Mailer plunged in. He retained the novelist as the unidentified narrator, but he is a step removed. The protagonist of the prologue is “a small frustrated man, a minor artist manqué,” one Sam Slovoda, who makes his living writing continuity for comic strips, but toys with the idea of writing a novel. The eight novels, in Mailer’s conception, were to be stages of the dream he has after watching a pornographic film with his wife and friends. With encouragement from Adele, his sister, Lillian Ross, and Dan Wolf, he wrote “The Man Who Studied Yoga” in a month of hard work, finishing it in early April (the title refers to the old joke about the man who goes to India to study yoga and is told to unscrew his navel whereupon his ass falls off). The 29-page story, perhaps his finest, that grew out of the abandoned prologue, opens with his ghostly narrator speaking: “I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as I have tonight. For the moment, then, let me say that I am thinking of Sam Slovoda.” We soon see that Sam is nothing close to a heroic figure, but he has one redeeming virtue: he doesn’t like himself; he wants to grow.
Overstimulated by the film, Slovoda is displeased with himself for wasting another day. His vision for the enormous novel he hopes to write “lies foundered, rotting on a beach of purposeless effort.” As he dozes off, the narrator, who seems to be the shade of a novelist now turned muse, gives Sam an idea: “Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered.” Inflamed by this idea, Sam will now dream the first novel of the sequence, which will be devoted to pleasure. He remembers reading about a garden of Louis XV where beautiful virgins were brought to be despoiled by the king. It was called the Deer Park, and Sam’s meditation on it in “The Man Who Studied Yoga” reappears as the epigraph to Mailer’s pleasure novel of the same name.
Adele will serve as the model for the female protagonist, Elena Esposito, who has affairs with two friends of Charles Eitel’s, the male protagonist, before settling into a complicated affair with him. Mailer may have drawn on the director John Huston—beholden to the studio system, but with a deep maverick streak—for some of Eitel’s traits. Whatever the case, he now had all he needed to make a new start on The Deer Park: a prologue, a vast narrative scheme, and a first novel that would draw on his time in Hollywood, his current Latina lover, and his twenty-minute visit to Palm Springs with Knox. As he was finishing “The Man Who Studied Yoga,” he wrote in his journal that he had the strength and optimism to work on the project for years to come, “going into obscurity if that is necessary, indeed even looking forward to that.” Most of his energy for the next three and a half years would be expended on The Deer Park.
In April 1952 Bea married Steve “Chavo” Sánchez in Mexico, and when Mailer wrote to congratulate her, he said that he had not been in touch earlier because he was revamping the novel. The effort was “agony,” he wrote to Fig, but by early May he had established a foothold of thirty pages. He was determined not to go back to the 240-page draft he had shelved; he wanted the new version to be markedly different. Writing to Adeline in late May, he described its style as “quiet, witty, sad.” He mentioned to her that he had an article in the May-June Partisan Review, his first contribution to what was then considered one of the most significant literary-political journals in the United States. Founded by William Phillips and Philip Rahv in 1934 as a platform for what was sometimes called the “independent left,” it became anti-Soviet in the late 1930s. With a circulation never much above ten thousand, it was nonetheless a major force in American intellectual life until the late 1960s when it was overshadowed by The New York Review of Books. Partisan Review’s notable contributors (most of whom migrated to The New York Review of Books), included a number who became friends and/or sparring partners with Mailer: Macdonald, Howe, Rahv, Lowell, Mary McCarthy, Bellow, Baldwin, Diana Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Cynthia Ozick, Susan Sontag, and Norman Podhoretz.
His inaugural contribution was part of a symposium titled “Our Country and Our Culture.” The twenty-five participants were asked by the editors to expound on the current role of writers and whether the old American tradition of nonconformism could or should be maintained, as exemplified by exiles like Henry James and Ezra Pound, whose hostile statements about the barrenness of American life preface the editorial statement. Mailer stated boldly: “I think I ought to declare straightaway that I am in almost total disagreement with the assumptions of this symposium.” He derided American intellectuals for moving from social protest to writing uplifting pieces for Time and Life. The American writer, he said, “is being dunned to become healthy, to grow up, to accept the American reality.” Mailer was having none of it. The writer works best in “opposition,” he said, and integration into society was “more conducive to propaganda than art.”
