Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  She used to wrinkle her nose and looked on the sex like it was smelly, which was a big thing among most of those middle-class women at that point, that sex was something you didn’t talk about; it was kind of a smelly activity and let’s not get into it. And of course, I was all for the smells. For me, that was the most positive thing about sex, precisely, that it was a smelly activity. So there we are, and we’d neck on the couch. And Jenny would come marching in, making enough noise so that we could disengage if it was getting that far. And she’d say, “Norman, I just wish you knew how many times I’ve come in here and seen Bea necking with one of you or another.” And I’d say, “Just getting ready for me.” I was very sassy with her.

  Fan, unaccompanied by Barney, came up for a visit in mid-July at about the same time that Mailer quit his job making sandwiches and sundaes. It is likely that it was during this trip that she met Bea, although there is no record of it. He started work as a press agent for the Joy Street Playhouse, a carriage house theater on Beacon Hill. There was no pay, but he got some free meals. He wrote releases, distributed posters, performed short walk-on roles, and schmoozed drama critics. “The work is congenial,” he wrote home at the end of July, “everyone is poor.” In mid-August he went to a reception where he met the cast of Othello—Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, and José Ferrer—who were trying out the play in Boston before its two-year run on Broadway. This foray into the dramatic world sparked an interest that would last a lifetime. It also gave him a sufficient sense of stagecraft to recast his experience at the state hospital in dramatic form.

  To write the play, he decided, quite naturally, to go to the Jersey Shore. The Scarboro was now a vacant lot so he went to Monmouth Beach, where Aunt Beck was that summer. It had been decided that it was time for Bea to meet the clan and she traveled, separately (and thus appropriately), to Monmouth Beach sometime during the last week of August. The round of visits with the aunts and cousins apparently went smoothly because Mailer sent his mother a postcard on the last day of August saying that Beck, the senior sister, liked Bea very much. Bea returned to Chelsea and he got to work on the play, using as the inciting incident the beating of the black inmate. He called the play “The Naked and the Dead.” Mailer scholar Robert F. Lucid, in his commentary on the unpublished play, noted that “Fear, for Norman, had probably always been the most authentic emotion,” and “the administration of fear as a public policy” that he encountered at the hospital “penetrated to the deepest center of his imagination.” He would return again and again to the ways powerful regimes and administrations at all levels of American society created what he called in his first published novel a “fear ladder,” whereby blandishments, threats, favors, and physical harm were increased or decreased as necessary for the maintenance of control, much as the water temperature (euphemized as hydrotherapy) was modulated at the state hospital to pacify unruly mental patients.

  It took him fifteen days to complete the three-act, eight-scene play, all of which takes place in a mental institution. In more than one way it seems to anticipate Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The combined and disorienting use of both harsh and sophisticated control methods by a despotic head nurse, the slow corruption of well-meaning staff members in an atmosphere of spying and informing, and the eventual revolt and escape of some of the tyrannized can be found in both works. The play has a number of redundant scenes and the line of action is sometimes difficult to follow, yet it has the force of its “fear ladder” thesis as well as the most believable dialogue he had yet written. After the rebellious black inmate is subdued and sent to hydrotherapy, the two young orderlies in the play realize they cannot change the institution’s deeply embedded methods of control. They quit and go on a fishing trip to regain their equilibrium, much as Nick Adams does in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” But before they go, one has an epiphany, which he blurts out to the other during an argument: “This all happened on a bigger scale in Germany. Germany is like an attendant!” Shortly after finishing the play, Mailer returned to Cambridge, where he submitted the play to the Harvard Dramatic Society and prepared for his senior year.

  BY THE FALL of 1942, Harvard had gone to year-round instruction and thousands of army and navy officer candidates were housed on campus. Mailer returned to Dunster, sharing a fourth floor suite with Harold Katz, a mathematics and philosophy major from Indiana. Many of the class of ’43 had gone into an accelerated program and graduated a year early. In late September, he began talking with the Harvard draft advisor about joining the enlisted reserve. He also began checking on graduate school requirements in engineering, but was told that no course could keep him from being drafted.

