Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Wallace’s horrendous showing, coupled with the ongoing popularity of Naked and the Dead (nineteen weeks in first place on the New York Times bestseller list, through November 19) led to a period of self-reflection. When he went out in public admirers surrounded him, and given the wonderful reviews Naked had received, he felt like a champ, bulging with self-esteem. “There were times,” he said, when Naked and the Dead seemed like “the greatest book written since War and Peace.” But in his sessions with Malaquais, he was painfully reminded of the limitations of his knowledge, and when he looked in the mirror, he saw someone who, he said, was “a bit of an imposter,” as much a fraud as a champ. Many times over the years, Mailer looked back at that young man who felt unworthy. For example, in 1979: “You’re 25 and you’ve written one good book that you wrote on a streak that was a natural book, and then you don’t know what you want to do with yourself after that. It was a terribly tricky time.” He began to examine the assets and liabilities of fame. Two things were certain: First, women were attracted to him as never before. “Celebrity,” he said, “was great for one-night stands.” Second, fame “cauterizes a lot of your past.” It was, he said, using another medical term, “a lobotomy to my past.” There were two Norman Mailers. One enjoyed the attention and savored what he called the “ego-gobblings” of celebrity, while the other suspected that the compliments he received were ploys of phonies. “Once I had been a young man whom many did not notice,” but after the success of Naked, “I was prominent but empty.”

  I was a dependable pain in the ass to a great many people, because all through the first year I’d keep saying, “Oh, now I will never know the experience of other people.” . . . I kept wanting to go back to what seemed like a sweet past when only a few people knew that I had talent. A young writer, if he is unknown, can be at a party and watch what everyone is doing. If he has a marvelous ear for dialogue, he can wake up the next morning and remember all that was said and how it was said. He is a bird on a branch. Sees like a bird and writes books that can be extraordinarily well observed. But once you are successful, especially if it happens quickly, it’s as if the bird is now an emu. It cannot fly. It’s big and it grows haunches and fore shoulders and a mane: Lo and behold, it is a lion. And everyone is looking at the lion, including the birds. But it is a lion with the heart of a bird and the mind of a bird.

  He wrote to Sinclair Lewis in mid-November and told him he was getting started on a new novel, “a big fat one.” But it does not appear that he began until after he and Bea moved to Jamaica, Vermont, near several ski resorts, where they leased a house from January to May of 1949. Mailer spent November and December in Brooklyn reading and meeting with Malaquais, who later came for long visits in Vermont. After six weeks of research and outlining, he began a new novel in mid-February. The idea came from the week in October that he had spent in Indiana gathering information on the case of the college professor who was fired. The working title was “The Devil’s Advocate,” but he also referred to it as the “strike novel.” For raw material, he relied on notes and clippings referring to a contested strike and subsequent blacklisting of Indiana union workers. Cy Rembar sent him material on the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which labor leaders viewed as unfairly restricting the right to organize and strike. Mailer struggled to embody the strike in narrative form, but finally, realizing that he didn’t know “a damn thing about labor unions,” abandoned it. The twenty-one pages he eked out tell the story of the death of the matriarch of a Ukrainian union family, and the visit of a labor organizer. His name is William McLeod, the same name Mailer would use for the central character of his second novel, Barbary Shore, which would grow out of “Mrs. Guinevere,” begun in Paris. “Full of second-novel panic,” he worked on the manuscript through April, interrupting it only for a brief visit to New York at the end of March to participate in an international peace conference, sponsored by the National Council of Arts, Sciences and the Professions. It was called the Waldorf Conference, after the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where it was held.

  The conference, which ran March 25–27, brought together close to three thousand delegates from around the world to discuss ways to promote peace. Although this sounds benign, America’s attitude toward Russia at this moment was one of fear and loathing, and all the newspapers and magazines of the day, with few exceptions (most notably The New York Times), attacked the gathering as a communist front designed to alter American foreign policy. The hotel was literally surrounded by right-wing groups such as the American Legion and Catholic War Veterans, but also by refugees from Eastern Europe protesting Russian-backed takeovers of Eastern European countries.

  The right-wing protesters had come, Mailer wrote, “out of the dream that the doors of the Waldorf might open to them, and they could smash some motherfucking Reds, loot the silk of that overrich hotel and perhaps drag back to Queens or Staten Island a real live Russian to char over a slow fire on their barbecue pit.” The Russian delegation included the world-famous composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who was pale and nervous in all his appearances. It was reported that he agreed to attend only after Stalin told him to. The American delegates and sponsors, many of whom Mailer knew, were well-known Russian sympathizers, “Stalinoids,” as anti-Stalin literary critic Dwight Macdonald referred to them: Henry Wallace, Langston Hughes, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Parker, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Lloyd Wright, and many others. Several Harvard professors attended, including his psychology instructor, Henry A. Murray, and F. O. Matthiessen, with whom Mailer had campaigned for Wallace. Life magazine, rabidly anti-Soviet, ran a five-page story about the conference that included a double-page spread, “Dupes and Fellow Travelers Dress Up Communist Fronts,” consisting of photographs of fifty prominent conferees. A smiling Mailer, in a white T-shirt, was one of them.

