Working through a very hot summer in New York, he managed to meet the deadline. Then he drove up to Provincetown with Adele to unwind. There he slept, swam, and shed some of the drugs while waiting for further proofs. He also began reading Thomas Mann’s multilayered symbolic novel, The Magic Mountain, which, he said, “lowered The Deer Park down to modest size in my brain.” He finished final revisions and sent them off on August 15. A week later, back in New York, he took one more look and decided on one more change. With the addition of still another drug—mescaline—to his pharmacopeia, he rewrote the last page of the novel, the conclusion of O’Shaugnessy’s imagined conversation with God about the relationship of sex and time. The cryptic lines continue to puzzle readers: God tells him to “think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.” He wrote to Lindner about the mystical effects of using mescaline. “Truly Bob,” he said, “it was a little like entering paradise.” In “The Mind of an Outlaw,” Mailer says that the novel’s ending is the only good writing he had ever done while stoned, although it has bewildered readers for fifty years.
IN A PATTERN that he would follow for the rest of his life, Mailer wrote to almost no one during the final sprint. But as soon as the novel was finished, he sent out a stream of letters to family and friends. Writing to Uncle Dave and Aunt Anne, he announced that the book would be published on October 14. He added that he and Adele had purchased two standard poodles, Tibo (who “looks like the black sheep”) and Zsa Zsa (who would be the mother of their thirty-four pups). He became inordinately fond of Tibo’s intelligence and verve. He once said that the variety of intelligent sounds made by Tibo convinced him that the dog was close to speaking. He included one more piece of information: he was a silent partner in a new weekly newspaper in Greenwich Village, The Village Voice. Ed Fancher was to be the publisher and Dan Wolf the editor.
It became clear by the end of August that Laughton had lost interest in the film version of Naked and the Dead, and Paul Gregory would now be the lead producer. Mailer suspected that the script was already written. With time on his hands, and feeling somewhat rested, he began dropping in at the Voice’s offices on Greenwich Avenue. Because of the sale of Naked, he was comparatively wealthy at the time. According to the 1955 financial statement prepared by Barney (the Voice’s first accountant), Mailer’s net worth at the end of 1955 was $108,270, most of it invested in stocks and bonds. He had put $5,000 into the paper for a 30 percent share. Wolf and Fancher also had 30 percent shares; the remaining 10 percent was owned by Cy Rembar, who drew up the corporation papers. Mailer took credit for inventing the name, although others remembered that he had selected it from a list of proposed titles.
His focus in the early fall of that year was not The Village Voice, however. Advancing the fortunes of The Deer Park was his first priority. Around the beginning of September he began sending out inscribed copies in the hope of reaping some responses that could be used, if not for the jacket, then for advertisements. He mailed off copies to Philip Rahv and Alberto Moravia, whom he knew fairly well, and to Graham Greene, Cyril Connolly, and Ernest Hemingway, whom he didn’t know at all. Brando got a copy and a note saying Mailer had learned from his work and thought Brando could learn from the novel. Others went to friends: Malaquais, Jones, and Styron, Dan and Rhoda (née Lazare) Wolf and Fancher, Howe, Hellman, Lillian Ross, Harvey Breit, Dwight Macdonald, Vance Bourjaily, and perhaps Vidal. He asked Mickey Knox, pointedly, to give his best wishes to Vidal in Hollywood.
He pinned his highest hopes on Hemingway, as he later wrote: “I could not keep myself from thinking that twenty good words from Ernest Hemingway would make the difference between half-success and a breakthrough. He would like the book, he would have to—it would be impossible for him not to see how much there was in it.” But Mailer was angry at himself for begging, “for stealing a trick from the Hollywood I knew so well,” and undercut himself with the inscription on the copy he mailed to Hemingway in Cuba. In Advertisements for Myself, he gives the disastrously qualified inscription.
To Ernest Hemingway
—because finally after all these years I am deeply curious to know what you think of this.
—but if you do not answer, or if you answer with the kind of crap you use to answer unprofessional writers, sycophants, brownnosers, etc., then fuck you, and I will never attempt to communicate with you again.
—and since I suspect that you’re even more vain than I am, I might as well warn you that there is a reference to you on page 353 which you may or may not like.
