Kate Mailer adds that her parents were drawn to each other not only because of his fascination with Jeanne’s background, but also by “her reaction to her background and her refusal to be done down by it, or to be hemmed in by it. A reaction which made her curious about all people in life, everyone. The most ordinary of people could capture her imagination and interest, and this was something that I think he was drawn to, as he could not at first understand it. ‘How could you find that person interesting at all,’ he told me he would ask her. ‘But yes, they are fascinating,’ she would answer, ‘if you only probe a little below the surface.’ He was also charmed by her across-the-board, unflagging gusto for life, and pleased that she shared two of his own obsessions: politics and spies.”
In May 1961 he wrote to Knox to say the affair was blossoming: “The Lady and I are making the scene and it is not at all uninteresting.” He was still writing poems and had begun sending them for consideration at a dozen different magazines. He also continued his correspondence with his Bellevue friends, enclosing books, cigarettes, and money. “Some of the best people I’ve come across since the Army were in Bellevue,” he wrote to Don Carpenter, a West Coast novelist with whom he frequently corresponded. “It was just simply that for the last six months my little old navigator didn’t know whether to get set for a year or less above ground or below ground and I suppose the psychotic sensation is a little like trying to hit a baseball when you are standing on a turntable.” When his navigator got its bearings, it sanctioned, we might even say urged, a liaison with Jeanne. Always unable to live alone for long, Mailer was hungry for something beyond one-night stands, and Jeanne seemed perfect. It was a fiery, intense affair. Jeanne said of their marriage: “We had both been extremists who knew no limits; and such an alliance takes you a breath from heaven and a sob from hell.” Jeanne was more than simply another rung on the ladder out of the pit of depression and nascent alcoholism. She was both the ladder and the prize at the top; she was his new mate. In June, she accompanied him to Provincetown, where they spent a few days in a dune shack, and then to Mexico, where she first met Susan. It was there that they got the news that Hemingway had committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961.
OFTEN MENTIONED AS Hemingway’s successor, a role he had openly sought, Mailer expected to be contacted for a statement after Papa blew his brains out with a double-barreled shotgun. When he read the statements of regret by various celebrities and politicians in the New York Times (including President Kennedy’s), he said he experienced “one full heart-clot of outraged vanity that the Times never thought to ask his opinion. In fact, he was not certain he could have given it. He was sick in that miasmal and not quite discoverable region between the liver and the soul.” Finally, he gave a statement to Jeanne for her grandfather’s newspapers in London, which he paraphrased in Of a Fire on the Moon. Papa’s suicide, he wrote, would strengthen the hearts of ignoble bureaucrats because “Hemingway constituted the walls of the fort: Hemingway had given the power to believe you could still shout down the corridor of the hospital, live next to the breath of the beast, accept your portion of dread each day. Now the greatest living romantic was dead.” He said later that Hemingway is “the father of modern American literature, at least for men.”
I keep thinking of [novelist] John Gardner’s unforgettable remark that when a father commits suicide, he condemns his son to the same end. Well, of course, you can go to suicide by more ways than killing yourself. You can rot yourself out with too much drink, too many failures, too much talk, too many wild and unachieved alliances—Hemingway was a great cautioning influence on all of us. One learned not to live on one’s airs, and to do one’s best to avoid many nights when—thanks to Scott Fitzgerald’s work—one knew it was three o’clock in the morning.
What was “doubly depressing,” Mailer said shortly after the suicide, “was that he died in silence.” Absent any valedictory message, he called his hero’s suicide “the most difficult death in America since Roosevelt.” Until the end of his own life Mailer ruminated on Hemingway’s. He examined every aspect of his life and work—his Midwest childhood, his characters (Jake Barnes, Frederick Henry, and Robert Jordan, mainly), his mistakes (taking the literary world too seriously, and establishing “a royal court of followers”), his sense of identity (as strong as Muhammad Ali’s), his narcissism (which he compared to Henry Miller’s), his moral vision (comparing it to that of Saint Thomas Aquinas), the inability of biographers to put his character in focus and, several times, his style: “Hemingway’s style affected whole generations of us, the way a roomful of men are affected when a beautiful woman walks through—their night is turned for better or for worse. His style has the ability to hit young writers in the gut.”