  Mailer’s ten-member panel on writing and publishing in the Starlight Roof Room drew a packed audience of over eight hundred. It was chaired by poet Louis Untermeyer, who had been involved in a public debate with political philosopher Sidney Hook, a strident anti-Stalinist and head of a new organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, secretly backed by the CIA. Some CCF members—Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Dwight Macdonald—were in the audience and challenged the Russians on the panel. Malaquais was also there. When Untermeyer made a comment about Hook being a dirty four-letter word, Lowell objected strenuously. As each speaker was introduced, including Matthiessen, there were cries for Mailer. When he did speak, he said that he was at the conference as a Trojan Horse and had been uncertain about whether to come at all. Immediately after the conference, he called his speech a “melancholy debauch” and recalled that he was almost weeping. In his speech, he said that “both Russia and America are moving radically towards state capitalism, and that the differences between them finally will be cultural differences, minor deviations, and that actually there is no future in fighting for one side or the other.” He concluded by warning that if the movement continued, “we would be put in concentration camps.” The only thing writers can do, he said, is to tell the truth and perhaps what is written will affect “the next turmoils of world history.”

  Norman Podhoretz, a writer and editor who later became Mailer’s friend, wrote that Mailer “must always work everything out for himself and by himself, as though it were up to him to create the world anew over and over again in his own experience.” Podhoretz’s insight is generally accurate. Mailer was a lifelong autodidact. But the exception that proves the rule was the political tutorial Malaquais conducted for Mailer from October 1948 through March 1950. Their conversations and the books Malaquais gave him to read, convinced Mailer that Stalin was a monster and—the central point—that the Russian and American economic systems were implicitly geared for war. He was now ready for immersion in the bible of revolutionary socialism. At Malaquais’s urging, he began reading Das Kapital after the Waldorf Conference. By his own accounting, he spent a year “living more closely in the history
of Russia from 1917 to 1937 than in the events of my own life.” It should be remembered that Mailer never took a history course in college, and until he met Malaquais, Spengler was his chief historical guide. The model of cultural growth, blossoming, and decay that he absorbed from Decline of the West was amply confirmed by Malaquais’ interpretation of the revolutions, wars, and catastrophes of the twentieth century.

  Mailer said that he “felt like a rodent” at the conference because he was leaving the Progressive Party. Indeed, he was booed at the end of his speech just as vigorously as he had been cheered before he began. He was unsure if he had spoken “out of a new and deep political conviction,” or if he was “afraid of the final wrath of those psychically starved hoodlums on the street outside.” When Irving Howe praised his bravery and candor, therefore, he was quite pleased. “I was immediately able to recognize the intellectual fingerprint of who was behind that speech—Jean Malaquais,” Howe said. When Mailer went outside, Dwight Macdonald came up to him on the street and told him he liked his speech. As Malaquais’s influence waned in the mid-1950s, Macdonald would become one of his intellectual godfathers. Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, and especially Howe also became close to him after the conference.

  Back in Vermont, he tried to work on Barbary Shore. There were no money worries. Naked had sold 197,000 copies in eight months, earning him about $80,000 in royalties. Only Lloyd C. Douglas’s book about St. Peter, The Big Fisherman, sold more copies that year. The Mailers banked most of the royalty money. Hellman was still working on the play, but said she wouldn’t have anything ready until the fall. The plan was to ski, write, and watch Bea grow larger; she was about three months pregnant by the end of March. Mailer had written to Fig requesting him to address mail to him as Kingsley Mailer so he could “stay incognito to avoid all the literary teas.” Progress on the novel was slow; he was having difficulty finding the right tone. As he had explained in a letter to a Harvard friend, Larry Weiss, his approach alternated between “the theoretical and empirical,” or between the realistic methods employed so successfully in Naked and the Dead and the abstractions delivered to him by Malaquais. He had also been stirred by Kafka’s The Castle and told Fig he saw it as “an adult fairy tale.” He would attempt to meld all of these elements in Barbary Shore.

  There was something else on his mind: Hollywood. He had been lionized there and had met celebrities like Hedy Lamarr, Burt Lancaster, and John Garfield, as well as up-and-coming actors like Shelley Winters, Farley Granger, and Marlon Brando. Winters always claimed that she introduced Mailer to her roommate, Marilyn Monroe, in 1948, but he could not remember meeting her. He did remember another woman, Lois Mayfield Wilson, a blond graduate student from Kentucky whom he met at a Stanford party given by the Linenthals. She recalled that she left the party with him, and they had an erotic wrestling match in the car, which became the basis for Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s tussle with Lulu Meyers in The Deer Park. He gave her the pseudonym of “Junebug” in his letters to her. They were deeply attracted to each other and would have a very lengthy long-distance affair.

