Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  THE MAILERS MOVED back to New York in December 1958 and rented an apartment at 73 Perry Street in the Village. Mailer had known Allen Ginsberg since the days of his loft parties, but had met Jack Kerouac only in passing. Sometime after they returned, Kerouac and Ginsberg visited. Ginsberg later said that the meeting was friendly, and that the other two writers weren’t competitive even though each considered himself the best writer in the country. Mailer liked Kerouac “more than I would have thought,” but found him to be tired. “In Buddhist terms,” Ginsberg said, Kerouac “was already sick of the world.” Mailer, however, was engaged in what Jews call tikkun olam, or repairing the world. There may not have been any discussion of “The White Negro,” as both Ginsberg and Kerouac had reservations about its positions on violence. On the other hand, Ginsberg said that he felt “a sense of brotherhood” with Mailer, because they were both trying to undermine the nation’s pervasive social conformity. For Ginsberg, Mailer’s essay was “the most intelligent statement I’d ever seen by any literary-critical person, anyone acquainted with the great world of literature.” Over the years, they would have many contacts with each other, especially in the 1960s when they were involved in a number of antiwar protests. But Mailer saw Kerouac at least once more, at a party the Mailers gave in mid-1959, most of which Kerouac spent under the kitchen table, dead drunk.

  All through the fall and winter of 1958 and into the spring of the next year, he labored on the collection, still unnamed. Heretofore, he had never worried a great deal about his nonfiction prose style. His forte, he felt, was to deliver unsettling hypotheses and blockbuster theories that would “influence the history of my time,” and not engage in the kind of fancy-pants writing he despised when he was writing for the Advocate. With “Lipton’s Journal” and “The White Negro,” his style had become more colloquial, and the prefaces he was writing for each selection reflected this shift. The problem he faced was that to accurately contextualize the pieces in the collection—fiction, nonfiction, a few poems and dramatic fragments—he had to talk about himself more than he cared to. He had always implicitly accepted Flaubert’s dictum that “the artist should be in his work, like God’s creation, invisible and all-powerful; he should be felt everywhere and seen nowhere,” a view he was parroting when he told Lillian Ross in 1948 that it was “much better when people who have read your book don’t know anything about you, even what you look like.” Writing the prefaces in the face of his growing awareness of the difficulty and doubtful wisdom of separating his personal and artistic worlds had made him “a little desperate,” especially since he had quit smoking, again. Yet, he still felt that the prefaces, as he told a friend, were “shit work.”

  I got sick of myself, sick of saying I felt this, I knew that, I wondered whether, I induced, and I and one and almost a he or two. It’s weird, it’s a little like self-analysis before you realize it, and your style dips into your own shitbag so fast it’s staggering. So now I’m facing whether to throw all this crap away, and put the book out without the prefaces, three months of work shot, and a less readable book or maybe keep on with the gamble and waste another three months on what may not be writable for me.

  But he continued, encouraged by the reception of “Way Out.” He told William Phillips, Rahv’s coeditor at PR, that he had received all good comments on the story, except from Macdonald, who “detested” it. By the end of 1958, he had a provisional plan for the collection, which he sent to Walter Minton, promising he would have everything to Putnam’s by February 1. He had already completed some of the prefaces, the brief ones that introduced his short stories, the longer ones—introducing “The White Negro,” the Voice columns, excerpts from The Deer Park and the big novel—remained to be written. He was considering a three-part, chronological division of the material: “Square,” “Transitional,” and “Hip,” with an appendix for his college stories and early journalism. The final shape of the collection owed something to this arrangement, but was more subtle. The only thing he was sure about at this point was that all the prefaces would be in italics.

  He began “to jiggle his Self for a style” that would reflect his emerging personality, while feeling “the yaws of conscience” about such concerted and public introspection. This anxious, delicate process, he said, sent his writing “through a circus of variations and postures, a fireworks of virtuosity designed to achieve . . . I do not even know what. Leave it that I become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I believe I can trap the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style.” He inched along, still worried about tabling the big novel. He told Yamanishi that he had written only seventy pages, and that the final product would take “five or ten years” and be a thousand pages long. Finishing the collection—its working title was now “Advertisements”—stood in the way of getting back to the novel. In a letter to Mickey Knox, he said that he had spent a half year trying to improve “my half-vanished techniques in writing,” which gives a hint about his slow progress. Going without cigarettes for nine months, he said, had left him with “less drive and better health.” What he needed now was “a stick of dynamite up my ass.”

  HE DID GET a small jolt when “Hip, Hell, and the Navigator” appeared in February 1959. Lionel Trilling, the informal head of The Family, described it in a TV interview as an “important theological document,” and this had created “a little stir” in the PR crowd. Just before this happened, Mailer was invited to appear on his second TV program, David Susskind’s Open End, along with Truman Capote and Dorothy Parker. He had met Parker in Hollywood several times, but knew Capote only by reputation, which by then was growing by leaps and bounds, based on the warm reception for his 1958 novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Mailer was “intensely curious” about Capote, he recalled, and enjoyed the limousine ride to the studio with him and Adele. With the Mike Wallace program under his belt, he felt confident about appearing, while Capote, “in a dry little voice that seemed to issue from an unmoistened reed in his nostril,” said that he wasn’t. “When it comes to personality,” Capote said, “I have something small and precise to offer, and it’s wrong for such a medium.” When the two-hour program was over, Mailer thought he had been forceful and articulate, while Capote had seemed “a hint bewildered.” After a celebratory dinner at El Morocco with Capote (who repeatedly insisted that he had been awful), Mailer went to bed happy. The next day, he made a few calls to friends to garner their praises.

