Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  The insight Mailer remembered is Kazin’s comment on the “marvelously forceful and inventive style” of the advertisements. “His intelligence,” he continues, “though muscular, has no real ease or quietly reflective power; he is as fond of his style as an Italian tenor of his vocal cords.” Previously, Mailer had doubts about whether he had a style worth discussing. Now he knew that his advertisements were not “crap,” as he had called them a few months earlier. As he said in a preface to a later edition, Advertisements for Myself “was forged out of a continuing recognition of how difficult it was to put words together when writing about oneself.” Nicotine deprivation, he explained, dulled his ability to locate the needed word, and “in compensation I was granted a sensitivity to the rhythm of what I wrote.” He moved from “the hegemony of the word to the resonance of the prose rhythm.” The collection, he wrote, was assembled after the “slowest and most morale-disrupting” period of his career, the ten years after Naked and the Dead. “I suffered prodigies of brain-curdling, and educated myself all over again how to write, write without cigarettes, and found the beginnings of a style which might begin to express the way my mind (as opposed to other writers’ minds) was ready to work.” The struggle to write Advertisements “changed my life,” he said, and gave him “a style I thought I might be able to call my own.” Kazin’s review was confirmation.

  SOMETIME NOT LONG after Advertisements for Myself was published, Baldwin, Styron, and Knox were drinking at Jones’s Paris apartment. Jones had a copy of the book and they began discussing Mailer’s comments on their work. “It wasn’t a fun evening,” Knox recalled. They read passages from the essay, Baldwin said, “in a kind of drunken, masochistic fascination.” Then they attacked Knox as “a surrogate for Norman.” Jones ignored the complimentary remarks in the piece on Styron, and instead kept reading the same line over and over: “Styron wrote the prettiest novel of our generation,” causing Styron “great discomfort,” according to Knox. He “started twitching and said, ‘Okay, Jim, that’s enough, Jim!’ ”

  Gloria Jones said that her husband “kept a copy of Advertisements” in their Paris apartment. “Whenever any of the authors Mailer had attacked came through Paris for a visit, Jones would have them write their comments in the margin of the book.” Mailer and Jones did not meet again until a 1965 party in novelist John Marquand Jr.’s New York apartment. Marquand thought they might try to kill each other, but they went off into a room and were gone for quite a while. “First Mailer came out by himself,” Marquand said, “and he was obviously quite moved. He didn’t seem angry; he seemed purged, almost as if there were tears in his eyes.” Jones told Marquand that they had worked things out, and said, “I love him, but I don’t like him.” When Baldwin returned to the United States, he sought out Mailer and they went for a drink. Baldwin asked why he had criticized him, and Mailer replied, “Well, if this was going to break up our friendship, something else would come along to break it up just as fast.” But he added that Baldwin was the only one whom he had misgivings about hitting in the essay. “I think I—probably—wouldn’t say it quite that way now.” Their friendship held.

  Aldridge liked the collection. He saw Advertisements for Myself as a breakthrough “because it dramatizes the range of your mind, the variety, even the maze, of your temper” in a way that his fiction could not. The advertisements, he says, allowed Mailer “to get in all the as yet unnovelized materials of your being—all the agony, the suspicion, self-love and self-hate, all that terrible supervising conscience which fiction hasn’t allowed you to get in.” Mailer was pleased and praised “the particular lucidity” of Aldridge’s approach to understanding the nature of the relationship between the writer and the world. Then he turned to Styron:

  I could tell you a lot about noble old Bill and how he cut off your roots, stripped your leaves, pulled your bark, scorched your lawn, and didn’t even show you a face until you had gotten to the point where it was all you could do to say, “Look, man, I’m dying a little.” Then his manners came to the fore and he could say, “I’m sorry to hear that,” and Rose could chime in, “Yes, isn’t it awful when someone is dying a little.” Since I know that the same acts of surgical gardening were performed upon me and that you probably hold the details of my operation as I hold the details of yours, an exchange of intelligence might be mutually fortifying.