Norman Mailer
The reference concerns a bullfighting novel that O’Shaugnessy, having left California and now teaching bullfighting in the Village, is trying to write. The novel wasn’t very good, he admits, because it “was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway.” The book came back ten days later, apparently unopened. He pondered the various possibilities: that it was a bad address; that all unsolicited books were returned; that Hemingway’s wife Mary interceded; that Hemingway read the novel but was uncertain what to say and punted; or that he had read the inscription and said to himself, “If you want to come on that hard, Buster, don’t write words like ‘deeply curious,’ ” mailed it back, in its original wrappings, “and started to drink fifteen minutes early that day.” Four years later, probably at the urging of George Plimpton, Hemingway sent a handwritten letter to Mailer, thanking him for sending the novel. He said he had later bought a copy and read it while laid up from an illness or injury and had liked it, even though it had “shitty reviews.” He went on to encourage Mailer and gave him this advice on reviews: “Try for Christ sake not to worry about it so much. All that is poison. Remember only suckers worry. You can’t write, fuck or fight if you worry. That doesn’t mean not to think. This [is] all that I can tell you that might be any use.” Hemingway’s encouragement would have been welcome in 1955; Mailer was indeed worried. His effort to gain encomia from established novelists and critics, and from Brando, “ended in fiasco,” he said.
The only one who answered him was Moravia, who said that it had Mailer’s “usual qualities of vitality, aggressiveness, sincerity and naive-ness,” but it was too long. O’Shaugnessy, he said, “has no function (I mean dramatic function) and therefore one feels that he is not necessary.” The novel, he says, would have been much improved if he had written the book in the third person and focused on the affair of Elena and Eitel. Mailer’s narrator—“a duplicate of yourself,” he correctly concludes—could be cut out entirely.
MAILER WAS NOT the first American writer to be interviewed on the occasion of a book’s publication. But few sought or embraced such publicity with his avidity. Over the course of his career, he was interviewed over seven hundred times, surely a record for a writer. In 1955, however, interviews with writers were far less common than in the years following the revamping, by the editors of The Paris Review, of the form into a well-edited collaboration, rather than a confrontation, or a search for authorial gaffes. For The Deer Park, he appears to have set up interviews with Martha MacGregor, the book editor of the New York Post, and with Lyle Stuart, editor of the muckraking monthly Exposé (later called The Independent). He struck back at Stan Rinehart in the MacGregor interview, telling the story of how he responded when the publisher said he didn’t feel he could put his name on The Deer Park. “I said, ‘Why Stanley, I’m deeply shocked. How dare you say something like that after publishing A House Is Not a Home,’ ” a reference to Polly Adler’s bestselling 1953 memoir about her career running Mafia-connected brothels in Manhattan and elsewhere. The Stuart interview, which Mailer gave “with a couple of drinks in me and a good drag or two of pot,” appeared in late November when The Deer Park had climbed to number six on the bestseller list, is his first major interview, and his first conscious attempt to shape his public image. He states that he believes in God, “but it is a very personal faith,” and he wants no connection with religious institutions; he defines hi
mself as a “Marxian anarchist, a contradiction in terms,” but one which gives breathing space to both extremes of his personality; he says he thinks “once in a while of becoming the president,” but says that “politics as politics interests me less today than politics as part of everything else.” He is also blunt about his ambition to be “a really great writer,” an artist whose role is “to be as disturbing, as adventurous, as penetrating as his energy and courage make possible,” a line which would be quoted many times over the decades. Mailer qualified, but never backed away from any of these aspirations, except running for president. He settled for mayor of New York.
By publication day, the novel was in its third printing. Mailer began sending advertising copy to Putnam’s, quoting from the MacGregor interview and the early reviews. He suggested the same technique used for Barbary Shore: alternating positive reviews with negative ones, raves with stink bombs. The New York Times’s Orville Prescott called it “a thoroughly nasty book,” but Malcolm Cowley, a friend of Hemingway’s and chronicler of the “Lost Generation,” said it was “the serious and reckless novel on the movie colony that we have been waiting for since Scott Fitzgerald failed to finish The Last Tycoon.” Several newspaper ads and bookstore flyers quoted this comment, and the novel went into its fourth and fifth printings. As expected, Time panned it, comparing it to the sleazy scandal magazine Confidential. Putnam’s spent $10,000 on advertising, a very high sum for the period. Overall, the reviews leaned toward the negative, especially outside the biggest cities.