He derided Papa for posturing, and also for not heeding his call to comment on the Cuban Revolution. He found it to be “damn depressing” that Hemingway didn’t “come to the rescue when us Indians were about to burn one of Life’s forts” (an ironic comment in light of Mailer’s own association with Life a decade later). And he worried the bone of the suicide, even to the construction of a scenario.
There is a no-man’s land in each trigger. For the dull hand it is a quarter of an inch. A professional hunter can feel to the division of a millimeter the point where the gun can go off. He can move the trigger up to that point and yet not fire the gun. Hemingway was not too old to test this skill. Perhaps he was trying the deed a first time, perhaps he had tried just such a reconnaissance one hundred times before, and felt the touch of health return ninety times.
Then, with a leap of empathy, Mailer gives a simulacrum of Hemingway’s conversation with himself on that particular morning in July.
Look, we can go in further. It’s going to be tricky and we may not get out, but it will be good for us if we go in just a little further, so we will have to try, and now we will, it is the answer to the brothers Mayo, ergo now we go in, damn the critics and this Fiedler fellow, all will be denied if papa gets good again, write about Monroe, and Jimmy Durante, God bless, umbriago, hose down the deck, do it clean, no sweat, no sweat in the palm, let’s do it clean, gung ho, a little more, let’s go in a little gung ho more ho. No! Oh no! Goddamn it to Hell.
The rendering of Papa’s final moments is a run of associations: Mayo refers to the clinic where Hemingway received psychiatric treatment. Marilyn Monroe was a suicide a year after Hemingway (Mailer discussed their deaths in Esquire). Umbriago was an imaginary companion of comedian Jimmy Durante, an Italian folklore version of Zorba the Greek. Whether Hemingway actually had any feeling for Umbriago or Durante is unknown, but the comedian did visit Havana in the 1950s when Hemingway was in residence. Leslie Fiedler wrote what can only be called a ghoulish piece, “Hemingway in Ketchum,” about his November 1960 visit to the much diminished writer. It came out in Partisan Review in September 1962, just before Mailer published his thoughts about Hemingway’s final reconnaissance. Hemingway told Fiedler to tell Mailer, whom he called “so articulate,” that he had not received the copy of The Deer Park sent to him in Cuba. Fiedler’s profile may have led Mailer to try to find a happier explanation for Hemingway blasting off the top of his head in his Esquire column, which he called “The Big Bite.”
Mailer’s speculations are outcroppings from a longer examination of Hemingway’s psychology in his philosophical self-interview, “The Metaphysics of the Belly,” written in the summer of 1962. It was intended to be part of the big novel, which he was then referring to as both “The Saint and the Psychopath” and “The Psychology of the Orgy.” One can wonder how this nonnarrative material would fit in, and it is quite possible that the problem of integrating this and two other self-interviews contributed to the slow death of the big novel. But, as so often happened in the course of Mailer’s headlong compositional process, the interviews became part of a new project: a study of Picasso. They were to be “an introductory chapter on questions of form and function,” he said later. He went so far as to sign a contract for
the study with Macmillan in the early spring of 1962, but soon abandoned the project, and did not return to it for decades. In 1995 he published Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man.
Hemingway’s death was clearly one of the factors that led him—quite naturally given Hemingway’s acquaintance with Picasso—to think of a book about the painter. When the self-interviews, which veer far afield from Picasso, were finally published as a whole in his 1966 collection, Cannibals and Christians, they came to 135 pages. There is no simple way to describe the catechetical ebb and flow of the dialogues, but his description of the growth and diminution of Being as it moves from state to state, from a molecule in the sea to a piece of driftwood, near-extinction to rebirth—it could be subtitled “The Progress of Souls”—is close to the core of Mailer’s concerns, and it could be argued, Picasso’s. Mailer’s method can be glimpsed in the following conversation of Mailer with himself about the division in Hemingway’s psyche.
