Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  While he was mulling over what revisions he would make, he learned that his father had been contacted by the Civil Service Commission and told that there was a “reasonable doubt” about his, Barney’s, loyalty to the country. This allegation was made because his father, an accountant at the War Department, was said to have a “continuing close association” with a person who was a “concealed Communist, that is, his son.” This allegation occurred at the height of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign to expose and punish secret communists and fellow travelers. Cy Rembar was brought in, and with his counsel Mailer drafted an affidavit in response. It began by addressing the question of whether the son had influenced the father.

  My father is a man of conservative stable temperament, and though we have many of the relations proper to a father and a son, I think I may say with assurance that he has never had any political influence on me nor I upon him, nor for that matter have I ever made any attempt to influence him. He is not in the habit of ever speaking about the details of his work, nor have I ever had any interest in asking him about his work. Our political ideas are in great disagreement, and I should like to submit to the members of the Loyalty Board the notion that disagreement between fathers and sons is a human phenomenon which has been long remarked.

  The second allegation, that he was a “concealed Communist,” Mailer dealt with by pointing out that for years the communists “have been calling me a Trotskyist; the Trotskyists call me a ‘so-called splinter Socialist’; the splinter socialists call me an anarchist; the anarchists call me a capitalist,” and now the Loyalty Board has brought it full circle by calling me a “concealed Communist.” In actuality, he continued, he was “admittedly and openly a dissident from the conventional and generally accepted attitudes about America and its position in the world today” and “had influenced exactly no one.” He ended with a dramatic fragment, the Mailer family at dinner arguing:

  THE TIME: (one of those rare times when politics is discussed.)

  NORMAN MAILER: I think the whole thing in Korea is hopeless. It’s a pilot-light war. Ignorant Americans and ignorant Orientals are just butchering each other.

  I. B. MAILER: I don’t know where an intelligent boy like you picks up such idiotic rubbish.

  FAN MAILER (the mother): Don’t call him an idiot.

  NORMAN MAILER: Well, he’s not so smart himself.

  I. B. MAILER: I never talked to my father the way you talk to me.

  The charge was dropped without a hearing and Barney continued his position with the War Department.

  A few weeks later on his thirtieth birthday, January 31, 1953, Mailer was in a black mood. He and Adele had just returned from two weeks of skiing in Canada. He was unsure how to respond to the calls for revision from Rinehart. He had written his General MacArthur letter to Aldridge before the trip, but had many afterthoughts during the vacation. Bernard DeVoto’s evaluation of Naked and the Dead had convinced him to fill out the characterizations of General Cummings and Lieutenant Hearn, and now Aldridge’s critique was making him reconsider the lineaments of Eitel, the novel’s protagonist. In a flurry of letters to friends and family over the next few months, he laid out the problems: Eitel verged on being a flat character; his narrator was somewhat unfocused; the story was too tightly focused on sex. The eight-novel scheme, he concluded, would have to be scrapped because he wished to add material planned for the later novels in the first one, material about business, corruption, the media, and the blacklisting and red-baiting rife in Hollywood. To accomplish this, he would have to write a new draft, not just improve the old one. That, he told Bea, was something that required “precisely the courage I could never get up on Barbary.” The Deer Park would have to be redone from “top to bottom, made much bigger, much rounder, more story.” He also felt an inner pressure to introduce “some sort of evil genius,” as he later put it, who could challenge Eitel, and bring him into greater relief.

  The idea for such a character came to him when he read the reports of the Manhattan trial of twenty-two-year-old Minot “Mickey” Jelke, a high-society procurer, which dominated the New York media during the first half of the year. Jelke was the son of John Faris Jelke, whose family had become enormously wealthy selling Good Luck Dutch Girl Oleomargarine. Short of ready money until he inherited a fortune on his twenty-fifth birthday, the younger Jelke turned to pandering and was tried as a “common pimp.” What intrigued Mailer was that Jelke took up his line of work not merely for the income and the pretty girls, but because he liked the excitement. He was tried twice. The first conviction was thrown out because the judge had cleared the court at the start of the proceedings, saying it would be “steeped in filth.” A higher court ordered a new trial after virtually every newspaper in New York City joined in a brief protesting the abridgement of the defendant’s constitutional right to an open trial.