The most important advertisement for the novel, however, was not paid out of this budget. Appearing in the fourth weekly issue of The Village Voice on November 16 was a half-page ad designed and paid for ($127.50) by Mailer. Under the headline: “All over America ‘THE DEER PARK’ is getting nothing but RAVES,” he arrayed fifteen negative blasts, all attributed. A sample: “The year’s worst snake pit in fiction,” “sordid and crummy,” “moronic mindlessness,” “nasty,” “unsavory,” “dull,” and in large letters at the bottom: “A BUNCH OF BUMS.” It was his way of announcing, he said, “that I no longer gave a dog’s drop for the wisdom, the reliability, and the authority of the public’s literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.” He thought the ad might sell some books, and it may have, as the novel remained in sixth place on the bestseller list through the end of November. In the end, however, he would have lost his bet with Alfred Knopf. When all the returns were in, the novel had sold just under fifty thousand copies, an estimable number, but an order of magnitude less than the number The Naked and the Dead eventually sold.
IN HIS MEMOIR New York in the Fifties, Dan Wakefield recalled the mood of the Village during that decade. “Our generation,” he said,
needed the Village and all it stood for as much as the artists, writers, and rebels of preceding generations—maybe even more. If the mood of the country was to force everyone to conform, to look and dress like the man in the gray flannel suit, surely it was all the more important to have at least one haven where people were not only allowed but expected to dress, speak, and behave differently from the herd. This was a time when a beard might be regarded as a sign of subversion.
When he saw that The Deer Park was not going to have extraordinary sales, Mailer began “to feel the empty winds of a post-partum gloom.” He was in no condition for the kind of monastic seclusion needed to write a thousand-page novel. His self-analysis was still under way and the ideas of his journal were still percolating. He wanted to vent, preach, and howl. “At heart,” he said, “I wanted a war.” The members of the generation described by Wakefield would be the recruits for his army. Mailer gave himself a new name: “General Marijuana,” and for the first time began referring to himself in the third person:
Drawing upon hash, lush, Harlem, Spanish wife, Marxist culture, three novels, victory, defeat, and draw, the General looked over his terrain and found it a fair one, the Village a seed-ground for the opinions of America, a crossroads between the small town and the mass-media. Since the General was nothing if not Hip (in the self-estimation of his brain) he was of course aware that the mind of the Village was a tight sphincter, ringed with snobbery, failure, hatred and spleen.
He made many suggestions about how the Voice should develop, but Fancher and Wolf rejected them. In a late interview, Mailer drew quick portraits of his partners. He had met Wolf first, through Malaquais, in 1948.
He was everybody’s guru. We’d all go to him with our problems, our thoughts and so forth. One of his best friends [Ed Fancher] was a psychoanalyst, and I had a hunch that the psychoanalyst even listened to Dan because he had a huge knowledge of psychoanalysis, and a huge sense of people and could have been a psychoanalyst, but hated the profession and considered himself in a funny way superior to it. . . . He was very private; he was very dissatisfied with his life. He wanted power; he had none. He was this quiet man with this wise sad smile, who was an absolute intensity of unsatisfied desires within. It had to do with prominence and prestige. He knew that he was brighter than anyone around and he wasn’t getting enough for it.
Fancher, whom Mailer met through Wolf, had one quality that was “extraordinary.”
He was like a lineman in football who could take fifty hits in a game and still be standing at the end of the game, still ready to tackle anybody who was trying to come through his hole. And so he had that kind of strength. Dan had the wiliness of a great quarterback who never wanted to be intercepted, never wanted to hand the ball off to anyone wrong, who never wanted to call a play that wasn’t going to work. Very cautious, but occasionally daring. So the two of them had skills that complemented one another.