  Mailer decided to spend some time in Hollywood and asked Malaquais, who had worked as a screenwriter in Mexico and France, and his wife, Galy, to join him and Bea in California. Bea, who loved films as much as her husband did, and was equally gregarious, was eager to go. His desire to sell Naked and the Dead to a film studio was another consideration in relocating. In late April, he wrote to Rembar about sale possibilities and also asked for help getting screenwriting jobs, noting that Malaquais had “a good flair for plots which I do not.” His conditions were $2,000 a week and a start date of September so that he could finish Barbary Shore. Because of Bea’s pregnancy, she would fly and he would drive.

  Barbara Probst Solomon recalled that one night in Paris after Naked’s extraordinary success was known, she was present when Barney said to Bea, somewhat bluntly, “You’re going back to America, Norman’s going to be famous, and you’re going to have a lot of competition.” He advised her to dress well and look attractive if she wanted the marriage to work. Bea blanched. But Barney was a bit of a womanizer himself and knew what he was talking about. After they returned from France, their marriage became “iffy,” Mailer recalled. When Bea got pregnant, he said, “I thought maybe that would improve the marriage, and it didn’t, of course. In fact, the marriage probably was worse afterward, because I hated having a baby; I felt trapped. I wanted freedom, I wanted to be screwing a lot of girls and here I am stuck. So it was all of that. So we ended up with this . . . and then after she [daughter Susan] was born, it just kept getting worse and worse. And I kept having more and more affairs on the side, whenever and wherever I could.” One of them was with Lois Wilson, whom he contacted when they reached California.

  MAILER LEFT IN early June 1949 for California, driving via Chicago. His sister was working in Chicago and, for a few days, he visited with her and Adeline, now married. After a week’s visit with Fig and Ecey in Arkansas, he drove through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to Los Angeles. In late June, he arrived in “the ugliest city in the whole world,” as he described it to Fig. He rented an apartment at the Chateau Marmont, the castlelike hotel overlooking Sunset Boulevard where celebrities have acted up since 1931. When Bea joined him, she was more than seven months pregnant. Mailer wrote a cheerful letter to Malaquais in early July saying that he thought they had a chance to “reap the wind yet, the golden wind.” He had been seeing Montgomery Clift and interested him in the idea of making Stendhal’s The Red and the Black into a film, with Clift as Julien Sorel. Malaquais would not arrive for a couple of months; he was only at page 380 in his translation of Naked.

  Shortly after the Mailers left Vermont, the British edition of Naked and the Dead was published by Allan Wingate. There was immediate criticism, led by the Sunday Times. On May 1, in a front-page editorial, the paper said that the novel was “incredibly foul and beastly.” It should be suppressed, the editorial continued, adding that “no decent man could leave it lying about the house without shame that his womenfolk were reading it.” Mailer responded in a telephone interview with the Associated Press by saying that the London paper was entitled to its opinion, but that the obscenity in the novel “is like a bell ringing in the background while you work. Before long you don’t notice it.” The British attorney general, Sir Hartley Shawcross, speaking on the floor of Parliament, called the book “foul, lewd and revolting,” but declined to prosecute it. Many British reviewers called the book brilliant, and the attention generated by indignant condemnation and unqualified praise led to tremendous sales. By the end of 1949, eighty thousand copies had been sold. Mailer took note of how the controversy sold the book. The fight against suppressing Naked was led by his Wingate editor, André Deutsch, a Hungarian Jew. Mailer said winning the fight to publish Naked and the Dead was “the biggest move” of Deutsch’s life. The novel’s success encouraged Deutsch and another Wingate editor, Diana Athill, to form their own firm, the eponymous André Deutsch, with which Mailer would later affiliate.

  Perhaps the shrewdest British reviewer was V. S. Pritchett, the eminent short story writer and critic. He found the obscenity flap overblown, noting that “respectable society cannot expect to indulge in two major wars in one generation without getting a flood of raw documents about what goes on in the minds and comes out of the mouths of ordinary men who are sent out punctually to these slaughters.” Pritchett praised the novel, especially the long patrol, which he said was done perfectly. But he found the book too long and thought the “Time Machine” episodes could have been cut entirely. Criticism of Mailer’s verbosity would be heard again.

  The length of Naked did not trouble George Orwell, who called the novel in a 1950 letter “the best war book of the last war yet.” Mailer admired Orwell’s work and praised his “profoundly prophetic” vision of the future in his 1949 novel, 1984. Mailer said that Orwell had accomplished what he was trying to do in Barbary Shore: “combine the political essay with fiction.” M
ailer worked hard on the new novel for his first two months in “Lotus Land,” as he called it, and finished the first draft on August 16 as Bea approached term. Hellman was visiting Hollywood scouting for male leads in the play and met with Mailer several times. Most of his time, however, was spent trying to work out a final agreement with Norma Productions, which had optioned the film rights of Naked. The company was a joint effort of Burt Lancaster, whom Mailer liked, and Harold Hecht, who handled the business side of the partnership. Hecht wouldn’t give Mailer the level of script oversight that he wanted and the haggling went on for weeks. Lancaster was slated to play Lieutenant Hearn. Mailer finally got the approval he wanted, but when he saw the script, written by two Hollywood veterans, he didn’t like it. The deal ultimately fell apart, hastened in part by war clouds over Korea, where fighting broke out in June 1950.