  Mailer’s family loved the show, but most of his friends told him, “Oh man, did Truman take you.” He was getting a lesson, not only of Capote’s one-upmanship, but also of the medium’s distortions. The diminutive Capote loomed large in the many close-ups of his “young-old face,” while the bearded Mailer appeared intense and pious in the medium shots he was accorded. Capote’s voice, he realized, was an asset.

  Nothing like it had been heard in New York before. Such presence over the camera. Such homosexual hauteur. He seemed to be certain of every word he was saying even if they were few words. Oh, that voice!—a cross between an adenoidal prince and a telephone operator. Whereas I was a verbose young intellectual spewing more ideas than anyone cared to hear in an over-friendly tone. Ugh! I had my first lesson in the transpositions of reality which come by way of television.

  The key moment came when the discussion turned to the Beats. After noting emphatically that he was not a Beat but a hipster, Mailer gave an endorsement of Beat writing, saying that it was “entirely new,” and had “broken clean away from the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Parker disagreed, saying that it was nothing more than reheated bohemianism. “None of these people have anything interesting to say,” Capote added, “and none of them can write, not even Mr. Kerouac.” What they do, Capote said, “isn’t writing at all—it’s typing.” Mailer disagreed but his defense of Kerouac was “limp,” he recalled, because he was only “two-thirds for Jack’s virtues and one-third against Jack’s vices.” A New Republic reviewer said that Capote “demolished Mr. Mailer’s arguments at ever
y turn.” Capote’s putdown of Kerouac has become legendary; Mailer’s comments are forgotten. He learned that television viewers prefer terse retorts to three-minute syllogisms. The experience on Open End gave him an appreciation for the epigrammatic, and he worked to refine his television style.

  Through the early spring of 1959, Mailer continued work on the prefaces. Barbara lived around the corner at 395 Bleecker Street and had begun doing regular secretarial work for him. He missed the February 1 deadline he had given Minton, and got little accomplished the entire month. In one sour letter he said that he needed to get the prefaces “out of the way and fast—I’m sick of fucking around with it, and the novel is not calling me right—seems to be fading as I goof off more and more of my time.” He and Adele were going to jazz clubs, especially the Five Spot, on Third Avenue. He was drinking as much as ever, but Adele wasn’t drinking at all because she was two months pregnant; they hoped for a boy.

  It was a curious period. He was trying “to make the scene,” as he put it, at Village parties and events, all the while fiddling with the prefaces, adding confessional material and then drawing back out of his fear that the collection would become “a thoroughgoing autobiography.” Some of them were brief, clear, and functional. In others, he was going for something deeper. In one of his drafts, he calls himself “the only writer of my generation who has the particular passion to be great,” and finds that his “ridiculous, dreary, narcissistic and noble” self has come to resemble a man he does not admire: Charles de Gaulle. Finally, he began to get some traction on how to handle his contradictions:

  Begin with declaration that my overriding passion for years—from 17 on—has been to be a great writer, and I’ve written hardly a word which hasn’t been seen for how it would look today, and how it would read a hundred years from now. This type of Gaullist narcissism runs through every turn of my ungracious prose—muscular, blunt, brutal, bullying, shrill, mean, pompous, totalitarian, timid, arrogant, clumsy—and be it said—passionate. Because for anyone who knows anything about writing, it will be evident through all the gnarled harsh turns of my prose expression, the graceless dogged determinations of my honest ideas, that I am a man obsessed with the urgency to be great, to be a great writer, leader, philosopher, seer, a God—what! And this humorless heavyweight clubbing toward so ineluctable a goal will appear by turns to anyone concerned with the spirit of the cool, the graceful, and the elegant, as the ludicrous thrashings of a man so impossibly gauche that one can envision him in Parnassus only as the archetype of the hippopotamus, the baboon and the pig. All right. Heavy I am and graceful I would be, and in the distance between the two lies the rhetoric of this work.

  By the end of March he was working more successfully, perhaps because he had—“assassin to myself”—gone back to smoking. He finished “The Mind of an Outlaw,” and continued working on an estimate of the work of his contemporaries, which would eventually be titled “Evaluation: Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room.” He also came up with the final sequencing of the pieces, and decided to include two tables of contents: the first follows the actual order of the book, and is more or less chronological; the second is generic—fiction, essays, journalism, interviews, poetry, plays, and “Biography of a Style,” which lists the advertisements and postscripts, thirty-four all told, written expressly for the collection. Advertisements for Myself was finally coming into focus. Putnam’s rescheduled the collection to come out in November.

