Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  For the next eight months, he regularly predicted that he was close to finishing the novel, only to find that there was more to be done. A rewrite of one section created problems elsewhere; change begat change and the manuscript began to resemble Penelope’s shroud: finished here, unraveled there, always in progress, never completed. When Howe asked him for a contribution to Dissent, he replied that he was no socialist scholar and had time only for The Deer Park. “I’m sick of writing it, I want to be quit of the thing,” he told him. Writing to Styron, he reported that New World Writing had put out a new issue that contained a piece by Gore Vidal written under the pseudonym “Libra.” Titled “Ladders to Heaven: Novelists and Critics,” the essay names and praises the greatest living U.S. writers: Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, and Carson McCullers. “We don’t even get mentioned,” he told Styron. “Another small delicious victory for the fag axis,” Mailer concluded, “but I boiled that they get away with it by pseudonyms.” In reply, Styron called Vidal “that talentless, self-promoting, spineless slob.”

  Styron had met Vidal in 1951, but had little contact with him over the years. Mailer and Vidal intersected regularly, not only because they were East Coast novelists of the same generation, but also because they were gregarious, ambitious, ornery, and permanently critical of the imperialistic streak in American foreign policy. The two met at Millie Brower’s apartment on East 27th Street in 1952. In slightly different ways, they both recalled that at their first meeting Vidal was eager to know at what age Mailer’s grandparents had died. Mailer said around seventy. Vidal announced that his grandparents had died much older and, therefore, he told Mailer, “I’ve got you.” He went on, saying that the one who lived the longest would have the best purchase on literary fame. Brower remembered that Mailer told her that Vidal was “gornisht,” the Yiddish word for nothing. According to Vidal, years later Mailer told him that when they first met he thought Vidal was the devil. Mailer apparently remembered what he had said because in 1993, and again in 2002, Mailer directed and acted in George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell. Mailer was the Commodore in the first performance and Don Juan in the second. Vidal, wearing a wine-red vest, played the Devil and stole the show both times.

  As 1953 drew to a close his unfinished novel and his relationship with Adele were on Mailer’s mind. He was telling everyone that the novel was done, but that he needed to redo “fifty pages in the middle (the central chapters on Eitel and Elena) which are fairly tepid and too expository.” He knew that delineating their intense, guilt-ridden relationship from the inside was imperative, even if he had to temporarily resort to omniscience and marginalize Sergius as a narrator. He called this work the “half third draft” and thought it would take him the first three or four months of 1954 to complete. Susan was living with his mother now, and he and Adele saw her every day. Susan and Adele got along well and this temporarily reconciled Fan to Adele. Mailer expected that he and Adele would probably marry in a few months. He went on about the marriage situation in a letter to Charlie Devlin, saying he was definitely getting domesticated. Although he was ready to tie the knot, he had reservations. “I go off dreaming of all the women I will never enter,” he said, “all the adventures I will never have, all the . . . ah, we were meant to end by cutting the family turkey.” Adele, he adds, is leery about getting married after pressuring him earlier. “She knows that the guilt which holds me so faithful will change to the gallant bucko the moment we’re legally stitched.” It is a prescient statement, for henceforth Mailer would swing irregularly between sexual adventuring and family responsibilities, the gallant bucko alternating with the family man carving the bird at Thanksgiving.

  Mailer got involved that fall in a literary group that Vance Bourjaily established. It met on Sunday afternoons at the White Horse Tavern on the corner of Hudson and West 11th Streets in the West Village. According to Dan Wolf, “Norman found that if you invited people to your house, it was not that easy to get rid of them,” a problem avoided by going to the White Horse, which was a quiet neighborhood bar frequented by local Irish. Aldridge, who was coediting Discovery with Bourjaily, attended some of the meetings, as did Herman Wouk, whose novel of the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific, The Caine Mutiny, along with Jones’s Eternity, was one of the leading bestsellers of 1951. Calder Willingham, whose southern accent Mailer would sometimes imitate, came, as did Styron. Dan Wolf attended, and Lewis Allen, a film producer whom Mailer later saw a lot of in Mexico. Bourjaily brought his wife, Tina, but Mailer—who generally presided—always came alone.

  Louis Auchincloss, a Wall Street lawyer who published a string of bestselling novels about the legal world in the 1960s, as well as the archetypal prep school novel The Rector of Justin, came to several of the gatherings, although he said he felt somewhat uncomfortable at first because of his Wall Street and Republican affiliations. Mailer welcomed him, however, and then told him that he admired a story, “The Gem-like Flame,” that Auchincloss had recently published, saying he would have been happy to have written the story. “I was so pleased,” Auchincloss said, “that I went right home. I wanted to leave one such assembly with a happy impression.” Part of Mailer’s welcoming attitude toward Auchincloss was his refusal to stereotype people; part of it was his curiosity about the wealthy. He said more than once that he agreed with F. Scott Fitzgerald that the rich are indeed different from the other classes. The White Horse group lasted through the early spring of 1955.