  Like everyone else, Mailer was eager to get a glimpse of the café society pimp, as the press called him. He could not attend the first trial, because the courtroom was sealed. Two years later, Jelke was convicted at a new trial and served twenty-one months in Sing Sing. Mailer kept a clip file on the story, and Jelke became the rough model for the philosopher pimp Marion Faye, the “evil genius” of The Deer Park. Faye, however, would prove to be much more complex. He makes his living the same way Jelke did, but he also detests sham, false piety, and knee-jerk patriotism. Before he plunges into near-terminal sadomasochism, Faye’s chief purpose in the novel is to serve as Eitel’s conscience, shaming him into not naming names when he is called before a House of Representatives red-hunting committee. He tells Eitel that giving the names of former or current communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee would only grant him the license to make more trashy sentimental movies. Like most of the dark characters in Mailer’s fiction, there is an enclave of virtue in his evil, and future redemption is possible.

  Finding his “evil genius” was an important advance, but he had a more fundamental problem: should Sergius O’Shaugnessy, a former air force pilot in Korea, be a first-person narrator, similar in many ways to Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, or should he be depicted by an omniscient, anonymous narrator, such as he used in Naked and the Dead? All through April, as he explained to Styron, “I’ve been rushing virtually on alternate days from third person and back again, disgusted in first person by the artificial barriers I set up on a book which shouldn’t have them.” With Sergius telling the story, there was no way to detail the complex affair between Eitel and Elena Esposito, the fiery flamenco dancer modeled on Adele. Eitel is a “boudoir Pygmalion” and his fascinating affair with her is at the heart of the novel. Yet when Mailer switched to the third person to gain access to their thoughts and their bedroom, another problem arose: “I find that when I write in the third person,” he told Styron, “I’m so bound, so constipated, that I can’t seem to enter people’s heads—I write as if the damn thing were a play, scene, dialogue, entrance, exit.”

  Hobbled by both perspectives, he told Styron that the third person had the additional misery of possibly revealing what he feared might be a “fundamental poverty of imagination.” The impasse persisted until the summer, when he returned to the first person draft that Rinehart and Aldridge so disliked. For the length of his career, Mailer would be hypersensitive to the challenges and opportunities of point of view. In 1963 he said, “The most powerful leverage in fiction comes from point of view.” He wrestled with how to employ this leverage for over a decade before finding a way, in The Armies of the Night, to escape from the subjective-objective dilemma, to gain the advantages of first-person immediacy without relinquishing the detachment, the aesthetic distance, provided by the third. But in the spring and early summer of 1953, he was nearly paralyzed by the problem. He wrote the first chapter of The Deer Park over and over and over.

  A SUMMER TRIP to Mexico to see Susan had been planned for some time; the break from writing would be a boon. He and Adele made the long drive in a new Studebaker convertible, sto
pping in Marshall, Illinois, where James Jones lived. Jones and his mentor and lover, Lowney Handy, ran a writers colony in the small town not far from the Indiana border. She and her husband, Harry, had supported Jones while he wrote From Here to Eternity, and he had repaid them by putting the lion’s share of his earnings into the colony. The colonists lived in small cabins and earned their keep by doing manual labor under the supervision of Lowney, who was a tough taskmaster. Everyone had to copy, word for word, passages from Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and other writers in the morning before turning to their own work, a pump-priming technique that Mailer thought might have some benefits. Jones had invited him to see the colony, meet the Handys, and talk shop. Jones was now embarked on writing a novel about a returning GI and a postwar society moving into commercial overdrive. It was titled Some Came Running, and when it appeared in 1958, it was, at 1,266 pages, perhaps the longest novel by a major U.S. novelist ever published.

