Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Mailer’s and Lubin’s parents had gotten to know each other a bit in Brooklyn and Mr. Lubin drove the boys up to Cambridge on September 16, 1939. Later, Fan Mailer and Eva Lubin would occasionally take Saturday night train trips to Cambridge bringing cookies and clean laundry to their sons, returning late Sunday and arriving in Brooklyn as the sun came up. For his college wardrobe, Mailer had purchased an outlandish set of clothes that could have been worn with Charles Bovary’s infamous hat: green and blue vertical striped trousers, a gold and brown jacket, and saddle shoes. These garments were quickly discarded once he observed the narrow-lapeled tweed jackets and gray flannel trousers of the other students. Mailer said later that in going from Brooklyn to Harvard he felt like “a young man going from a small town in the Caucasus to Moscow for advanced studies.”

  “Unformed” is the word Mailer used to describe himself as a first semester freshman. We can add unprepared; Harvard was a shock and at first he drew inward. Kaufer later said that his new roommate was quiet, pleasant, “a smiler” who didn’t venture out much during his first semester, unlike his gregarious roommates. One thing that his classmates all seem to remember about Mailer as a freshman is the collage of pinups over his desk. We know that one of them was a George Petty centerfold from Esquire, signed salaciously by his buddies, because Mailer wrote home to give his parents fair warning of its placement before their first visit. Betty Grable’s legs were probably included and there was also a photograph of Amy Arnell, a vocalist in the Tommy Tucker big band; her big hit was “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.” When the band had appeared in Long Branch in the summer of 1939, Mailer was much taken by a large, framed photo of Arnell in the lobby of the West End Hotel. Wearing a tool belt and work clothes, he brazenly unscrewed the entire frame containing Arnell’s photo and walked out with it. A friend from Long Branch remembers seeing it in his Harvard room. There were bull sessions about sex, of course, and he discovered that he had “a bunch of roommates who also hadn’t been laid. . . . We’d heard of working-class kids who got laid when they were 13 or 14. Here we were, good middle-class kids, and we weren’t able to get laid. . . . You bore a standard of shame.”

  The required courses for his first semester were an engineering drafting course, physics, and the first halves of math and English courses. His sole elective was French. The English course, English A, was a composition course, required of all students who did not turn in an outstanding performance on the English exam taken by new freshmen. In Mailer’s time, students in English A had to write a variety of descriptive and argumentative themes, often in response to assigned readings in collections of essays and short stories and, later, novels. At first, he did not like the course, writing home on October 25 that the course was “about the dullest.” But when he read the contemporary novels assigned, his interest not only sharpened, he said, the novels changed his life.

  Before I was seventeen I had formed the desire to be a major writer, and this desire came upon me rather suddenly in the last two months of my sixteeth year, a time I remember well enough because it was my first semester at Harvard. All through December 1939 and January 1940 I was discovering modern American literature. In those sixty days I read and reread Studs Lonigan, U.S.A., and The Grapes of Wrath. Later I would add Wolfe, Hemingway and Faulkner, and to a small measure, Fitzgerald; but Farrell, Dos Passos and Steinbeck were the novel for me in that sixty days before I turned seventeen.

  Of the three books that Mailer names, James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy, set on the South Side of Chicago in the early part of the twentieth century, was at first the most influential. For the rest of his life he said that Farrell had awakened him to his vocation. What Farrell provided was the recognition that the social atmosphere of Brooklyn was similar to that enveloping the lower-middle-class Irish toughs that Farrell chronicled. It was liberating, Mailer wrote, to find a novelist who could write about “the monotony and the boredom, and the killing deadness of the average simple life among many people who were not well educated.” Until he read Farrell, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck, the novels he prized were stories of the romantic past or the imagined future; he had no sense that the stumblings and longings of his pals at the candy store and the burlesque house were the stuff of fiction. “Suddenly,” he said, “I realized you could write about your own life.”