  The rapprochement with Styron would take many years. Aldridge also broke with Styron and became one of his most persistent detractors. Over the next thirty-five years, Aldridge would have nothing but praise for Mailer, especially for his risk taking, and few qualifications.

  SHORTLY AFTER ADVERTISEMENTS for Myself was published, George Plimpton tried to get Mailer and Hemingway together during Papa’s visit to New York in January 1960. Plimpton told him stories of Mailer’s thumb wrestling and got Hemingway interested. “You call him,” Hemingway told Plimpton. But A. E. Hotchner, a close friend of Hemingway’s, advised against it and Papa said, “Oh, well, forget it.” Thumb wrestling intrigued him though, and he went at it with Plimpton. When he couldn’t get the hang of it, he began to squeeze Plimpton’s hand in his powerful grip, leaving marks that lasted a week. When someone asked what they were doing, Hemingway replied, “We’re pretending we’re a pair of Norman Mailers.” Mailer waited in vain for the call from Plimpton, “both scared and excited,” he told Plimpton, “and then both disappointed and even a bit relieved when the call never came through.” This was as close as they came to meeting. Eighteen months later Hemingway would be dead.

  Around this time, Bob Lucid invited him to speak at Wesleyan, where he was teaching, but Mailer declined “because I’ve been talking much in public lately and will never get to work on the novel if I don’t stop.” He did, however, continue to accept almost every invitation to read, debate, lecture, and be interviewed, and began to create a relationship with his admirers not seen since Mark Twain’s barnstorming days a half century earlier. From 1960 on, Mailer was more and more in the public eye.

  He grew closer to Lucid and Aldridge in the next decade, as his friendships with other writers, with few exceptions, waned. He increased his contact with aspiring writers, reading their manuscripts, writing blurbs, and offering advice generously, but was out of sorts with his peers. More and more he saw himself in the company of major writers of the past than with Jones, Baldwin, Styron, Capote, and Kerouac, or with the Jewish writers who came into ascendancy in the 1960s: Bellow, Salinger, I. B. Singer, Susan Sontag, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, and Bruce Jay Friedman, to name the most prominent. He had occasional contact with most of these writers, Salinger being the notable exception, but generally downplayed any suggested commonalities. He wanted his own pedestal, and a few years later Kazin acknowledged his preeminence. It was “entirely possible,” he wrote in an essay on Jewish writers, “that Norman Mailer had become the representative American novelist,” a Jew who had “mastered the complex resources of the modern novel, who wrote English lovingly, possessively, masterfully, for whom the language and the form, the intelligence of art, had become as natural a way of living as the Law had been” to previous generations of Jews. Mailer may have given a nod to the shade of Rabbi Schneider when he read this, even as he was wrestling with the implications of retaining his novelistic credentials at the same time that his reputation was becoming anchored in his new role of public intellectual.

  SEVEN

  A FELONIOUS ASSAULT AND AN AMERICAN DREAM

  Two of the most important events in Mailer’s life took place in 1960: he wrote an essay on the presidential candidacy of Senator John F. Kennedy, based in part on two meetings with him and his wife, Jacqueline, and three months later, after a black night of drinking and fighting, he stabbed Adele. Writing “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” a new kind of political commentary, and then observing its extraordinary reception, affected him profoundly and led, indirectly but certainly, to the assault on Adele in the early morning of November
20. Two unexpected upheavals—the Cuban Revolution and the political ascent of Kennedy, an Irish American Catholic—also contributed to the calamity, but the wretched state of the Mailers’ marriage and his “Napoleonic” ambition were the chief causes. There were other factors—alcohol, drugs, and the dissolution of friendships—but these were effects as much as causes. Chance also played a part, and had the last featuring blow at the event his friends called “The Trouble.”