  Harvard had gone to war and Mailer was eager to engage war in his writing, not as background as in several of his previous year’s stories, but head-on. He had been reading Malraux and Hemingway and began planning a new narrative, to be set in the South Pacific, where American soldiers were fighting. Like everyone else, he was getting the dispiriting news from the war front. In April 1942, shortly after General Douglas MacArthur left the Philippines for Australia, the American-Philippine army surrendered to the Japanese on the Bataan Peninsula. The battle for Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands dragged on through the last half of 1942, causing dismay. The Japanese were on the offensive. This cheerless mood would be reflected in Mailer’s writing. He was not taking a writing course but worked on the novella with his usual focus. His courses that semester were two required engineering courses, a drama survey course, and Henry Murray’s course in abnormal psychology. And, for the length of the fall semester, he awaited word from the Harvard Dramatic Society on the fate of his play. Because of wartime limitations, the society was only mounting plays that could be handled with small stage crews. A note in the Crimson said his play, now retitled “Man Chasm,” was “a dark horse among the plays considered.” Ultimately, the play was turned down and he focused on completing the war novella, which carried a title, “The Foundation,” plucked from a passage in Man’s Fate:

  All that men are willing to die for, beyond self-interest, tends more or less obscurely to justify that fate by giving it a foundation in dignity: Christianity for the slave, the nation for the citizen, Communism for the worker.

  There was one additional influence: the horrendous fire and pandemonium at the Cocoanut Grove supper club in Boston. On the night of November 28, 492 people, including many servicemen and their companions, were burned, asphyxiated, or trampled to death when flammable paper decorations caught fire. For identification purposes, the morgue where most of the bodies were sent, the Southern Mortuary, was opened to the public. Mailer wrote home to say he was safe in Dunster when the fire occurred, not mentioning that he and Bea had gone to view the bodies. Afterward, he transposed his memory of one of the victims to the memory of the key figure in the novella, Captain Bowen Hilliard, a Harvard graduate:

  He remembered the burnt body of a man that he had looked at for quite a time. It had seemed a terrible degradation, as if the man in burning to death had reverted to a prehistoric type. He had been blackened all over, his flesh in shriveling had given the appearance of black fur, and his features, almost burned off, had been snubbed and shrunken, so that the man’s face in death had only registered a black circle of mouth with the teeth grimacing whitely and out of place in the blackness of the ape.

  The novella is a kind of prospective dirge in which five Americans inwardly grieve and ponder their all but certain deaths as a force of invading Japanese surround them on the fictional island of Tinde in April 1942. Only brief and tentative descriptions of combat are provided; Mailer is much more at home in giving the texture of American life in capsule biographies of his characters. The novella winds down quickly after the five realize they are completely cut off. It ends with a Hemingway flourish. As they smoke their final cigarettes, one character notes that it is going to be a sunny day. “Yes,” says another, “sometimes you want to look pretty carefully at it.” Later retitle
d A Calculus at Heaven, the novella strongly prefigures The Naked and the Dead, especially in the use of a hovering, brooding, sympathetic narrative consciousness. He completed the novella over semester break in Brooklyn in preparation for submitting it in Professor Robert Hillyer’s English 5-A course the upcoming semester, his last at Harvard. In the middle of his senior year, he wrote in his journal that he wanted to do “a little philosophical accounting.” What is most striking about this nine-page entry is his effort to tell the worst, to probe and pinch his weaknesses as if they were lice on his body. He starts by casting back to his arrival at Harvard, saying he came with little self-knowledge.

  I lived completely (and my moods depended on) in the impressions of others. I would lie, boast, exaggerate so that they would think more of me, & so that I by some rather difficult rationalization might believe it too. This deception did not always work with me, & I went through periods of extreme realization & unhappiness. To myself I was no good.