Of the twenty-five participants on the panel, which included Howe, Margaret Mead, Delmore Schwartz, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Louise Bogan, Leslie Fiedler, and Lionel Trilling, only Howe was as truculent as Mailer. Howe contacted him after seeing the symposium in print, and asked him to write something for a new left-wing magazine that he and some others were founding. Howe and his colleagues recognized that a mass socialist labor party modeled after those in Europe could not compete with the Democrats or Republicans in the United States, not in the 1950s. Dissent, therefore, would try to work within the Democratic Party for some of the goals of socialism, while standing firmly against totalitarian regimes. The first issue appeared in winter 1954 and Mailer’s name was on the masthead as a contributing editor. He published three pieces there in 1954, and in 1955 became a member of the editorial board.
In early 1952, Mailer saw Jones and Styron several times. Mickey Knox often joined them, making it a quartet. They hit the bars of the Village and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, boozing and playing liar’s poker for dollars. “We did a prodigious amount of drinking, and there were always flocks of girls around,” Styron later wrote. Given his continuing doubts about his writing, Mailer got a kick out of these outings with his peers. Styron said later that there seemed to be “a moratorium on envy” among writers at the time, and much camaraderie, “as if there were glory enough to go around for all the novelists trying to fit themselves into Apollonian niches alongside the earlier masters.” Envy may have been absent, but not competition. Knox described a contest Mailer had with Jones: “At the last bar one night, the match finally took place. They sat in a booth facing each other. Their forearms held the middle position for endless seconds.” The look on Jones’s face “was concentrated determination. He was not going to be put down. He wasn’t. He slowly pushed Norman’s arm up until they reached the middle position again and it was over: a tie. They unclasped at the same time without a word being said.”
One night walking in the Village, Knox recalled, Styron put his arms around the shoulders of his two novelist friends, “joyously announcing, ‘Here we are, the three best young writers in America!’ Neither Norman nor Jim objected, but let it be noted that they did appear both pleased and embarrassed.” “Moving about at night with Jim,” Styron said of the writer who would become one of his closest friends, “was like keeping company with a Roman emperor.” When the partying wound down, the group would settle into a corner of the bar with their drinks and talk about writers and books, often until the sun came up.
HE WROTE TO Bea, with whom he still had warm relations, about his slow progress. “I seem unable to recapture the kind of simple humanity I had in the best parts of Naked,” he said, and characterized his new style as “a kind of lush gargoyle.” The root problem, he continued, was that for most of the previous year, “I was convinced that I was through as a writer,” which, in turn, made him reflect on the pain Bea had felt at the time of their breakup when she didn’t know what to do with her life. Now she was in medical school and committed to a career while he was “irritable, gloomy and feeling quite hopeless in my distaste for myself.” He was, however, able to keep the same schedule he had kept for Naked: four days a week, seven hours a day.
In early July,
he had his appendix removed. He told Bea that he was “seriously fagged” by the operation, and needed time in Provincetown to recuperate. “I need this vacation physically, emotionally, spiritually, and what have you,” he said. He and Bea had promised to state frankly in their correspondence any gripes they had, and he ended his sour letter by laying into Bea for telling Fan that “Danny Wolf is a procurer,” which was, apparently, her interpretation of Wolf’s role in introducing Adele to him. Bea’s comment was turning Fan against Adele about whom she already had a low estimate. “I felt very antagonistic to Adele” Fan wrote in 1971. “To me she was an interloper, a plain ignorant girl ready to satisfy Norman’s physical needs. How could she ever measure up to my son, a Harvard graduate, a famous author.” Mailer’s love of his mother was unshakable; he revered her always but ignored her judgments about his male friends and female companions. Fan called the former “bums” and “spongers”; for the women she had harsher language. Adele “was just a plain common sucker,” and his relationship with her, she said, was the first big mistake of her son’s life.