  The film version of From Here to Eternity, starring Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, and Donna Reed, was due to be released in the fall. Jones had been paid $85,000 for the rights to his novel by MGM, and had learned just before Mailer’s visit that he would receive $100,000 from New American Library for the paperback rights, a larger sum than Mailer had received from the same publisher for Naked. Mailer was slightly in awe of all this, as he wrote to Styron.

  Lowney Handy and Jones are people whom one can satirize so easily, and yet one’s missed it all, for both of them are such extraordinarily passionate people, that their errors as well as their successes have a kind of grotesque to them. Lowney Handy burns—I kept thinking of fanatics like John Brown when I looked into her eyes. Jones like all of us is having his troubles with the second book, but everything that happens to Jonesie [is] on so big a scale that his troubles are flamboyant next to ours, and involve money, movie scripts, gymnastics, obscenities, raw insecurity, triumphant phallicism, and wham, wham, wham, it’s all explosion. With it all, I like him tremendously. I suppose I have a kind of friendship with him that I had when I was a kid with other kids on the block. He’s really worth knowing. I’ve never come across anyone so intelligent and stupid, so penetrating and insensitive all in one.

  The young, unpublished writers at the colony were also dazzled by Jones, who lived in a silver Airstream trailer. He did flips on a trampoline, boxed, and drank martinis at lunch to loosen up. When Mailer arrived and then was joined by Montgomery Clift, the colonists were agog. John Bowers, in his wry memoir, The Colony, described his reactions when he witnessed the arrival of Mailer and, at his elbow, “the beautiful, raven-haired woman introduced as Adele.” When no one was looking, Bowers returned to the Studebaker and took a quick look.

  There was still an indentation in the front seat. By God and Christ, his ass had sat on that veritable spot. The steering wheel showed palm prints, and I pictured the dark-haired man on the book jacket tooling along with an intelligent, Harvard-grad countenance. I couldn’t imagine him stopping along the highway for an Eskimo pie; and when he got gas somewhere, it must have been in such a holy manner that the attendants were left faint. At the ramada entrance I caught a glimpse of dark curls, a sharp boyish profile, and someone with hands confidently on hips like a general. He was talking to Jones—not listening, talking.

  Adele and Jones, who had met in New York, had uneasy relations; Adele sensed that they were competing for Mailer’s attention. Lowney and Jones were polite enough, but she felt ignored. It was hot and she remembered walking around in “as little as possible, a tiny bra and a pair of brief shorts. I don’t think Lowney was too pleased by my seminakedness tempting her monks.” Mailer and Jones got drunk every night and then arm-wrestled and had push-up contests. Jones, in better shape than Mailer, won the latter. During the day, they spent long hours talking about writing and the pluses and minuses of celebrity.

  After three days, they left and drove to New Orleans, where they fell in with some local literary bohemians. One night at a party they both drank peyotl, made from peyote cactus buttons and used in religious ceremonies by southwestern Indians. Afterward, they went to hear Max Roach and Charlie Parker play at a jazz club. Adele got nauseated and vomited violently. She had a synesthesia experience and saw beautiful colors as “the music ripped into my open mouth, down my throat through my stomach to my groin pressing against the silken crotch of my panties, pressing against the fabric of my dress, and against the chair seat. I felt like the cat, I thought, who nibbled the cheese that was on the plate that lay on the table that was in the house that Norman built.” Mailer, who remembers getting very sick, had a vision of an Aztec sacrifice with Indians atop a pyramid holding ceremonial knives, followed by visions of hallucinogenic Disney cartoons. The drugs took a long while to wear off.

  They arrived in Mexico City in early July. Susan was happy to see them and Mailer wrote to Dan Wolf that “deep down, I feel that in ten years I’ll love her more than anyone or anything else. Except perhaps Adele. There were difficult moments on the trip,” he continued, times when “I could have murdered her for infantile relapses,” but “she’s in my flesh, and to be extravagant I’ve got my cross and my salvation—for she keeps me alive, dumb little Mo [Adele] with her amoeba heart that pushes like a tentacle into everything I say, and feel.” By the end of the month, they were settled in a place just outside Mexico City called the Turf Club, a former country club that wealthy Mexicans, he told Styron, used “as boffing huts for their mistresses.” Here he settled down for the next ten weeks to revise the novel.