  EXCEPTING JONES, MAILER’S most important friendship during this period was with Robert Lindner, a psychoanalyst who had written a sharp critique of psychoanalytic practice, Prescription for Rebellion. After their initial exchange of letters, they got together in New York after Mailer returned from Mexico. Three months before Mailer died, he remembered his first meeting with Lindner, a tall, handsome man with a “rusty, soft moustache.” He was “a guy I could talk to. His head was fertile, full of ideas. I was full of ideas. We just yakked, which I needed.” They continued their correspondence and for a time talked almost every day on the telephone. Initially drawn together by their disgust with Senator McCarthy’s hunt for communists in government, and the dull fog of conformity rolling over the country, as well as mutual distaste for President Dwight Eisenhower, their relationship deepened when they recognized each other’s ambition and how they might help each other. Both recognized Freud’s genius but chafed under the yoke of repression, renunciation, and compromise that he believed made civilization possible. Lindner was an establishmentarian and worked from within; Mailer was a rebel with a cause: the spontaneous expression of feelings, including the violent and the sexual. Kindred spirits, they were joined by their belief that people could transform themselves, become bolder and more creative, and that society itself could be renovated. Both were tremendously ambitious and competitive, but their spheres of interest were adjacent, only partially overlapping, and thus neither had to worry about being outshined.

  Mailer had read Lindner’s Prescription for Rebellion. Lindner was convinced that most of Freud’s theories were sound, but he parted company with his peers on the merits of getting along by conforming. It has “become axiomatic with our culture and in our society that adjustment is the highest good and the absolute right,” he said. “A way has to be found to unbind the Prometheus within each one of us, to unloose the rebelliousness of our natures, and to give full sway to that instinct upon which our survival as free individuals depends.” Lindner made this same point a variety of ways in several other books: Rebel Without a Cause; Fifty-Minute Hour; Must You Conform? The gist of his argument is simple: “The alternative to adjustment is rebellion.” Although Mailer was eight years younger than Lindner, his relationship with him was nothing like the one he had with Malaquais, whose views were secure and settled. Mailer and Lindner were both more open to new ideas.

  Mailer had also been reading the work of Wilhelm Reich and was much taken with his ideas about the pernicious effects of repression on sexual potency. The following passage, ta
ken from Charles Rycroft’s brief study of Reich, is apposite, if not identical with Mailer’s ideas. Reich was “surely right,” Rycroft states, “in asserting that no neurotics are orgastically potent and that the great majority of human beings suffer from a character neurosis. His theories of character armor and orgasm constitute, therefore, a sweeping indictment of the sexual life of civilized man, an indictment similar in many ways to that made by D. H. Lawrence.” Mailer’s infatuation with Reich would grow throughout the 1950s, and he would later build his own version of Reich’s infamous “orgone box,” a telephone-booth-sized chamber where one repaired to replenish or accumulate orgonic, or life energy, but also rumored to promote erections. At this point, Reich was only one of several theorists that interested Mailer.

  His friendship with Lindner grew to the point where they discussed their own sexuality. Lindner, like Mailer, had had extramarital affairs and was sympathetic to Mailer’s mixed feelings about Adele, which Mailer described many years later.

  He thought she was very sexy. He understood that entirely. He also thought she was kind of—how to put it—that spiritually speaking she was a very expensive wife for me. Not because she cost me money, but because—he understood my social ambitions, which were high. I wanted to be feted as the number one writer in America, and there were new sprouts coming up all over the place. The torch was being handed over in other places and that had me irritated. And Adele was no help socially to me. In fact, she was a drawback. She knew it and I knew it and there was a tension between us.

  He confided his most private feelings to Lindner and although he believed that undergoing psychoanalysis would harm his work, he asked Lindner if he would take him on. Lindner said it would ruin their friendship. That was the end of it. Mailer later said that one of the things he was most proud of in his life was that he had never gone into analysis. Nevertheless, he still talked to Lindner about his problems. “One of them,” Mailer said, “was a buried fear that under everything I’m a homosexual. That was always a fear. He would just say, ‘Look, on the basis of my experience, you’re not. What you’re suffering is latent homosexual anxiety, which is common to all of us.’ And so forth and so forth. Occasionally, I had an episode when I couldn’t get it up and that bothered me.” Lindner listened and told him to shrug it off.

  Another matter he brought up with Lindner was his friend “Bernard” (his pseudonym for Barney), a compulsive gambler. Lindner responded by sending his article “The Psychodynamics of Gambling.” It argues that gamblers are compelled to both win and lose, suffering either way. Mailer told Lindner that he was struck by how well it explained his father’s addiction. “While I read your monograph a fund of rare compassion for him began to form in me—I understood how terribly compulsively neurotic Bernard is, how helpless he is, and I felt more tender toward him.” Recalling Barney’s 1949 English colonel letter, he went on to recount how “Bernard” had asked to borrow $3,000 and how after Mailer had chastised him, “Bernard succeeded in punishing me by running the debt up to five thousand dollars” and then wrote him a highly abusive letter, the only one of its kind he had ever received from his “friend.”