  During his first semester, the struggle to keep up with his courses was wearing him down. Several weeks into the semester, he was cut from the 150-pound crew team. It was, he said, “the bitterest blow freshman year,” salved only slightly when he learned from a friend that the coach never had the slightest interest in him because his arms were too short. The other disappointment was women: he had no dates until he returned home for the Christmas holiday and saw Phyllis Bradman, taking her to a New York Rangers hockey game. But on New Year’s Eve he had no date, and went skating in the afternoon and to a burlesque show. Back at Harvard for semester exams in late January, he realized that physics was too much for him and he dropped it early in the second semester. He was maintaining As and Bs in his other courses, including English A, where the instructor had informed the class that short stories could be submitted in lieu of topical essays. Mailer, who once said, “I threw down my pen at 11,” began writing fiction again.

  He also looked into the possibility of getting on The Harvard Lampoon, but he was rejected. The Lampoon was dominated by students with prep school pedigrees. “I can’t write humorously,” he told his parents, and also noted the Lampoon’s $100 initiation fee. Then, on February 12, 1940, he attended an open house put on by the Advocate, the college’s venerable literary magazine, founded in 1866, among whose contributors were T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Henry Miller. At the meeting, he met Bruce “Pete” Barton, also a freshman and the son of a prominent advertising executive and congressman from Manhattan’s Silk Stocking district. Mailer was attracted to the quiet, well-mannered young Barton. “He was the first man I met who was the son of a very powerful man, a tycoon. And he was also very much a gentleman,” he said. Barton was drawn to Mailer not only for his literary interests but because he felt the Brooklynite could tell him about life outside his pampered existence. The next day, Mailer wrote to his parents to say he was trying out for the magazine and ask if they would pay the $40 initiation fee. They gave their enthusiastic assent in a telephone call and he began assembling the required three-piece application packet.

  Also in February, he took two additional steps in pursuit of his ambition: he accepted an invitation to join a weekly, extracurricular writing seminar, and he began keeping a notebook, the first of innumerable such records he kept for the rest of his life. Not much is known about the seminar save an anecdote from his friend Larry Weiss, a sophomore transfer student, who had considerable influence on him. Weiss recalls that Mailer argued for the importance of writers describing every bodily function, including bowel movements. Weiss said he had no problem with such descriptions, but it was wrong to call them literature. Mailer responded by reading aloud from the “Calypso” chapter of Ulysses, Joyce’s account of Leopold Bloom in the outhouse.

  The pocket-sized notebook of thirty-odd pages contains one-sentence character sketches and two-sentence plot ideas, memorable people, places, and moments, a list of his dates with girls in Brooklyn, with telephone numbers and a letter grade next to each (Phyllis Bradman got a B, the highest), snippets of conversation and quotations from several writers, including Hemingway (“Everybody was drunk”). Some of the ideas are the usual freshman theme fodder: tearing down the goalposts after a football game. But others are more ambitious: a boy with a castration complex, based on a line from Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex; a young white man dancing with a black woman for “altruistic reasons” who gets sexually aroused; “fellow meeting mother long lost and finding she is a prostitute[;] you know that’s crap have him lay her first then find out it’s mother—don’t give it away but have it sharp dialogue piece”; “a homosexua
l who has an otherwise fine character . . . have it from an accident.” A significant number are pensées about the writing life: “It is only when an author reproduces some personal experiences of ours that we can fully understand his meaning.”

  The most impressive thing about the notebook is how it functioned as a wellspring. The examples of his literary trinity of Farrell, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck, encouragement in English A, and interaction with other aspiring writers in the seminar, generated writing momentum. He wrote fifteen stories based on the notebook jottings over the second semester of his freshman year and the following summer. His desire to write was also whet by the possibility of getting on the Advocate. When his Uncle Dave found out about his hopes for the magazine, he offered to speak to Bruce Barton Sr., whom he knew from New York business circles, but Mailer nixed the idea, writing home, “There’s no use making it, if I can’t do it on my own.” A week later he wrote home with the bad news that the Advocate had rejected his application, saying the stories he submitted were deemed fluid but deficient in plot. The editors, he admitted, were probably right.