  The rationale for “Biography of a Style” was to encourage readers to swallow the advertisements whole, read them apart from the selections that they frame, for the purpose of revealing the new kind of writer Mailer was becoming. He wanted the agonies of creating the book to bleed through, yet sparingly, in the manner of Yeats, who wanted his readers to “know about the intense and unremitting labor required to create an apparently spontaneous line.” For example, he concludes “Sixth Advertisement for Myself” with this tease: “The confession is over—I sense that to give any more of what happened to me in the last few years might make for five thousand good words, but could also strip me of fifty thousand better ones.” But the confession is far from over; subsequent advertisements continue to offer glimpses of his life in progress. Many long passages are suffused with the rhetoric of revealing and then shrouding the writer and the process of composition. In addition to being a genre-conflating work—part confession, part tirade, part visionary testament—Advertisements for Myself is a great work because Mailer is adept at what we might call confession interruptus. Just when we think he is done baring his battered psyche, he returns with more revelations, laced with witty revilements and cranky pontifications.

  MAILER’S SISTER, WHO was typing the manuscript, had reservations about some of the writing in the collection, but said nothing at first. But finally, she recalled, she told him what she felt about “Quick and Expensive Comments.”

  “Norman you’re not serious about publishing this thing.” I was appalled by it. “You don’t do this to your fellow writers.” I said, “You don’t expect to publish this until after everybody’s dead.” He said, “Of course I do.” And I said, “I really think you shouldn’t”—he got so angry at me. He said, “You’re wrong, you’re always wrong!” And he never got over it, I mean, for years he teased me about how I’d been wrong about it. However, he did change it, a lot. He went over it pretty carefully. Some things he really toned down. I also said, “I think some of it’s marvelous.”

  None of the early drafts of the essay have survived, but even in the softened published version most of the writers he comments on receive a mixture of positive and negative comments, sometimes in two sentences, sometimes in a page, no more. What immediately sets off the piece from the abstracted literary criticism of the day is that mixed in with the usual commentary are surmises and hunches on the characters of the writers themselves—their vanities, virtues, and quirks—based on Mailer’s interaction with them, even if it consisted of one meeting. The prose is obscene and prickly, but conversational, as if you were drinking with him over a long winter evening in some snug Provincetown bar. The praise given is grudging as often as not; and the criticisms are a mixture of shrewd insight based on careful reading and ad hominem jibes.

  He makes comments on twenty-one writers, in the following order: Jones, Styron, Capote, Kerouac, Bellow, Algren, Salinger, Paul Bowles, Bourjaily, Chandler Brossard, Vidal, Anatole Broyard, Myron Kaufmann, Calder Willingham, Ralph Ellison, Baldwin, Herbert Gold, Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, Carson McCullers, and William Burroughs. He had met at least two thirds of the group. Some samples:

  Saul Bellow’s National Book Award–winning novel, The Adventures of Augie March: “at its worst it was a travelogue for timid intellectuals and so to tell the truth I cannot take him seriously as a major novelist.” He goes on to call Seize the Day “the first of the cancer novels,” although he calls the ending “beautiful,” and says it is “the first indication for me that Bellow is not altogether hopeless on the highest level.” To reach that level, “he must first give evidence, as must Styron, that he can write about men who have the lust to struggle with the history about them.”

  Nelson Algren: “Of all the writers I know, he is the Grand Odd-Ball. Once he took me to a line-up in Chicago and I could have sworn the police and the talent on the line had read The Man with the Golden Arm for they caught the book perfectly, those cops and crooks, they were imitating Algren.”

  J. D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, “is everyone’s favorite. I seem to be alone in finding him no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school.”

  Kerouac is “the first figure for a new generation,” possessed of “a large talent. His literary energy is enormous.” But “his rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, sentimental as a lollypop.”

  “Truman Capote I do not know well, but I like him. He is tart as a grand aunt, but in his way he is a ballsy little guy, an
d he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences, word for word, rhythm upon rhythm.” But “he has less to say than any good writer I know” because of his “attractions to Society.”

  Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, “is essentially a hateful writer: when the line of his satire is pure, he writes so perfectly that one can never forget the experience of reading him—it is like holding a live electric wire in one’s hand.”

  “The early work of Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford and Carson McCullers gave me pleasure,” he says near the end of the piece, noting that he was unable to read other women novelists “out of what is no doubt a fault in me.” Later, he would enjoy the work of Iris Murdoch, Joan Didion, and Erica Jong, among others, but in 1959 he was gender-bound. “At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life,” he continues, “the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn.” He concluded by saying that “a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls,” a line that would come back to haunt him. When asked about his comment on women writers a few years before his death, he said, “I happened to grow up in a family with a lot of wonderful, adoring women—a marvelous, strong mother and a lot of terrific aunts. So I took it for granted that I could say anything I wanted about women because they knew I loved them.” His dismissal of female writers would not only be remembered, it would be bitterly intoned by women for decades. This mention is sometimes seen as the first indication of the misogyny he would be accused of in the 1970s.