  Gore Vidal’s review of Advertisements for Myself, which appeared earlier that year, focused on Mailer’s burgeoning ambition. Writing in The Nation, Vidal discussed in a collegial way Mailer’s achievements as a writer—he especially admired Barbary Shore—and praised his “honorable” efforts to vex the “Great Golfer,” Eisenhower. He called Mailer “a Bolingbroke, a born usurper. He will raise an army anywhere, live off the country as best he can, helped by a devoted underground, even assisted at brief moments by rival claimants like myself.” Vidal had some criticisms, of course. Pointing to the barrier erected by Flaubert between his private woes and public face, he suggested that Mailer needed such a wall; writers “create not arguments but worlds,” and Mailer “is a born cocktail-party orator” whose prose sometimes shifted into “a swelling, throbbing rhetoric which is not easy to read.” As far as Mailer’s “preoccupation with actual political power” was concerned, Vidal called it a waste of time in that the possibility of “the American president, any American president, reading a work by a serious contemporary American writer” was unimaginable. Within a year, President Kennedy would prove Vidal wrong.

  Vidal’s most insightful comment concerned Mailer’s sense of mission, which Vidal was among the first to perceive clearly: “His drive seems to be toward power of a religio-political kind. He is a messiah without real hope of paradise on earth or in heaven, and with no precise mission except that dictated by his ever-changing temperament, I am not sure that he should be a novelist at all, or even a writer, despite formidable gifts.” Vidal found all these tendencies to be “very dangerous” for “an artist not yet full grown.” Mailer read the review and wrote a letter with some mild rejoinders to The Nation, but Vidal’s analysis was prescient. Eight months later, Mailer would be ready to abandon his literary career and become a full-time politician.

  Barbara, who was still doing some work for her brother in 1960, was deeply troubled by his behavior. He had told her that he wouldn’t cry at her funeral and she found him to be “violent, full of hate.” He hit his wife at a New Year’s Eve party, and Adele told Barbara that she feared he might hurt her seriously. “Yet,” Barbara wrote in her journal, “she continually provokes his cruelty because she dislikes it less than his neglect.” Both women thought that he needed psychological treatment and, in a moment of lucidity, he told his sister that he was also worried about himself. Adele says little in her memoir about Mailer’s interest in politics, and nothing about his difficulties in forging a new style, except her passing comment: “I think he was having a lot of trouble writing.” She does note, however, his ability to work almost every day in his Brooklyn studio, no matter how drunk and disorderly the night before. For Adele’s thirty-fourth birthday, June 12, he gave her a garnet crucifix, a momentary lull in their increasingly nasty public arguments. She preferred parties to hitting the bars, and often did not accompany him when he went to the White Horse or jazz clubs in the Village, although she was with him at the Village Vanguard when Lenny Bruce performed. Mailer was thrilled by Bruce’s mix of political irreverence and crass obscenity, a comic version of William Burroughs’s riffs in Naked Lunch. He saw them as allies in the struggles ahead. Both employed shock techniques and, like Mailer, were happiest when their audiences were uncomfortable.

  Parties, Adele wrote, gave her an excuse to drink, which she did soon after Betsy’s birth. Her drinking led to flirting, “since I came on with everybody when I was drunk.” On a few occasions, she went home with another man, once with an Esquire editor, which led to a bad fight with Mailer. He had several one-night stands, and at least one serious affair. We were “steadily digging the grave for our marriage,” she recalled. One night they went to the Copacabana nightclub with Knox and Sammy Davis Jr. After three martinis, Adele began talking with Davis’s bodyguard. She asked to see his gun.

  Norman glared at me, a silent signal for me to shut up, but my martinis had gotten there first. The bodyguard politely refused. “Come on,” I insisted, “let me see your gun.” He took it out and passed it around the table. It was the first time I’d held a gun in my hand. I had a strange feeling of power as I pointed it at Norman. I grinned when I said, “I’m gonna kill you, you son of a bitch.” My finger was on that trigger, and my husband wouldn’t have to worry about his next novel anymore. That’s how much rage I had inside me.