  He continues with a description of the stair steps of his growth as a reader, writer, and lover, commenting on his failure in the Scranton brothel, his success in the one in Virginia, and the seduction in Cambridge. He examines his political awakening and discusses hitting “the jackpot” with “The Greatest Thing.” At the end of his sophomore year, he writes, “My egoism was extreme, & the fact of it bothered me.” In his junior year, lacking any belief in God, he constructed a sensualist philosophy. Then he met Bea and “I’ve been loving–not loving her ever since. The sex-ego business is laid to rest. I’m a good lover without being as great as Bea thinks I am.” He ends with a reflection that augured well for a writer who would later examine sympathetically the psyches of moral monsters such as Gary Gilmore, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Adolf Hitler: “Every villain in a melodrama considers himself as the hero. That is one of the fundamental things to learn about life. It is one of the milestones of intelligence.”

  Amussen wrote at the end of March 1943 to say that A Calculus at Heaven was the best piece of writing he had yet produced and offered to help him find a publisher for the twenty-thousand-word novella. Mailer’s friends, who he said were his toughest critics, agreed with Amussen’s evaluation as Mailer reported to Millie Brower in an April letter. He also told her that he expected to be in the army by July 1, and that he’d like to see her in New York in June if she would be there. His relationship with Bea is still very much alive, he continued, but it had been through many evolutions. “It’s been wonderful, & exciting, & maturing for me, (and her) but it won’t survive the next five years of war, I fear. Nothing could.”

  He wrote to his parents the same day to discuss what was on everyone’s mind as graduation approached—the army. He was both resigned to being drafted and eager to seize the experiential possibilities of life in the army melting pot.

  You say, Mother (and I’ll include you dad) that you will worry if I’m in the army, and that therefore, I should reconsider it. If you only knew how much I’ve thought about this, and how many my temptations have been. (Don’t forget, I have much besides Harvard to keep me in Boston.) And yet, as a writer, and you must believe me since I can’t explain it to you, I feel it necessary to enter a private, to get the feel of the nation, to know what [servicemen] think about, rather than guessing.

  Uncle Dave came up to Cambridge in April to discuss his nephew’s plans—no family member came more often. As a graduation present, he offered to underwrite Mailer’s participation in a trip to Mexico with several of his friends, and Mailer seemed eager to go. His friends planned to leave on May 20, a week before graduation, but he decided to go through the ceremony with the family in the audience. “Lord knows you’ve waited long enough for it,” he wrote to them. He had already told them that he was planning to start a new work, another novel, which he would base on his play about the insane asylum. He had a title: A Transit to Narcissus.

  For the remainder of the semester, he worked on the novel and did sufficient work in his final, required engineering course to get a passing grade. He told his parents he might get only a C, which was not impressive, “but what importance do my masks have now anyway.” He was also engaged in deep conversations with Bea. Earlier in the semester, she had asked him if he wanted to get married and he replied that their commitment would persist without marriage, even if one or both of them were unfaithful. There was no sense, therefore, in getting married just “so we can participate in the great American custom,” he wrote in his journal. “Bea loves me as a vase now, something valuable to her because it’s clever and sensitive.” The romance was obviously a work in progress because when the time came to make a decision about going to Mexico, Mailer opted out. He told his parents he’d prefer to take his vacation in a small town on the tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown, with which he would be associated for the remainder of his life. He didn’t tell them that Bea would be going too, or how serious their relationship had become.

  He got a B in his engineering course and As in his other three courses, which enabled him to graduate cum laude. With his parents, Barbara, and the Kesslers in the audience, he received his SB degree in Engineering Sciences on May 27. Winston Churchill was to have been the graduation speaker and receive an honorary degree, but his meetings in Washington with President Roosevelt forced him to cancel. Bea also did not attend—the number of tickets was limited—but Barbara stayed with her in Chelsea and Barney met her for the first time. After a reception at Dunster House, the family returned to Brooklyn and Mailer awaited greetings from the army.