Wolf and Fancher had much to learn about running a newspaper, although they recognized that for it to succeed they needed advertising, and to get that the paper had to appeal to several publics. For the old-time Irish and Italian residents of the Village, there had to be copy about church, social, and political organizations. For the younger crowd, stories were needed about the cultural scene—poetry readings, foreign films, jazz, and folk music. And there had to be some hard news. The headline of the lead story of the first issue on October 26 was “Village Trucker Sues Columbia”; there was little in the early issues to distinguish the Voice from its competitor, The Villager. In its first four months, the paper was quite bland. It was also hemorrhaging money, $1,000 a week. At the end of the year, Mailer loaned the paper $10,000.
Fancher and Wolf could hardly refuse Mailer when he proposed himself as a weekly columnist. They expected his column, “Quickly: A Column for Slow Readers,” to be “radical and abrasive,” Fancher said, and generate controversy. They had no inkling of how deliberately abusive it would be. Writing to Hollywood chum Chester Aaron shortly after starting the column, Mailer said that he should have lived in the previous century, “what with épater le bourgeois being the dominant passion of my life.” In his notes for Advertisements for Myself, written in 1958, he recalled his motives for the column: “I really had the notion that the Village was going to dig what I did—that the results would be apocalyptic—we would see that a hero had appeared in the breach, any one of us (myself of course), but that the swindle was finally to be made apparent.” The first column, accompanied by his photograph in the kind of lumberjack shirt that Kerouac would later wear in public, with tousled hair and a surly look, appeared on January 11, 1956.
He begins by stating baldly that the column will not be well written. To do so would require the expenditure of too much effort on a lost cause: trying to please the snobs and critics that abound in the Village, ambitious people whose lack of fulfillment only makes them “more venomous. Quite rightly. If I found myself in your position, I would not be charitable either. Nevertheless, given your general animus to those more talented than yourselves, the only way I see myself becoming one of the more cherished institutions of the Village is to be actively disliked each week.” The column, he notes, took him an “unprofitable fifty-two minutes” to write.
His maiden effort brought a handful of irritated letters, including a sarcastic one from Joe Jensen of Bank Street stating his hope that “Quickly” would keep Mailer from writing another novel. Mailer now recognized that his task was to divert the anger onto “more deserving subjects.” In the next column, he attacked the hypocrisy of the mass media. Much of the column was a redaction of reflections in “Lipton’s Journal” on these topics. He called himself a “dialectical idealist,” one who sought to improve society by attacking shibboleths like the abhorrence of obscenity. “For what are obscenities finally,” he asked, “but our poor debased gutturals for the magical parts of the human body.” The column might have gone down fairly smoothly, but he undercut it by adding a preface telling slow readers to skip the column and urging those who did read it to “have the courtesy to concentrate. The art of careful writing is beginning to disappear before the mental impotence of such lazy audiences as the present one.”
After this column, the number of angry and dismissive letters from readers increased. Jensen attacked Mailer for imitating Dos Passos in “your ONE & ONLY BOOK,” and comparing the column to “the very overworked, tired, boring, creaky, mimeographed Henry Miller.” The tone of the rest of the letters is captured in one from Phyllis Lind: “This guy Mailer. He’s a hostile, narcissistic pest. Lose him.” He’s the kind of character, she said, “who moves into a nice neighborhood and can’t stand the warmth and harmony, so he does all in his power to disrupt it.” Reading this, Mailer must have said, “Exactly!” It was, as he said later in Advertisements for Myself, “blitzkrieg.”
The column went on for seventeen weeks. Mailer tried everything. He parodied the major gossip columnists and turned the column over to a Village wag for a parody of “Quickly” titled “Burp: A Column for People Who Can Read by Normal Failure.” He celebrated three iconoclastic comedians—Steve Allen, George Gobel, and Ernie Kovacs—and debated the merits of psychoanalysis with a practitioner. About halfway through the run, Mailer began including letters from readers and his responses. When someone complained about his egotism, he replied: “Let others profit by my unseemly absorption, and so look to improve their own characters.” He ran a contest, offering $20 to anyone who could guess his candidate for president in the 1956 election (Hemingway, one reader did). In his next column, he elaborated on Hemingway’s credentials: physical courage, a good war record, and the charm of appearing to have had “a good time now and again.” He also replied at length to another nasty letter from Jensen, who had complained about his “congenital or rigged up ostentation.”
Norman Mailer Page 25