  IN A MARCH letter to Yamanishi, Mailer answered his translator’s question about Trotskyism in the United States. He said that the movement had dwindled, and that Dissent might be the last outpost of its influence. While no longer a Trotskyite himself, he was pleased that Trotsky’s ideas were still alive in Japan because that could “lead in the direction of something new, something radical, and something better in the same way as Castro’s Barbudos in Cuba.” This is his first written reference to Fidel Castro, although like everyone else he had followed Castro’s overthrow of the Cuban dictatorship in January 1959.

  Shortly after writing to Yamanishi, Mailer’s name appeared at the end of a full-page advertisement in The New York Times for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an international group challenging reports that Castro was a communist who would ruthlessly confiscate property and execute his opponents. All of these charges would ultimately prove correct, but Castro’s sins were peccadilloes when measured against the hideously cruel and corrupt regime of General Fulgencio Batista, who ruled the country for twenty-five years before being overthrown by Castro’s band of bearded—the Barbudos—guerrillas. Besides Mailer, there were thirty signatories, including Baldwin, Capote, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Over the next forty years, Mailer would sign scores of open letters in the company of famous writers, academics, and activists.

  Mailer called Castro “the first and greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second War,” and compared him to Emiliano Zapata, a hero of the Mexican Revolution. Over the years, his belief in Castro’s greatness never flagged and was strengthened when they met in Cuba decades later. Asked late in life to list the geniuses he had met in person, Mailer named Ezra Pound, Charlie Chaplin, Muhammad Ali, and Fidel Castro. In November 1960, he anguished over “An Open Letter to Fidel Castro,” in which he panegyrized the Cuban, and challenged him to invite Hemingway to write a firsthand report on the Cuban situation. He finished it after three weeks of intense work, but it became a casualty of “The Trouble,” and was not published until the following April. His estimate of Castro’s stature can be seen in the following passage.

  Back in December, 1956, you landed near Niquero in the Oriente of Cuba with 82 men and a few arms. Your plan was to ignite an insurrection which would rid Cuba of Batista in a few weeks. Instead, you were to lose all but 12 of these men in the first few days, you were to wander through fields and forests in the dark, without real food or water, living on sugar-cane for five days and five nights. In the depths of this disaster, you were to announce to the few men who were still with you: “The days of the dictatorship are numbered.”

  Castro’s confidence was unshakable. A legend began to grow about the Barbudos in the mountains, and the idea of revolution spread across the island. Mailer’s golden opinion of Castro’s vision and tenacity in the face of great odds invigorated his desire to mount his own revolution in the United States—not political, but moral and sexual. Che Guevara, Castro’s chief lieutenant, elicited similar admiration. They met briefly when Guevara came to New York to address the U.N. General Assembly. Mailer wrote, “I met him once. He had a great devil in his eye. I had rarely liked anyone as much.”

  In mid-1960, Mailer stoo
d high in the regard of Esquire’s editors. Harold Hayes found him to be “very astute” in recommending “The Mind of an Outlaw” for publication in the magazine a few weeks before Advertisements was published. “I think he gained immensely by that intersection at that moment—that is, his arrival in our magazine when it was trying to become what it later became.” One night in April, Mailer bumped into another young Esquire editor he knew, Clay Felker, at the Five Spot. Felker ended up at a table with Mailer and Adele, Mickey Knox, and Joan Morales, Adele’s sister. Felker recalled that Adele was attacking Mailer, “exploding all over the place, saying things like, ‘We’re all shit; we don’t add up to anything. You guys think you’re significant, but it’s all shit.’ ” Mailer said nothing, just smiled, which increased her anger. Finally, she left and Felker began talking to him about writing a piece on the upcoming Democratic National Convention. “I had read his pronouncement in Advertisements that he had been running for president in his mind and wanted to create a revolution in the consciousness of our times. Pundits were going around saying the upcoming election would mark a turning point in American history and usher in a revolutionary age, so I thought, ‘What is more natural than turning loose the revolutionary mind on a revolutionary event?’ ” It was an editor’s gamble, a brilliant one. Mailer accepted the assignment but said he didn’t know much about politicians and political writing, so Felker agreed to accompany him to the convention, which was to be held in Los Angeles, July 11–15.