An American-owned car could prove a formidable weapon. Particularly persuasive was Paco Benet-Goitia. A bright twenty-one-year-old, very intellectual and passionately anti-Franco, he was the only one of the Spanish students who was not a refugee and could therefore travel back and forth. He also had a network of contacts in the small world of anti-Franco resistance that still simmered inside Spain. He would accompany Norman and Bea. They decided to go.
With a stash of antifascist leaflets hidden in the Peugeot, they drove with the Linenthals to Barcelona, where they passed on the leaflets to Paco’s friends. Mailer was asked if he wanted to see the brothels in the Barrio Chino. As a young man, Picasso had been a customer. In Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (1995), Mailer recalled his visit to the most famous whorehouse in the quarter, one which he surmised the painter had visited.
In a large bare room, along a dais some sixty or seventy feet in length, forty or more women in bras and panties were bellowing out the catalogue of their specialties before a near mob of a couple hundred men, just about all of these putative customers puffing away on cigarettes as if to raise a wall of smoke between themselves and the cacophony of sexual advertisement bombarding them. The density of smoke in that room cannot be exaggerated.
From Barcelona they drove to Madrid, but the situation had changed and they were unable to help Paco’s friends. After a few days and their first bullfight, they drove back to Paris. Later, after his family arrived on April 21, Mailer learned that an escape was now possible. He was getting preoccupied with prepublication activity and so asked his sister, who didn’t know how to drive, if she wanted to go to Spain, to try again with Paco. Barbara, who had been having an affair with a Marxist in the States, was “thrilled” by the prospect of a romantic adventure to assist leftists. Mailer, never a proficient driver himself, gave her some driving lessons. A young woman named Barbara Probst (later married to Mailer’s Harvard classmate Howard Solomon), whom Fan and Barbara met on the boat from the United States, was enlisted to go along. Probst, who had a driver’s license, was eager. Mailer thought he should first test her driving skills, and his sister’s, so they took a trip to Chartres. Barbara Probst Solomon recalled:
What pleased me was that he treated me like an adult. He was awestruck by Chartres yet at the same time juggled with other thoughts, other ideas. He wondered—what would my Spanish experience be? How would it affect me? There we were, two Americans suddenly stunned by the Rose Window. Architecture, when it’s amazing and has soul, affected Norman (he was enthralled by the visual) as profoundly as politics and literature, and in that magical golden spring afternoon, he talked and talked, telling me tons of stuff about Chartres.
The mission was scary but successful, and the two Barbaras rescued Paco’s friends.
Mailer was in good spirits that spring, and enjoyed alternating between family gatherings and dealing with a wave of publishing correspondence. To Adelaide Scherer of the Sam Jaffe Agency in Hollywood, who contacted him, he said he would consider having them represent him and was willing to work on a screen treatment of the novel. He also asked for Scherer’s advice on hiring a literary agent. After he parted company, amicably, with Berta Kaslow, his cousin Cy Rembar began representing him, but professional help was now needed. He also agreed to hire a clipping service and asked that all reviews be sent to him at Rue Bréa. From Rinehart, a copy of a letter from John Dos Passos arrived. Mailer’s literary hero had read an advance copy of Naked and the Dead and written to Stan Rinehart to praise the book as “a courageous piece of publishing,” calling the author “a first rate novelist.” Mailer was immensely pleased. When asked years later what American novels affected him the most as a young man, Mailer said, “U.S.A. meant more than them all.”
In early May, around the time of publication, the Mailers drove with Barbara and the Linenthals to Mont St. Michel, built on a tidal island in the eighth century after St. Michael the Archangel, it is said, burned a hole with his finger in the skull of the dilatory local bishop whom he had instructed to build a church there. They spent the night and the following day admiring the architecture of the church. “Norman was flush with success, and he was doing a southern accent,” Linenthal recalled. They played a game called “The Naked and the Dead,” with Bea as Wilson and Mailer as Croft. It was a role that he always enjoyed, especially after a few drinks.
Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams were in Paris in April 1948. Mailer did not meet them or Truman Capote, who visited Vidal and Williams at the Hôtel de l’Université. Over the next four decades, he would have rocky relationships with all three. Vidal recalled that the publicity about Mailer’s 721-page novel reached them in Paris. He wrote, “I remember thinking meanly: So somebody did it. Each previous war had had its big novel, yet so far there had been none for our war, though I knew that a dozen busy friends and acquaintances were grimly taking out tickets in the Grand War Novel Lottery.” Mailer was by no means certain that he had, indeed, done it, not so far, but the first reviews that crossed the Atlantic certainly augured well. In mid-May, before his month-long trip to Italy began, they began arriving. He was restrained when he wrote to Fig in late May, saying that while the reviews were good enough, only one in five understood the novel. “All they could do was choke over the profanity and while that gave me a bang in the beginning it ended by boring the shit out of me.” He was eager to leave the city with Bea, Barbara, and his mother, even though he told Fig that he loved it as never before. It was too easy to do nothing in Paris and “drown in inertia.”
While Mailer was traveling he learned that Lillian Hellman wanted to adapt Naked into a play on Broadway to be produced by Kermit Bloomgarden (the following year he would present Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman). Excited by the prospect, he wrote to Raney from Venice that he was empowering Rinehart, working with Dave Kessler (who had his power of attorney), and Cy Rembar, to make whatever financial arrangements they saw fit. “I have no worries [about] a flop hurting a movie sale because I don’t see it selling to the movies anyway,” he wrote. The chance to collaborate with one of the country’s most important playwrights clearly excited him.
Mailer had planned to return to the States in mid-August, but after he and Bea returned to Paris from their trip to Italy at the end of June, he decided to leave a few weeks earlier. He wanted to meet with Hellman, see friends, and play a role in the Wallace presidential campaign. Most of all, he wanted to celebrate. He and Bea flew back to the United States, arriving on July 21.
HE DID NOT tell anyone at Rinehart about his early return; he wanted time to take Hellman’s measure before being caught up in promoting Naked and the Dead. He met with her within a few days of arrival and found her to be “a tough baby, but very pleasant and direct.” He would later describe her as being “what the French would call joli-laide, that is, she was not at all pretty or beautiful, but she was attractive, and there was a vitality . . . an intensity.” Hellman liked him as well; he was young, handsome, and energetic. When he went to her Manhattan apartment, she received him in her bedroom. She was in a sexy nightgown and showed him a “truly formidable bare breast.” When someone called from downstairs, Hellman answered, “Come on up. What did you think we were doing? Fucking?” There was always a bit of sexual electricity between them.
Hellman knew next to nothing about army life and had a long list of questions: “What is a carbine?” “What is a squad tent?” “How do you dig a latrine?” Mailer drew sketches of weapons and tents and explained the rank structure and army organization from division to platoon. Hellman had done a twenty-three-page outline of the novel before they met, and had begun identifying scenes. He drew maps of Anopopei to show General Cummings’s tactical options. The Cummings-Hearn debates were inherently dramatic, but they saw no easy way to stage the ascent of Mount Anaka. Hellman didn’t want Hearn to die, and Mailer agreed to this significant change. Then he and Bea made arrangements to go to Maine for a week with the Linenthals, now returned from Paris. On August 5, the day b
efore they left, Mailer went to visit with Sinclair Lewis in Williamstown, Massachusetts, at the elder novelist’s invitation. The visit went well and two months later Lewis praised him to an interviewer: “Speaking of newcomers in the field—one of the greatest writers today is young Norman Mailer—author of The Naked and the Dead—an amazing bit of writing. That boy has talent worth preserving. There’s nothing petty about Mailer—he’s the author of the hour—the greatest writer to come out of his generation.” Mailer’s books carried this last phrase for many years.
The Naked and the Dead had reached first place on The New York Times bestseller list on June 20, and Rinehart wanted Mailer to meet with the press. He submitted to interviews with the Times, Cue, the New York Star, and The New Yorker’s Lillian Ross, with whom he remained friendly. But at Bea’s urging, he had turned down a request from Life for a photo at the airport, saying, “Getting your mug in the papers is one of the shameful ways of making a living,” a remark that drew chuckles in later years. It appears that Life wanted the photograph to accompany a full-page editorial on August 16 calling for “a novelist to re-create American values instead of wallowing in the literary slums.” The piece was unsigned but had Henry R. Luce’s imprimatur. The core complaint is that
Both Anopopei and Mr. Mailer’s stateside U.S. teem with riotous, essentially meaningless life. But does Mr. Mailer really mean that life is meaningless? What he seems to tell us is that such purposes as marrying and procreating and raising a family or mastering an art or a profession or building a business or beating the Japs are without value to anybody now living.
