They rented a car and drove to Munich to meet his German publisher. As they approached the German border, Adele told her husband that her heart was pounding. “Norman laughed, ‘Baby, mine is pounding harder. I’m a Jew, you aren’t.’ ” The men in Munich “made much of my dark good looks,” she said. “I would overhear words like ‘schoene mädchen’ in restaurants and elevators. Norman looked pleased.” They went from Munich to Buchenwald, which Mailer said he felt obliged to visit. They saw all the horrors. The small oven for children, Adele said, was “most graphic and heartbreaking.” He never recorded his immediate response to viewing the camp, but his memories of the visit, deeply lodged, surfaced when he wrote “The White Negro.” Back in Paris, Adele found she was pregnant. Mailer told her he knew what night the baby was conceived. They were very happy. Adele said that she “never learned to disentangle myself from his moods,” but the pregnancy necessarily changed her focus. She found that the odor of alcohol made her ill. The distaste would continue for her pregnancy and through the period that she nursed the baby. “How I wish it had stayed that way for the rest of my life,” she wrote, referring to her later alcoholism. They left a few weeks later, again on the United States. Mailer, sometimes unfeeling about the illnesses of others, was thoughtful and tended her as the morning sickness continued during the crossing.
He had promised Baldwin that he would do all he could to aid the reception of Giovanni’s Room, which he had read in manuscript. He sent a blurb for the novel to Baldwin’s publisher, and on August 16, before heading to Provincetown, he wrote a letter to Francis Brown, editor of The New York Times Book Review, offering to review the novel. Brown politely turned him down. Mailer mailed a carbon of his letter to Brown to Baldwin with a note asking him to let them know when he would be back in New York, and Baldwin wrote a warm note from Corsica thanking Mailer for the “very sweet thing” he’d done. His personal life, he said, “has gone all to pieces. But I imagine I’ll recover this winter, if I work hard.” They did not see each other for six months, but then their paths crossed often in New York.
Recalling his first meeting, Baldwin said he was “aware of a new and warm presence in my life.” Campbell believes that he saw Mailer as “a partner, an equal, and therefore a lover,” and this seems quite possible. Baldwin’s preference for sexual relationships with bisexual and straight males was well known. He would not be the only gay man who was attracted to Mailer. Their relationship was complex. Campbell summed it up.
What did exist, on both sides and in plentiful supply, was petulance, ego, vanity, impatience with the other’s direction and aspirations. There was a considerable amount of mutual respect, but also a feeling on Mailer’s side that Baldwin had wasted his substance in Europe, and on Baldwin’s that Mailer’s much-vaunted theories about Negroes’ superior sexuality and elegance amounted to nothing more than a portrait of the noble savage re-drawn. They mirrored, after all, the kind of stereotypes he had been fighting for years. “Next thing you’ll be telling me is that all coloured folks have rhythm!” was one of his favorite rebuffs, borrowed from Richard Wright.
IN SEPTEMBER THE Mailers visited their friends from Mexico Lew and Jay Allen in rural Connecticut, where they had recently moved. They liked the area—rolling hills, horse farms, rambling colonial houses, and lots of green. With a new baby on the way, the 55th Street apartment seemed small and they decided to move to the country. The presence of the Styrons and John Aldridge and his wife, Leslie, was another factor. The Mailers bought a large house and barn on fifty acres of woods and meadow in Bridgewater, about four miles from the Styrons, and not far from the New York state border. “The house is old,” he wrote to Malaquais, “and it smells good as a house, the cellar has the odor of a warm bird’s wing.” It was bracketed by ancient elms.
One night two weeks before they moved, he took Tibo and Zsa Zsa for a walk at one A.M. When he paused near some doorsteps where three young men—“hoodlums” Mailer called them—were sitting, one of them made a crack about the dogs being queer. Mailer said something back and the man called him queer, which led to a fight. Mailer thought he would win, as he was older and heavier, but the hoodlum gouged his eye in a clinch, “very professionally, I may say,” Mailer wrote to Malaquais. They clinched again and the man gouged Mailer’s other eye.