MAILER: Postulate a modern soul marooned in constipation, emptiness, boredom and a flat dull terror of death. A soul which takes antibiotics when ill, smokes filter cigarettes, drinks proteins, minerals, and vitamins in a liquid diet, takes seconal to go to sleep, benzedrine to awake, and tranquilizers for poise. It is a deadened existence, afraid precisely of violence, cannibalism, loneliness, insanity, libidinousness, hell, perversion, and mess, because these are the states that must be passed through, digested, transcended, if one is to make one’s way back to life.
INTERVIEWER: Why must they be passed through, transcended?
MAILER: . . . These states, these morbid states, as the old-fashioned psychologists used to say, can obtain relief only by coming to life in the psyche. But they can come to life only if they are ignited by an experience outside themselves. . . . A dramatic encounter with death, an automobile accident from which I escape, a violent fight I win or lose decently, these all call forth my crossed impulses which love death and fear it. They give air to it. So these internal and deadly experiences are given life. In some cases, satisfied by the experience, they will subside a bit, give room to easier and more sensuous desires.
INTERVIEWER: Not always?
MAILER: Not always. Hemingway, it seems, was never able to tame his dirty ape.
INTERVIEWER: His dirty ape?
MAILER: It’s a better word than id or anti-social impulse.
INTERVIEWER: I think it is.
MAILER: Once we may have had a fine clean brave upstanding ape inside ourselves. It’s just gotten dirty over the years.
INTERVIEWER: Why couldn’t Hemingway tame his ape?
MAILER: . . . An artist is usually such an incredible balance of opposites and incompatibles that the wonder is he can even remain alive. Hemingway was on the one hand a man of magnificent senses. There was a quick lithe animal in him. He was also shackled to a stunted ape, a cripple, a particularly wild dirty little dwarf within himself who wanted only to kill Hemingway. Life as a compromise was impossible. So long as Hemingway did not test himself, push himself beyond his own dares, flirt with, engage, and finally embrace death, in other words so long as he did not propitiate the dwarf, give the dwarf its chance to live and feel emotion, an emotion which could come to life only when one was close to death, Hemingway and the dwarf were doomed to dull and deaden one another in the dungeons of the psyche. Everyday life in such circumstances is a plague. The proper comment on Hemingway’s style of life may be not that he dared death too much, but too little, that brave as he was, he was not brave enough, and the dwarf finally won.
The discussion is as much an exercise in self-analysis as commentary on Hemingway. The references to Seconal and Benzedrine, the demarcations between timidity and boldness, the predilection to explore extreme states such as cannibalism, libidinousness, violence, and insanity, not to mention the need to propitiate a monster that inhabits one’s psyche, point as much to Mailer’s psychic states as to Papa’s. Mailer’s suggestion that “we” may all have our own dirty ape supports this idea. A few years later, Mailer would come to call his ape “the Beast,” noting that the monster was “witty in his own way and absolutely fearless,” and required a “breath of air” about once a month. Papa’s death, like the death of many fathers, liberated something in Mailer, and despite his immediate woe, anger, and disappointment, can be seen as the symbolic beginning of the decade of his greatest achievement.
ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF was scheduled for publication in England in September and Mailer had been invited by André Deutsch to fly over for a round of publicity events and public appearances. He was peeved with Deutsch for convincing him to accept the evisceration of “The Time of Her Time” (twenty of twenty-six pages cut) in the British edition, and said he did not think that “this draping of breasts and covering of asses will solve very much at all,” but he had given Deutsch his word that he would accept the verdict of the lawyers. So he accepted the invitation, and was happy to have Jeanne on his arm during his visit to London. “England was absolutely abuzz with this affair,” Mailer recalled. “Each of us loved it, because each of us loved being the center of attention.” They arrived in mid-September for a month-long visit, with a week in Paris toward the end. Deutsch had set up a press conference at his editorial offices, and Mailer answered questions for two hours while sipping Scotch and smoking English cigarettes.