After his vacation, he learned that his three war stories had been accepted: “The Paper House” by New World Writing and “The Language of Men” by Esquire, the magazine that Mailer would write more words for than any other over the next half century. The third story, “The Dead Gook,” after being rejected by The New Yorker, was taken by a new periodical, Discovery. Its coeditors, Vance Bourjaily and John Aldridge, sent out a statement of the periodical’s goals that tweaked the nose of Time-Life publications by saying that the editors would reject the sort of material that appeared in large-circulation magazines, writing that was “inoffensively general, meeting the romantic needs of the pablum set at both ends of the human life span.” The inaugural issue of Discovery was printed as a three-hundred-page paperback, and distributed by Pocket Books. Styron had the longest piece in the collection, a novella titled The Long March, an account of the killing of eight Marine recruits by misdirected mortar fire during basic training at Camp Lejeune. Mailer admired the story extravagantly and wrote to Styron to tell him so: “I’ve been meaning to write ever since I read Long March about a month ago. I think it’s just terrific, how good I’m almost embarrassed to say, but as a modest estimate it’s certainly as good an eighty pages as any American has written since the war, and really I think it’s much better than that.” Styron wrote back a warm letter thanking him and said that he had been influenced by The Naked and the Dead, although not revealing where or how. The friendship of the Brooklyn Jew and the Tidewater WASP took a leap after this exchange and would grow even stronger until it blew up in another exchange of letters exactly five years later.
Lillian Ross had continued to encourage Mailer, and he wrote her with praise for her controversial “Portrait of Hemingway,” which The New Yorker had published two years earlier. He knew she would be aware of Life magazine’s recent publication of Hemingway’s short novel The Old Man and the Sea. He liked Hemingway’s idea of the old Cuban fisherman’s Homeric struggle to land a huge fish, “but I just can’t bear his prose,” which he said was ripe with “affectation.” But what really bothered him was that Hemingway was always implying the following: “I am a great man who happens incidentally to be a great writer. I know that all of you will be interested in my noble, strong, and beautiful attempts to exercise myself as a great man, and will be happy when I succeed except for professors, other writers, and assorted cocksuckers.” This was the first time he had put his feelings about the elder writer into words since his Harvard parodies. The earlier work, especially the short stories, A Farewell to Arms, and Death in the Afternoon, were close to sacred texts, but he had reservations about Hemingway’s later books and distaste for his enormous public presence.
By the late 1950s he would reverse himself, however, and praise Hemingway for struggling to “make his personality enrich his works.” Looking back at the time when he was rewriting The Deer Park, Mailer realized that he was now “one of the few writers of my generation who was concerned with living in Hemingway’s discipline, by which I do not mean I was interested in trying for some second-rate imitation of his style, but rather that I shared with Papa the notion, arrived at slowly in my case, that even if one dulled one’s talent in the punishment of becoming a man, it was more important to be a man than to be a good writer.” A good deal of Mailer’s self-reflective writing from Advertisements for Myself to The Fight would explore the web of relations between personal valor and virtue and literary growth and mastery. In regard to Hemingway, he was inconsistent, lauding him here and socking him there.
In September, he and Adele moved from Pitt Street, but only a few blocks away, to 41 First Avenue, between 2nd and 3rd Streets. The rear windows of the apartment overlooked the New York Marble Cemetery, the oldest public cemetery in the city. The apartment was near Dan Wolf’s and next door to Adele’s—she had kept her place there even though she was spending most of her nights with Mailer. The First Avenue apartments were sixty feet long and eight to eleven feet wide, what were known as “railroad flats.” He and Adele knocked down some interior walls between the apartments, added bookshelves, and painted the walls white. Then he borrowed plumbing tools and with the help of Mickey Knox ran forty feet of gas pipe through three walls, hooked the pipe to a heater, and installed a hot water line and a bathtub. When Lillian Hellman came to a party there one night, climbing six flights to the apartment, he proudly showed off his handiwork. She told him that it was “more impressive than The Naked and the Dead,” a remark he never forgot. Having learned the skills of carpentry, wiring, and plumbing, he now believed he could make a living with his hands, if necessary. “I don’t think Norman was ever happier than he was in that cold-water flat,” Adele said. When he wasn’t improving the apartment, he was in his Fulton Street studio writing. He still saw The Deer Park as the first of eight connected novels, and he intended to start on the second one—devoted to the business world—before polishing the manuscript of the first, leapfrogging in this manner through all eight in the series. The “overall scheme is so grandiose,” he wrote to Graham Watson, his British agent, that it was possible he would “steal away from it in terror.” By October 1952, he passed the two-hundred-page mark in the manuscript.