At that point a whole crowd of people—a gang—poured out of a house (we were fighting on the sidewalk) and some tremendous brute of a character clouted me, and said “Have you had it?” Well I had had it. I could hardly see, my eyes were bleeding, and I could see myself being beaten to death. So I nodded hopelessly, muttered several times over, “Yes, I’ve had it, I’ve had it,” picked up the dogs from another hoodlum who ironically enough had been holding them during the fight and shambled off.
For a week, he had to stay in a darkened room because of a blind spot in one eye. He told his family that he had an infection. He was pleased with himself for not backing down, and happy that they had bought the Connecticut house before the fight, he told Malaquais, “or else I would always have felt that I was fleeing New York in a panic.” He gave a briefer version of the story to Baldwin, adding that what was worse than the injury was working up the nerve to walk that street again, which he did.
In his letter to Malaquais, Mailer said he was losing many friends in New York because of his radicalism. “Phone calls don’t come in any longer from one’s elevated social friends.” Mailer was obstreperous when he drank, and he was drinking a lot, bourbon mainly. The booze sanctioned crazy behavior. He took on accents—an Irish brogue, a British one that resembled Barney’s, and the Texas drawl he had learned in the army, his favorite. When Dwight Macdonald asked why he put on these antic dispositions, he said that he lived “in a perpetual stagefright, going to so many parties,” and therefore “assumed the accents as a kind of mask.” His Voice column, his boozing, and his sexual freedom platform had checkered his reputation. When he went to parties in the Village, he said, the attitude was that “Satan and his wife had come into the room.” With the move to Connecticut his lifelong pattern was firmly established: immersion in the “inhuman city with its violence, its coldness, its electric assault on the nerves,” and then retreat to the country or Cape Cod.
In the spring of 1956, Mailer’s and Jones’s relationship was souring; Jones wrote to him that The Deer Park was a mistake. He added that “writing a fucking column for the Village Voice” was “another serious mistake in judgment.” Mailer didn’t reply, but when he was in Paris, he drafted a note to Jones.
Dear Jim—this is just to let you know that this is the last line you will get from me until I have read your 1500 page novel [Some Came Running]. On which my congratulations. But, if as I fear, you have turned a little chicken since you’ve written Eternity, and this book, for all its size, and I suspect growing skill, is the color yellow, then I will feel obliged to tell you so. Mailer
Having rebuked Jones for being craven without even having seen his novel, Mailer thought better of it and decided not to send the note. Jones had the same impulse. The six-page letter he actually had sent to Mailer was a second, toned-down draft. The touchdown twins were disappointed with each other, but enough love remained for them to pull their punches. When he was unpacking in the new house in early November, Mailer dropped a note to Styron asking him to remember him to Jones.
Mailer had also had a serious argument with his old friend Adeline Naiman, and got “boiling mad” at her. At a party at the 55th Street apartment, he accused her of believing Adele to be “intellectually shallow and inferior.” Perhaps because Mailer saw Adeline as a “brilliant intellectual,” as she speculated, he projected his own views about Adele on her. Her insight was on the mark. The truth, Adeline said, was that she had little in common with Adele but had no ill feelings toward her, just the opposite. His harsh words drove her from the party, and they did not speak for some time. He also fought with Fig about Adele. Undoubtedly entwined with Mailer’s intuitions about how his friends felt
about Adele was their response to The Deer Park. Adeline, Aldridge, Malaquais, Fig, and Jones all disliked it. The novel’s admirers were the ever-loyal Knox, Dan Wolf (from whom he was estranged because of the Voice), and Lindner, who was dead. Mailer’s friendship with Styron was still intact, however, perhaps because Styron had sugared his criticisms of the novel.