  His first semester papers for English A are on garden-variety topics, for example, freedom of speech and a discussion of Malthus’s Law. But second semester he turned in six short stories, including the two he submitted to the Advocate. Never the minimalist, he wrote one that was almost six thousand words. His grades ranged from C+ to B+. For the last paper of the year, Mailer asked if he could submit one more story, and his instructor, after some discussion, agreed. Originally titled “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” he concluded that this too blatantly echoed a Hemingway story title and settled on “Prelude to Sleep.” Submitted on May 21, the story is a first person psychological account of the loss of virginity by Mark, a Brooklyn youth, before he goes off to college, an event preceded by months of frustrated petting with his girlfriend, Susan, punctuated by his self-serving theories on free love, true love, the family, and society. After Mark convinces Susan to have sex, he concludes that the “long, terrifying, childish period of sexual self-analysis and shame” was finally over only to find the consummation tainted. He discovers that “even at the height of coitus, his analytical mind was working and it annoyed him.” The story received an A–, his highest grade of the year, and brought his final grade up to B. Harvard was stingy with grades, especially for freshmen.

  AS MAILER WAS forging his literary vocation in the smithy of English A, isolationists and interventionists were lining up against each other on campus. Poet Archibald MacLeish, in a welcoming address to his class, compared it with the class of 1918. The earlier generation saw World War I “as a finality,” he said, but they were wrong. “The last war was not an end but a beginning.” Harvard’s students were not at all pleased with this news. The Crimson came out four-square against the war, saying in an editorial, “We are frankly determined to have peace at any price.” But President James B. Conant told the first chapel service of the year, “The forces of violence must be beaten by superior violence.” Mailer’s first response to the war, made while MacLeish was giving his importuning speech, was to jot down a very brief story, titled “It,” which follows:

  We were going through the barbed-wire when a machine gun started. I kept walking until I saw my head lying on the ground. “My God, I’m dead,” my head said. And my body fell over.

  If his mini-story demonstrates his awareness of the war, it should be said that it was impossible to ignore. The newspapers, newsreels, and radio were saturated with reports of the events in Europe—the German-Italian alliance, the German-Soviet pact, the invasion of Poland, speeches by Hitler and Churchill, and general mobilizations in England and France. Harvard’s 3,500 undergraduates knew that if the United States entered the war they would be among the first to go and, compensatorily, they partied a lot. Swing bands were the rage and Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” was the big hit of the year. A member of the class of 1942, one Lothrop Withington Jr., started a nationwide craze by swallowing a live goldfish, just months before Congress began discussing the first-ever peacetime draft. In his letters home Mailer made no mention of anything but grades, football games, laundry, allowance checks, and, more and more as time went on, literary activities. In avoiding the topic of war, he was not much different from his fellow Harvard students. In a May 1940 poll, 91 percent of them opposed going to war. In 1939 and early 1940, Harvard wanted it to go away.

  A good part of student reluctance to accept the inevitability of war came from the widespread sympathy for leftist ideas and principles. The leader of Harvard noninterventionists was the grave, revered F. O. Matthiessen, an avowed socialist and author of American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Mailer heard him lecture more than once and was deeply impressed. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (Harvard ’38) visited Matthiessen at a time when England was beleaguered. During their discussion of the war situation, Schlesinger said that Churchill was the only hope. “Matty said with great intensity, ‘Winston Churchill is the epitome of everything I have hated all my life.’ ” But when Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, Matthiessen endorsed the war. He even wrote an essay for the 1943 yearbook, “The Humanities in a Time of War,” in which he praised the engaged humanism of André Malraux, who would soon become one of Mailer’s heroes.