  Chipping away at the novel four days a week, Mailer also found time to demonstrate bullfighting in his loft. Writing to Lew Allen in Mexico, he announced that he had become a “renowned toreros de salon” with sufficient dexterity “to pass a young lady carrying the horns without sweeping a single highball glass from the coffee table which serves as barrera.” He also began experimenting, quite seriously, with the Tarot deck, and came up with his own interpretations. He wrote them out, giving plus and minus characteristics for each of the twenty-one trump cards or “Major Arcana” (the oppositions intrigued him), and noting that the meanings were dynamic and “always dependent upon the constellation of the cards.” He revamped the rules slightly—as he was wont to do with all the games he played.

  Jonathan Cape, whose firm of the same name had published Barbary Shore, wrote to Mailer in January 1954 for a progress report on The Deer Park. Mailer replied that he was only four or five weeks away from finishing the new draft, but didn’t want to rush the conclusion. He had done that on his first two novels, he said, and now regretted it. He also said that no one had seen the new draft. That changed on the weekend of January 16–17, when Mailer took the train to see Lindner in Baltimore. Adele did not join him; there was friction between her and Lindner’s wife, Johnnie. Mailer described Johnnie as “a sort of pepper pot blonde, pepper pot fire. WASP, very strong in a breakable way, in other words vulnerable, vulnerable as hell. She was in the best sense of the word, a dame. She was full of strong feelings, full of love, full of lust, full of fire, full of the inability to pardon.” Mailer brought the manuscript along and Lindner read it, as did Johnnie. They both gave him warm feedback. Lindner was intrigued with Marion Faye, whom he called the novel’s “evil principle,” a description that Mailer said was close to his own feelings about the pimp.

  Lindner was the staff psychologist at the local women’s prison and had a collateral interest in criminology. He and Mailer discussed the gamut of mental illnesses, especially schizophrenia and the range of behaviors linked with criminal psychopaths. Lindner was the adept and Mailer the catechumen, questioning, parsing his answers, and challenging Lindner, who for Mailer was to psychology what Malaquais had been to politics. But Mailer was more willing to challenge Lindner—he had after all studied abnormal psychology at Harvard under the redoubtable Professor Murray, read Freud, Reich, and two figures in the early psychoanalytic movement, Karen Horney, and Theodore Reik, and spent most of his adult life observing and writing about human personality, its structure and fault lines, how it cohered, developed, and disintegrated. Creating memorable characters was the raison d’être of his writing life. With Marion Faye, he had opened up a new line of inquiry. He had begun reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which helped him decide that the psychopath and the saint were more alike than different. Dostoyevsky had charted the path from sinner to saint, and Marion Faye, after plumbing the depths of sadomasochism, could become as selfless as Catholic social reformer Dorothy Day. Sin was not an end, but a beginning, a cathartic experience. This emerging belief was sharpened when he accompanied Lindner to the prison during his visit to Baltimore.

  He sat in on Lindner’s brief interviews with fifteen inmates and took notes. “The experience was just fantastic,” he said. “I left there boiling with rage at the injustice of a sort I haven’t felt since I was eighteen,” referring to his experience at Boston State Hospital. Observing the women inmates, Mailer said, was one of the great discoveries of his life during this period. They were, he said in an interview in his final year, “not only much like you and me, but in a certain sense had a little touch of intensity that was more than you and me, because they’d been through the prison experience.” He asked one woman what she was in for, and she said she almost killed her husband with a knife, and went on to tell him about it. Her statements, he said, gave him a profound sense of

  how deep, how deep were the roots of what was commonly called crime. And how human they were, and how natural. And for people who were not living as I was, gussied by all sorts of protection, ah, crime was very easy, it was instinctive; it was something you did, it was one of the arrows in your quiver; it was one of your answers to your environment; it was a way of continuing to live. And so very early in life, my thinking life was shaped by the notion that no crime is ever too bad not to be explored, that no judgment is to be made on a criminal for too little. And that stayed with me always, and it was invaluable, absolutely invaluable.

  The whole idea of prison, he concluded, was “absolute idiocy.” His visit and subsequent conversations with Lindner reawakened the idea of getting a nonliterary job after The Deer Park was published, a job in a prison. He thought he would like to write a book on convicts and prison life.

  Adele accompanied him to see the Lindners only every third time because of her lack of ease in social situatio
ns, Mailer said.

  Adele could never have entertained the people, at that point—later Adele could—that Johnnie had over for dinner. So Adele stood out like a sore thumb. You know, “There’s Mailer with his slum kid,” was almost the attitude. But Adele wasn’t from the slums; she was from the lower middle class, working class, but she was seen that way. It was awkward. You know, “You’ve brought the wrong person into the room,” sort of. And she was very aware of that and Adele’s worst fault was that when things got bad, she got worse. She did not respond to crises; she fell apart. And so if somebody handed her a drink and she received it with the wrong hand or something—I’m making this up—it would be something of that sort, whatever the code was, she’d broken it. Sure enough, she’d drop the glass a minute later.

  Lindner and his wife had two young children and for this reason rarely came to visit the Mailers in New York. They did, however, attend the Mailers’ wedding reception a week after the April 19 ceremony at City Hall.