This attack was the beginning of decades of predominantly negative reviews and commentary from the Time-Life organization. Three years later, Life referred to Naked and the Dead as “insidious slime.” Among national publications, only William F. Buckley’s National Review had a higher batting average in berating Mailer.
In late August, the Mailers flew to Arkansas for a two-week visit with Fig and his new wife, Ecey. The foursome went on picnics, swam, and relaxed. The Gwaltneys liked Bea, who was her usual frank, earthy self. Fig remembered that when the Mailers were ready for bed, Bea would ask if she needed to install a birth control device, hollering out in a voice “both vulgar and innocent, ‘Norm, do you want to fuck me tonight?’ ”
Rinehart’s extremely effective marketing campaign was aided by strong word-of-mouth support and generally superlative reviews. A postcard went to top editors and publicity staff at all the major publishers heralding the novel’s publication and stating that “all but the tough-skinned” will turn from the book’s “unrestrained accuracy of detail in speech and thought”—code for plenty of profanity and sex. Posters with Karov’s drawing of the infantryman were displayed in bookstores. Initially, they carried no information, just the face of the soldier with a thousand-yard stare and nine bullet holes. According to Adeline, “Everyone was both startled and shocked,” but the tactic worked and “by the time the book was published, the jacket had become famous.” As reviews appeared, snippets from them were added to the poster: The New Yorker: “closer to Tolstoy . . . than to Crane or Remarque”; The New York Times: “its total effect is overwhelming”; Newsweek: “powerful . . . brutal . . . astonishingly thoughtful”; New York Herald Tribune Book Review: “a prodigal and brilliant talent.” Within two weeks of publication Rinehart had ordered two more printings, bringing the total to 65,000; the Book Find Club chose it as their July selection and printed 35,000 copies. When reviewers found anything to complain about, it was usually the profanity. Orville Prescott, in his Times column, said it contained “more explicitly vile speech . . . than I have ever seen printed in a work of serious literature before.” But the vast majority of reviewers believed Mailer’s language was an accurate reflection of the way GIs in barracks and battles had actually spoken. The preponderant view was that he was a pioneer of free speech, although the book was banned by many local libraries and in several foreign countries.
The negative reviews troubled him. “I think I suffered more over the reviews of The Naked and the Dead, even the good ones, than over the reviews for any other book. I wanted to sit down and write a letter to every critic—they had misinterpreted something I said even though they liked the book.” But he had no time for rejoinders. He was busy making speeches for Wallace. In September and October, he made over thirty, mainly in the New York area, but also in Hollywood. Bea also worked on the campaign and both of them became associated with the Progressive Party’s unofficial newspaper, the National Guardian. At the end of September, Mailer traveled to Evansville, Indiana, on assignment from the New York Post, a liberal paper that gave extensive coverage to the Wallace campaign. A young instructor at Evansville College had recently been fired for heading the local Wallace committee. Mailer spent four days there, interviewed about twenty people, and then wrote a 2,500-word feature article built around a devastating interview with the college’s president. It was his first piece of professional journalism. The strong feelings and occasional violence against the Wallace campaign indicated the depth of anticommunism in the United States at this time.
In mid-October, he flew to Hollywood to enlist movie stars as Wallace supporters. At a party at the home of Gene Kelly and his wife, Betsy Blair, Mailer gave a speech to a large crowd that included Montgomery Clift, Farley Granger, Edward G. Robinson, and Shelley Winters, who later said, “Everyone who was anyone was at this party, AND I MEAN EVERYONE, in Hollywood.” Mailer, reflecting the influence of Malaquais, whom he had been meeting with regularly, said that America’s huge institutions—the government, corporations, and labor unions—were commensurate with Russia’s equally large and oppressive bureaucracies. The Progressive Party, he argued, was the only way to prevent the drift toward war with Russia. He recalled that he had been “unintentionally eloquent,” although it was clear that many in attendance weren’t going to endorse Wallace. At one point, Robinson stood up and said, “See here—who do you think you are, you little punk? You know, I’m known all over the world, I’m world famous, and you’re telling me how to vote? I’ll keep my vote to myself, if you don’t mind.”