Fifty years after the sexual revolution, court cases overturning anti-obscenity laws, and the fading of facades erected before Hollywood’s workaday exploitation and sordidness, the merits of The Deer Park are more obvious. It was published at a time of knee-jerk prudishness when even metaphoric descriptions of sexual acts were considered bad taste. As Gay Talese noted in his memoir, A Writer’s Life, a New York Times picture editor lost his job in 1954 “because he permitted the publication of a wedding-day photograph showing Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio revealing their physical attraction to each other while standing in front of City Hall in San Francisco—she with her head back and her mouth slightly open, and he with his lips puckered and his eyes closed.” When Dan Wakefield, speaking with Mailer many years later, noted that The Deer Park was the most controversial novel of 1955, he replied, “Anything that dealt openly with sex back then was controversial. The issue of sex was the cutting edge of the new novel of exploration in the fifties. It was the way of going beyond the frontier.” Looking at the novel sixty years later, Walter Minton’s estimate seems on the mark: there is no better novel of Hollywood in the postwar period, or perhaps any period since.
ONCE SETTLED IN Bridgewater, he set up a gym of sorts in the barn, including a boxing ring. He also had a workshop there. He created a studio with a picture window for Adele in the attic, among other projects. In New York he had built a version of Wilhelm Reich’s orgone box, a place where he could “scream and snort and bellow and growl and even pipsqueak.” In Connecticut, he constructed a variation: a large, polished wooden egg large enough to hold a person in the fetal position. The idea, Adele explained, was to get inside, curl up, and be rocked by someone outside. A bongo board was another project, a fat wooden cylinder with a board on top on which he could balance, roll, and swivel. One day when Lew Allen was visiting and Mailer was demonstrating his agility on his customized version, Mailer fell and got a bloody nose. He convinced Allen to go along with the story that the blood came from a punch as they boxed. “Norman was ready to take offense at anything,” Allen recalled. “His whole nervous system was exposed, and his nerve ends were out on stalks. He was on pot all the time and primed.”
Adele’s parents visited them in Connecticut. Her father, Al, a printer at the New York Daily News, in his earlier years had been an amateur fighter. He turned professional briefly and lost half of his twenty matches before retiring. The majority of his fights ended in knockouts. After he gave up boxing, he turned to handball, and played well into his eighties. When Al and Mae Morales arrived, Mailer greeted Al with, “Hiya champ,” and they would trade fake punches like old sparring partners. Mailer had again quit smoking and was feeling healthy, although he had ballooned to 175 pounds. He and Al often put on the gloves and boxed a few rounds. Mailer was twenty years younger, so it is not too surprising that in one of their first matches he knocked Al down twice. The next time they visited, Al wanted to box right away. Al landed one on Mailer’s chin and knocked him out. As Adele remembers it,
Norman sat up almost immediately shaking his head, rubbing his jaw. He was still groggy as my father helped him up.
“Jesus, young feller, sorry about that.”
Norman was a good sport about the whole thing, and instead of being angry, he admired my father. “Not bad, Al, for a fifty-four-year-old.” He touched his chin. “That was some punch you landed.”
“Well, Norm,” Daddy said, “you’ve got to be on your toes. You should’ve seen it coming. But that’s the way ya learn.”
Mailer did learn and became noticeably better as a boxer over the years. He continued sparring until he was almost sixty, and was quietly proud of the bruises he gave and took in his grandfatherly years.
He probably had not heard of club fighters before he got to know his father-in-law. In any case, the club fighter’s attributes—a consistent level of performance, the capacity to absorb punishment, and the ability to learn from mistakes—coalesced into a touchstone metaphor for Mailer. Those who got to know him fairly well, or read his interviews, became accustomed to what he called his “all-purpose expression”: “I’m an old club fighter; I get mad when you miss.” The compensation for being a club fighter, that is, a fighter whose duty and pride is to spar with superior fighters, is that you not only enable your opponents to sharpen their skills, you might also learn how to slip a punch by taking one on the chin. Also, by taking certain blows, a boxer (now feeling more combative) can counterpunch, something that Mailer learned to do very well inside and outside the ring. Everyone gains, and sometimes the loser learns the most. Two years later, in the opening essay of Advertisements for Myself, he used the trope in a capsule autobiography, one he never relinquished: “I started as a generous but very spoiled boy, and I seem to have turned into a slightly punch-drunk and ugly club fighter, who can fight clean and fight dirty, but likes to fight.” The literary world, as Mailer defined it, was a place of fierce struggle. Painful experience was the soundest guide.