Press reports on Mailer’s problems preceded him, and the reporters “half-expected,” as one of them put it, “a combination of Brendan Behan, De Quincey, Rimbaud, Hemingway and Kerouac.” The reporters didn’t know what to make of Advertisements for Myself, which they called a “hotch-potch,” but were clearly charmed by his American candor as well as his statement that “sentence for sentence” English novelists such as Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene “write better than we do.” It was a relatively subdued event and, it seems, a successful one. He had spoken at political press conferences when he campaigned for Henry Wallace, but this was his first literary press conference. There would be many more.
At some point in his visit, the British philosopher Richard Wollheim interviewed Mailer on the subject of violence. Hemingway was still on his mind, as was Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi death camp bureaucrat who had recently been captured by Israeli agents. In a discussion of the nature of a free act, Mailer distinguished his definition of a free act from Sartre’s idea of a willed action by which a person “can literally recreate himself.” For Mailer, as for Hemingway, “the life of the day has become more complex than the morality that covers it.” His assumption, he said, “is that life always advances far ahead of morality. Morality is the quartermaster corps bringing up supplies to starving soldiers.” One acts and then one decides on the morality based on whether the act felt good or not. This sensation was “what Hemingway was writing about all the time,” he continued, and the hipster also “follows his unconscious, he acts on the basis of his id,” although Mailer didn’t like the word “id” preferring “it,” as in “get with it.” Mailer used Eichmann to distinguish between personal and collective violence. If Eichmann, responsible for uncountable deaths, “had killed 500,000 victims with his bare hands, he would have been a monster,” but he would have “worn the scar of his own moral wound,” and thus gained “our unconscious respect.” He was not to relent on this point; he would continue to seek merit, even a smudge, in the psyches of evil people.
He ended his conversation with Wollheim by saying New York City seemed to be dying slowly. “There’s a psychic poverty in the city today, perhaps in the whole country. The thing that distresses me about America is that for all the country’s done, I don’t think it’s done one quarter of what it should. I believe it was destined, by history if you will, to be the greatest country that ever existed. I don’t think it’s come near it.” For the rest of his life he would harp on his disappointment with the United States for failing to achieve its millennial promise, the Puritan idea of a “city on the hill,” a beacon of hope for humankind. The advent of totalitarianism in all its forms�
�and few writers have identified as many of its subtle variations—was the tocsin he pealed, much as Jonathan Edwards had warned sinners in the hands of an angry God two centuries earlier. Mailer’s God was not so much angry as disappointed, tired, and overextended. Humankind was a disappointment. The desire to be a Jeremiah lingered.
He and Jeanne were in England for at least three weeks and socialized with her friends between interviews for his book. We know that he did not visit Lord Beaverbrook during this trip, his first to England since 1947, but there is a record of his visit to the Somerset home of Janet Gladys Kidd, Jeanne’s mother. She threw a huge party for the couple, one that Evelyn Waugh attended, as Waugh noted in a letter to a friend.
Mrs. Kidd’s ball was very lavish—nothing remarkable if it had been in Surrey but sensational in Somerset. Two bands, one of niggers & one of buggers, a cabaret, an oyster bar in the harness room, stables flood lit, much to the discomfort of the horses. One bit an American pornographer who tried to give it vodka.
I had never before met Lady Jeanne Campbell and was fascinated. She came to us next day bringing the bitten pornographer. He might have stepped straight from your salon—a swarthy gangster straight out of a madhouse where he had been sent after the attempt to cut his wife’s throat. It is his first visit to England.
Norman Mailer Page 38