  Mailer’s sentiments changed in about the same time frame as Matthiessen’s. John Crockett, with whom Mailer would later be associated on the Advocate, remembers talking to him after MacLeish’s welcoming address. Mailer, he said, called the speech “crap” and argued that there would be no war. Although he did not remember meeting Crockett until February 1940, he could very well have been antiwar in September 1939. In his “Harvard Journal” he recalls that after reading Farrell, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck, he became “a leftist & an advocate of free love. The leftism came from the books; I can’t remember that the problem bothered me before then.” He adds that by his sophomore year, “I was violently leftist, & almost joined the YCL [Young Communist League].” Support for U.S. involvement in the war began to grow with the fall of France in June 1940, but Mailer showed no real interest in world events until later. He had something else on his mind: sex.

  During his sophomore year, Mailer went to the Treasure Room of the Widener Library and there read D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, unpublished in the United States at that time. It was one of the perks of the Harvard experience and deeply moving, he said. “It changed my sex life, or rather, accelerated it.” He read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer at about the same time and later paid homage to Lawrence and Miller in his work. From the very beginning of his writing career, Mailer wanted to jump into the ocean of sex and plumb its secrets. He admired the resistance to anti-obscenity laws and prudery in general by Lawrence, Joyce, and Miller, and was eager to explore sex from A to Z. From one perspective, his sixty years of writing can be seen as an untrammeled examination of all things sexual—a long list. He would grapple with everything from the funky odors of lovemaking to the inalienable joys of marriage and children, from promiscuity and free love to abortion, masturbation, and orgies. He examined the humor in obscene speech and writing, as well as the problems of contraception and the mysteries of conception and pregnancy. He wrote about homosexuality, bisexuality, sadism, masochism, pornography, AIDS, and incandescent one-night stands. Sometimes he seemed ahead of the times, as when he was called the prophet-seer of the 1960s sexual revolution; sometimes he appeared to be deeply regressive, as in opposing contraception, but he was always a passionate responder to the conundrums of sexuality and identity. In Henry James’s era, he would have expired of frustration. In 1941, when he read the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley, the Depression was ending, life was opening up, and the Victorian ark of sexual repression was sinking. But it was going down too slowly. Mailer wanted to torpedo it.

  One of the last stories he wrote his freshman year, “Life Is Where You Find It,” concerns an eighteen-year-old Harvard student, Hal Stewart, a would-be w
riter who wants to go hitchhiking in the summer to find “some cheap tail.” When he returns to school, Hal realizes that he will have to face a choice: “whether he’d be a writer or an engineer.” Mailer was not ready to tell his family that he was approaching this same crossroad. That announcement would have to wait until such a time as he could produce some literary bona fides. It was still understood by the family that he was preparing for a career designing airplanes, although shortly after he arrived at Harvard he must have recognized that his degree would be in a general engineering program (engineering sciences), as Harvard did not have an aeronautical engineering program, merely a few courses. Further complicating matters was the fact that he had not taken high school Latin, which was required for a bachelor of arts degree at Harvard, and so could not change his major to English, although he talked to his friends about doing so.

  Another issue was money. He had entered Harvard with the understanding that his parents would, by whatever means (including help from Uncle Dave and Aunt Anne), find the money for his first year’s college expenses, $1,200, a huge sum for a family with a sporadically employed father. On his application he had put down $3,000 as total family income for the year, supplemented by the $60 he claimed he would earn as a summer counselor at the Scarboro Hotel. For his part, he agreed to apply himself to his studies so as to be eligible for a scholarship in his sophomore year. This meant getting on the dean’s list, which he accomplished by getting three Bs and an A (in Mathematics, the subject in which he always scored highest). His family was happy with his performance but, apparently, these grades weren’t high enough, for in July he was informed that his scholarship application had been turned down. Another disappointment was not getting into one of Harvard’s residential houses for his sophomore year. He and Sy Breslow applied for a suite in Dunster House, with Adams as a backup, and were rejected for both. Marty Lubin was also turned down, and the three friends decided to share a suite in one of the dormitories, Claverly Hall.