He pushed on through November and at the end of the month turned in to Rinehart a manuscript of approximately three hundred pages. It carried a subtitle—“The Search for the Obscene”—crossed out on the title page. He accomplished this while entertaining Susan, who had been visiting for a month. The three-year-old enjoyed her time with her father and Adele and visits with both sets of grandparents. Mailer flew her home to Mexico on December 1—Adele remained in New York—and he enjoyed his first visit with Bea and Steve (as did they) for a week, and then stopping off for a weekend with the Gwaltneys in Little Rock. When he returned, he found out that the Rinehart editors had some large reservations about his manuscript. He pushed back, asking for another reading by an outsider. John Selby, his editor, accepted his recommendation of John Aldridge, who Mailer thought would naturally side with him. Aldridge agreed to do an objective report, despite his friendly relations with Mailer. He was writing as critic, not novel doctor.
The editors approved, Aldridge recalled, “So I wrote the report in that way, and then with great glee they went waving it in Mailer’s face.” The frank sexual scenes in the book—it was after all a novel about pleasure—didn’t bother Aldridge. He wrote that there was nothing in The Deer Park that would trouble “anyone above the level of 16-year-old daughters and 70-year-old grandmothers.” But the episodes of casual fornication in the novel did bother Rinehart’s top editors, and partly because of his mother, they bothered Stanley Rinehart even more. Mailer always believed that behind the scenes, Mary Roberts Rinehart had much to do with her son’s intense dislike of the novel. A seventy-six-year-old grandmother of six, and also a director of Rinehart, Inc., Mrs. Rinehart, it can be surmised, detested the idea of seeing her last name on the title
page of The Deer Park. Aldridge assumed that the crossed-out subtitle revealed the real theme of the book. “Mailer is careful never to deviate” from his search for the obscene, he wrote. “The result of his singlemindedness is that the experience he presents is precisely as dull, mechanical, monotonous, passionless and unobscene to the reader as it is to the characters.” Aldridge also said that Mailer had made a terrible mistake in sharing the manuscript with twenty friends and relatives. The fact that he sought such extensive feedback made Aldridge conclude that Mailer “felt an uncertainty and insecurity.” These criticisms angered Mailer.
He wrote back to Aldridge that “The Search for the Obscene” was meant to refer to all eight interlocking novels, not merely the first one, which was about the disasters and corruption that flow from a search for mere pleasure. Thus, the strikeover of the words. “You have hardly acted toward me like a friend,” he said. In fact, you act “like a sort of literary General MacArthur [Aldridge had a similar profile] delivering harsh pronunciamentos from your high and lonely peak, deriving your pleasure I suspect from the bitter notion that you have been true to yourself, and hang the consequences. The worst of it is that like the good General it gives you such pleasure.” Mailer argued vociferously, and defensively, that it was a writer’s sole prerogative to show or not show early work in progress. It was none of the critic’s business and “Jehovah” Aldridge was unfair to object. But he didn’t forget what Aldridge had said, and by the late 1950s had come around to the idea that it was a mistake to let anyone see his manuscripts at an early stage. When work jelled—polished first draft—he would share it with his family, editors, agents, and secretaries, most notably Judith McNally, who worked for him for almost three decades. In later years, he shared his manuscripts with some of his older children and friends, most notably Jean Malaquais; Mickey Knox; scholar-critic Bob Lucid; his lawyer, Ivan Fisher; writer and filmmaker Richard Stratton; and Walter Anderson, editor of Parade. His last wife, Norris, saw all of his first drafts from the time they met in 1975 until his death. His sister is the only person who read every one of his major books before publication.
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