A second purpose of the event was to raise money for the Hollywood Ten, a group of current or former communist producers, writers, and directors who refused to tell a congressional committee whether they were or had been members of the party. All ten were eventually sent to prison. Mailer asked those present to sign an amicus curiae brief to be used when the convictions were appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Many at the event responded by giving cash, but only two—Winters and Granger—signed the brief. They also gave Mailer checks for $100. Granger recalled that Mailer, “unbeknownst to us . . . probably saved Shelley and me from bringing our careers to an early end.” The Hollywood blacklist was now in force and Mailer, fearing that their checks could be traced, returned them. He also tore up the brief containing their signatures. A month earlier, he had signed another such brief, along with two hundred other writers and film industry figures, including Charlie Chaplin, John Garfield, John Huston, Dorothy Parker, and Burt Lancaster.
On October 17, he was the keynote speaker at a fundraiser at the El Patio Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. His speech, titled “Ballots vs. Book Burning,” hammered on the point that the Progressive Party was the only way to oppose a third world war. He gave the same speech several more times after he returned east, and may have garnered some support in New York, where Wallace received almost half of his 1.1 million votes, a total slightly less than Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat Party. Truman, against all expectations, soundly defeated Wallace, Thurmond, and the GOP candidate, Thomas E. Dewey. Wallace, who was mocked for allowing communists to infiltrate his party’s ranks, was quoted as saying, “Communists are the closest thing to the early Christian martyrs.” He retired after the election. Mailer became disenchanted with electoral politics and didn’t vote again until 1960.
JUST BEFORE THE election, the Mailers were living in a furnished apartment at 49 Remsen Str
eet, the same address where they had lived when he was writing Naked and the Dead. Malaquais had moved to New York and was lecturing at the New School for Social Research. One of his students was a man named Dan Wolf, whom he introduced to Mailer. (Later, with Edwin Fancher, Wolf, Mailer, and a few others would found The Village Voice.) By now, Mailer had reconnected with Malaquais, who lived around the corner on Montague Street. They met often and Mailer now found Malaquais’ ideas more appealing. It was at this time that Mailer asked him to translate Naked. At Mailer’s request, Malaquais drew up a reading list for him. “When I met Norman in Paris, he knew nothing about the history of the Russian Revolution, of the Russian movement going back to the 1880s. In Western Europe all students are political animals but in America a writer is a writer is a writer,” Malaquais said. “But that curiosity began in Paris, and he became very interested. Being young and perturbed on an intellectual level by the Cold War, he was open-minded to a degree. He was willing at least to confront and combat.” One of the books Malaquais suggested was Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet “Bloc of Right” and Trotskyites (1938), a verbatim transcript of the Moscow show trials of Stalin’s enemies, real and perceived. The show trials and the executions that followed led many Communist sympathizers to turn against Russia. Another title Malaquais recommended was Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism (1939), which traced the tumultuous history of Marxism in Russia up to the outbreak of World War II. It was written by Boris Souvarine, a fervent anti-Stalinist Malaquais knew in Paris. These two books and several others on Malaquais’ list obliterated what remained of Mailer’s belief in the Soviet Union as the foundation of a new world culture. For the rest of his life he referred to Russian history, including the history of Russian Jews, with familiarity.
Malaquais’ flinty geopolitical analyses impressed Mailer, but not his friends. Irving Howe, the founding editor of Dissent and a longtime flag bearer for socialism, admired Malaquais’ War Diary (1944), but found the man to be “opinionated, cocksure, and dogmatic.” He thought Malaquais was joking when he said there were only two genuine Marxists left: himself and Marc Chirik, a key figure in Malaquais’ 1948 novel, World Without Visa. When Mailer brought Hellman and Malaquais together, “it was a disaster,” Mailer said. “They couldn’t bear each other.” Cy Rembar didn’t much care for Malaquais, and Mickey Knox, a young Hollywood actor who would become Mailer’s close friend, found Malaquais to be “unrelenting.” Before Mailer met Malaquais, his guide to Marxism had been Charles Devlin, and back in Brooklyn after the election, he arranged for Devlin to meet Malaquais. He said that Devlin was a specialist on the Russian economy, but Malaquais found him to be “a thoroughly constipated Stalinist hack.” It was “child’s play,” Malaquais said, “to destroy him.” The meeting with Devlin reinforced Mailer’s recognition that he had been used by the communists who had infiltrated the Wallace campaign.
Norman Mailer Page 14