  THREE

  THE ARMY

  Two weeks after his graduation, Mailer and Bea took the ferry from Boston to Provincetown. A fishing village on the tip of Cape Cod, P-Town, as it is often called, is encircled by ocean, tidal flats, and sand dunes. During the week they vacationed there, the town had an “unearthly” beauty at night, Mailer said. A wartime blackout had been imposed on the East Coast a year earlier and when the couple walked along Commercial Street fronting the harbor, a gibbous moon gave the town’s colonial architecture “the feel of 1790,” Mailer said. They stayed at an inn on Standish Street where their marital status went unquestioned by the landlady or anyone else, and enjoyed an idyllic week in each other’s arms and at the beach. Provincetown has never been a starchy place and the two free love advocates promised that they would return if and when he returned safely. He was certain that a draft notice awaited him at his parents’ new residence in Brooklyn Heights, an apartment at 102 Pierrepont Street. Bea had a final semester to complete in Boston and they went their separate ways on June 15.

  Ambivalence is the only word to describe Mailer’s attitude about the army during that summer. Right after graduation, he told George Goethals that he planned to enlist and get it over with, but in July he asked Amussen to request that Stanley Rinehart write a letter to his draft board seeking a deferment so he could finish A Transit to Narcissus. Rinehart was interested in his writing but counseled that such a request would be unwise. “I was a little frightened of going to war, and a great deal ashamed of not going to war, and terrified of my audacity in writing so ambitious a novel,” Mailer wrote in the introduction to Transit when it was finally published in 1978. Every day the draft notice was expected and every day it failed to appear. He pushed on with the first draft of Transit and then began the second. Occasionally, he took the train to see Bea in Chelsea, or she visited Brooklyn. For both, it was an anxious period and Mailer’s state of mind—“I was as lonely as I have ever been”—is reflected in the mood of the novel, a mix of the febrile and the lugubrious.

  There was some cheer that summer. Amussen’s efforts to find a publisher for A Calculus at Heaven were successful. Edwin Seaver wrote at the end of August to say that he was accepting the novella, with only minor changes, for publication the following spring in Cross-Section: A Collection of New American Writing, the first of a series of anthologies of new work by young writers. It would be Mailer’s first appearance in a book. Published with him were several important young wr
iters whose careers were also given a boost: Jane Bowles, Richard Wright, Shirley Jackson, Ralph Ellison, and two others whom Mailer came to know well in Brooklyn after the war, Arthur Miller and poet Norman Rosten.

  Set in the summer of 1938 in an unnamed city, A Transit to Narcissus focuses on a college senior, Paul Scarr, who works at what is called “the insane asylum,” where he is a ward attendant. As in Mailer’s own experience and his play, “The Naked and the Dead,” a troublesome black inmate is punched and kicked into unconsciousness by the attendants. Scarr is distraught but also strangely exhilarated by the regular and condoned brutality.

  The novel’s overarching struggle is between the Syndicate that controls the asylum and a crusading newspaper run by an idealistic publisher. During a ruckus with inmates, Scarr kicks one in the stomach, and the inmate later dies. Because the Syndicate controls the D.A.’s office, Scarr is offered a lighter sentence by the Syndicate’s consigliere, a Mephistophelean lawyer named Riorden, if he does not reveal the horrors and graft at the asylum. He agrees but later reneges.

  As the novel proceeds, Scarr becomes emotionally calloused and finds that violence beguiles him more and more. The methods employed to cow the inmates eventually turn nearly all of the employees into little fascists. The hospital scenes and routines (including an elaborate, fiendish system of distributing discarded cigarette butts among the inmates), based on Mailer’s experience, ring true. The depiction of the newspaper and its staff and the Syndicate thugs is thin, and Scarr’s bizarre suicide (with which the novel ends) is unconvincing. The sex scenes, written shortly after he completed Henry A. Murray’s abnormal psychology course, are slavishly Freudian. Plot strings are left dangling, nothing is resolved. The ending gives every sign of authorial haste and confusion. As Mailer biographer Carl Rollyson notes, Transit “was a devastating novel to write, for Mailer deliberately turned in on himself before he had the experience to develop the shields of the various personae who would appear in his later work.”