moments of ignominious humiliation. Late in life, he said, “I don’t feel joy going back to the old streets in Brooklyn.”
Mailer was an outstanding student at Boys High, graduating near the top of his 650-member class. His grades were nearly as high as those of valedictorian Martin Lubin, a boy he knew slightly and later roomed with at Harvard. But Mailer’s lack of involvement in athletics and student government—indeed, his lack of involvement in any school activity except for the aviation club—left him out of the running for valedictorian. Overall, his best grades were in math and science (a 99.5 in Algebra and a 99 in Chemistry), but his English, French, and History grades were only a few points lower. His lowest academic grade was in drawing, an 80; his grades in physical training were dismal. Beatrice Silverman, his first wife, said he had trouble vaulting over the horse in gym class. His report cards gained plaudits at home, especially the math and science grades, but not in the neighborhood, where he was just another skinny kid. “In Brooklyn I was always a little ashamed of being smart,” he said. “Somehow you weren’t manly if you were smart.” He did have some success with the opposite sex, however. Barbara’s friend Rhoda Wolf had a crush on him and his girlfriend, Phyllis Bradman, according to his sister, was the prettiest girl in the neighborhood, although they never got beyond kissing and light petting. The summer before he died, he remembered his situation.
I was 13; it was 1936. The New Deal was on; a great deal was happening. But we, in Brooklyn, in my end of Brooklyn, weren’t thinking about anything but sex. We wanted to get laid. We wanted to muzzle a girl as they called it, and put our hands on their breasts. We wanted to be able to neck with them. And none of us were. The girls were nice Jewish girls who were loath and we were inhibited—the Jews were very inhibited about sex. . . . And I remember that in all those years of adolescence, I was absolutely focused on girls and pornography. There used to be little magazines like Spicy Detective in those days, where the women had huge tits poking through gossamer scraps of torn blouse. And that was a huge turn-on.
One scheme dreamed up by Mailer and two other boys, Arnold Epstein and another friend, Harold Kiesel, was to form a musical trio and get a summer job at a Catskills resort where they might seduce some Jewish women. He convinced his parents to buy him a clarinet; Kiesel played the trumpet and Epstein the drums. On afternoons after school, they practiced at the apartment of Epstein, who remembered their sessions: “I could keep beat with anything. But Kiesel and Norman had to get tunes out of their instruments, and I think they were equally bad. We’d laugh and giggle and fall on the floor.” The project soon collapsed. Mailer never learned to play an instrument and had trouble carrying a tune. He remembered going to a few dances in high school, but was “a wallflower . . . a terrible dancer, very stiff-legged.” At the Scarboro Hotel one summer there was a flirtation with a pretty girl named Bunny Schwab, but nothing sexual came of it. Decades later, he still vividly remembered his humiliation when Bunny described his large, sunburned ears as “red sails in the sunset.”
“High school’s that place, that country,” he reflected later, “where you get laid for the first time; you have marvelous memories and you go around with a girl, you go to the prom.” But for him high school was studying and he was bitter because his social life was so dull. People who knew him in high school, he said, thought he was “quiet, studious and inconsequential.” His work paid off, however. His grades got him accepted to both MIT and Harvard. He knew that he was more likely to realize his dream of becoming an aeronautical engineer at MIT, as it had a program in this specialty, something Harvard lacked. But because of his age, MIT wanted him to go to prep school for a year. This circumstance led him to Harvard. What clinched it, he often said, was the reaction of girls on Crown Street. MIT’s name didn’t impress them, but “when I said I might go to Harvard, they lit up and they saw me with new eyes.” Choosing Harvard, for reasons he could not have guessed at the time, was one of the luckiest things he ever did.
TWO
HARVARD
The distinguished historian and journalist Theodore H. White, who graduated from Harvard in 1938, came up with a system of classifying prewar Harvard students. They were divided, he wrote, into three groups, “white men, gray men, and meatballs.” The first group was comprised of wealthy WASPs from New England who graduated from private prep schools. The gray men were middle-class boys from public schools, mainly outside New England. The meatballs were non-WASP students who commuted and/or were on scholarship. White, a Jew whose father was born in Russia, claimed meatball status. He didn’t attend Harvard “to enjoy the games, the girls, the burlesque shows of the Old Howard, the companionship, the elms, the turning leaves of fall, the grassy banks of the Charles.” He was there to gobble up cultural riches from learned professors, from the libraries, museums, poetry readings, tutorials—all of this under a dome of reverence
for intellectual and scholarly pursuits. Mailer and his friend Marty Lubin, both of whom received scholarships (sophomore year for Mailer), were classic meatballs, although such was the subtlety of condescension at Harvard that they probably never heard the term. Mailer was also there for the culture, although it took him the better part of a year to find it. Unlike White, he was profoundly interested in girls, although the kind he sought were as difficult to find as were the right professors.
He was assigned to Grays Hall, a five-story freshman dorm on Massachusetts Avenue accommodating about sixty men. They lived in comparative luxury in two- or three-person suites, cleaned by “biddies,” with a shared bathroom and a working fireplace. Like the Oxbridge house system that it mimicked, Harvard’s houses and halls had a master living on the first floor who regularly invited students for tea and dinner. The administration more or less randomly assigned the approximately eight hundred resident members of his class (about a hundred more commuted) to approximately fifteen freshman dorms. Most nationalities, states, and several foreign countries were represented in the class. WASPs, German-Americans, and Irish-Americans dominated, although more than 10 percent of the class was Jewish. Mailer shared his second-floor suite with Richard Weinberg from Memphis and Maxwell Kaufer from Kingston, Pennsylvania. Looking back, he said that he noticed no discrimination. Harvard, he said, “had solved more delicate social situations than any other institution . . . of the establishment.” He estimated that during his first year four out of five of his friends were middle-class Jews and they socialized in the same way black students would a generation later. In his second semester, he would become friendly with several non-Jewish men, most of whom he later associated with on the college literary magazine, the Advocate, or the Signet Society, an intellectual luncheon club. But for his first semester, his group included three other Grays men, Seymour Breslow, Myron Kaufmann, and Stanley Lampert. Marty Lubin, Harold Katz, Douglas Woolf, Peter Ruderman, and Harold Marantz, who lived in other dorms, made it nine. All Jews, all meatballs.
Norman Mailer Page 3