  He worked steadily, with breaks to tour Cuernavaca, see some bullfights, and watch jai-alai matches. Jones’s successful sale of From Here to Eternity to Hollywood remained on his mind and he wrote Cy at the end of August that he wanted to restart the process of selling Naked and the Dead, even though he thought that advance publicity for The Deer Park might have put him on the blacklist. Cy was instructed to ask for $200,000, but be willing to accept $85,000, the amount paid for Eternity. Selling it for less, “what with the income tax and other deductions, plus Dad’s go-ahead to gamble a little more will mean that I’ll be very little richer a year or two from now.” If the novel was going to be “crapped up” by Hollywood, then a big paycheck and financial independence would be requisite compensation. “It’s the old business of if you’re going to be a whore, you ought to be the most expensive one in the land.” He also expressed concern about Stan Rinehart trying to get out of the contract for The Deer Park and the necessity of a lawsuit to get the $10,000 advance. His apprehensions were correct.

  As he was preparing to leave Mexico at the end of September, feeling somewhat relieved at having made some progress, he answered a letter from Vance Bourjaily in which he looked back at his career to date and gave what amounted to his novelistic credo at age thirty. He adhered to it, more or less, for the rest of his life.

  My experience with all three novels now has been one of starting with characters, finding things for them to do, and then sometimes after I’ve finished, as with Naked, or else at the 3/4 point as with Barbary and Deer Park, I discover what my damn theme is. And to hell with the theme in a way, for I always know even before I start something what the connected theme is between all the books, the thing which makes us write I suppose, and for me it’s probably never been anything more profound than, “Itch, you bastards, I hope I make you uncomfortable to the death.” In that sense, perhaps all I write is political (short stories excepted) and my themes are political.

  In his letter, Bourjaily had made the point that he wrote from a set of well-considered principles. Mailer countered with the primacy of experience.

  Maybe you’re right, probably you’re right—I’ve had the argument with Malaquais many times—but to me the fact remains that the more experience the better the chance to come up with something fortunate. I don’t even know quite how, but at its best experience can give you ideas for other things, so that maybe working as a stevedore for a year might help one
write a novel about priests. There’s something somewhere about the idea of proportion, and seeing everything in its place. Besides, one can go after experience consciously, determinedly, and in a funny way not disqualify oneself for writing about the material. . . . I think it can almost be put that one feels the need to say certain large things and takes for the purpose whatever world one is capable of throwing up at the moment, and the theme rides as a kind of bridge, an afterthought, between the two. Therefore, the better the world one can throw up at the moment, the better the book. I didn’t write Naked because I wanted to say war was horrible, or that history is complex, resistant, and almost inscrutable, or because I wanted to say that the coming battle between the naked fanatics and the dead mass was approaching, but because really what I wanted to say was, “Look at me, Norman Mailer, I’m alive, I’m a genius, I want people to know that; I’m a cripple, I want to hide that,” and so forth.

  While he felt some disquiet about what Stan Rinehart and his mother might say about the next draft of Deer Park, he knew that Ted Amussen, who had returned to Rinehart as vice president, was on his side. Mailer had charmed and cajoled Rinehart’s editors into approving his first two novels without making any major concessions, and felt fairly confident he could do it again, although he was certainly upping the ante with his description of his Hollywood producer, Herman Teppis, getting a blowjob. But the publishing world was now less prudish than in 1948; the walls had cracked with “fug” and were breached three years later when Jones used “fuck” repeatedly in Eternity. Trailblazing writers and wily editors could usually find ways to undercut the last bulwarks of Comstockery. Mailer was feeling something close to these sentiments when he returned to New York with Adele and Susan in mid-October. He was anxious to get back to work and the last day on the road, they arose at three A.M. and drove eight hundred miles. Susan remembers sitting in her little car seat in the front, peering at the stars, watching the sun come up, and then stopping for breakfast at a diner.