Mailer was now in a fever to fight. Perhaps it was the memory of his eye gouging in New York or Al Morales’s instruction, or the emerging ideas of “The White Negro”—all of these, no doubt, played a role—but what is clear is that in 1957, he was itching for fisticuffs, with or without gloves. One night at the Styrons’, Mailer told Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, who had turned down The Deer Park, “You’re not a publisher, you’re a dentist.” They went outside, but Styron broke it up. When novelist Chandler Brossard, whom Mailer had met in Mexico, visited, Mailer wanted to box with him. Brossard, who had fought semiprofessionally and been trained by the same man who trained Hemingway—another inducement for Mailer—wisely declined, saying someone (meaning Mailer) could get seriously hurt. “Violence and pain are a form of engagement to Norman, of reality,” Brossard said. In 1952, Brossard had published one of the first novels about hipsters, Who Walks in Darkness, set in Greenwich Village. On the dust jacket, a question is asked: “What is a hipster? The name derives from the jazz term ‘hip’ and denotes a person who possesses ‘superior awareness.’ ” The lead character is an African American who passes for white. Mailer read the novel and liked it; it most certainly enriched the essay that was percolating in him.
The memories of Mailer fighting and acting out are what many friends and acquaintances of the period remember, but it wasn’t all fireworks. For one thing, Susan had joined them for her annual visit shortly before they moved, and she spent a lot of time with her father. She was also fond of Adele and, like any six-year-old, deeply interested in the pregnancy. Mailer wrote to a friend that he was “beginning to see himself as the patriarch of a vast family,” a premonitory remark. As the birth approached, he started writing. He began taking notes for “The White Negro” and also working on a dramatic version of The Deer Park. The growing extent of his literary operation can be gauged by the fact that he now had an answering service in New York. Further help came from the Miss Baltimore Agency, a domestic help service that Fan had taken over from her sister Beck in the early 1950s. She supplied maids to her son and his wives for years to come.
TWO WEEKS BEFORE Adele was due, Mailer appeared on a local late night television program, Night Beat, hosted by Mike Wallace. Adele accompanied him in a low-cut black velvet dress. “She looked splendid,” Mailer recalled, “and sent out the beauty of her pregnancy like a promulgation of status.” He was excited to be on live, “the virgin air,” he called it, and believed he might be able to move the million or more people who would watch the show by saying the unsayable with “wit, conviction, and passion.” His ideas about the repression in American life might catch fire, “buried sentiments could take life.” But t
o do this he had to hold his ground against Wallace, whose “straight black hair and craggy face gave off a presence as formidable as an Indian in a gray flannel suit.” And given his own “massive incapacity to stay cool,” this would not be easy. Just before airtime, Mailer took out a flask of gin and poured it into his glass, clearly annoying Wallace.
Wallace asked if he was obsessed with sex in his novels and Mailer answered, yes, most definitely. I see myself, he said, continuing the work of pioneering novelists such as Henry Miller. When Wallace quoted Life magazine’s attack on The Deer Park for “immorality, alcoholism, perversion, and political terror,” Mailer replied that “only hypocrisy and insincerity are dirty. Life magazine is a dirty magazine.” He decided to raise the ante. When Wallace quoted a line from one of his columns about the country being run “by men who were essentially women, which indeed is good for neither men nor women,” and then pressed for an example, Mailer replied, “Well, I think President Eisenhower is a bit of a woman.” He was certain he had scored and “the heart of a million TV sets missed a beat.” Wallace’s eyes, he recalled, “grew as flat as the eyes of a movie Apache who has just taken a rifle bullet to the stomach.” Mailer recalled the moment, writing about himself in the third person.
In the elevator, going down to the street, his wife said, “Maybe we’ll be dead tomorrow, but it was worth it.” It is possible they never had a better moment together. They had been with each other for years, yet always fought in the animal rage of never comprehending one another. On this night, however, with the baby two weeks away, they were ready for one hour, at least, to die together. For once Mailer felt like a hero. In those days saying something bad about Dwight D. Eisenhower was not a great deal less atrocious than deciding Jesus Christ has something wrong with Him.
Norman Mailer Page 27
