Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  In 1978, the editor of Waugh’s letters wrote Mailer asking about Waugh’s comments. Mailer replied.

  The horse did bite me on the finger, but I was not feeding him vodka, just petting him on the nose. Maybe it was my breath that enflamed the animal, or maybe he was fond of Evelyn Waugh. I also thought I could point to the inaccuracy that I did not cut my wife’s throat but realized on reflection that throat-cutting is only a general term of description when used by Mr. Waugh. Otherwise, his account is accurate and his description of me adequate, and will doubtless enhance my status.

  Mailer’s forbearance is not as unusual as it might seem, and might perhaps be attributed to his admiration for Waugh’s facility with sentences.

  Colin MacInnes, a novelist and social activist, interviewed Mailer when he was in London. MacInnes, sometimes called the English Norman Mailer, had a long discussion with him on BBC radio, covering a range of issues, including the ways in which mood is undermined by modern life, God and the Devil, hip, and Time magazine. Time has “a detestation of all the younger and more adventurous American writers,” Mailer said, “and willy nilly I’m considered the figurehead.” Shortly after they returned to the United States, Time reported that Mailer was doing the Twist with Lady Jeanne Campbell at the Peppermint Lounge on 45th Street in New York. An unflattering photograph of a perspiring Mailer accompanied the story. He was upset and wrote to his California friend, Don Carpenter, that the magazine had done “a nice knife job” on him. The piece said he had “a dazed look on my face which my probation officer will naturally read as drugged. In the dreams of Walter Neo-Mitty there is one recurring fantasy. He comes to power like Fidel Castro and enters TIME MAGAZINE with a burp gun.”

  He decided to make a push on the big novel and in the fall of 1962 rented a house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about an hour north of Philadelphia. He and Jeanne spent most of each week there and weekends in New York. The work did not go well. He wrote to Carpenter to complain: “I always suffer from the same thing you suffer from: to wit, I start a novel and immediately I’m getting all my best ideas on the excursions and departures from it.” He had never found a way to avoid this, he said, and his only working principle was to “let the unconscious have complete dominion.” He wrote to the still incarcerated Harry G. to say how “lucky” he, Mailer, had been to avoid prison, and to say he was sending him a pile of books and a subscription to the Voice. Being holed up in the country and writing every day was a “depressing activity,” he said to Harry, “sometimes after two hours of writing I feel as if I’ve done six or seven hours of manual labor.” In December, they gave up on country living. “I suppose I suffer from some no doubt misguided notion that New York is the big leagues,” he said, “and so when I get away from it for too long I begin to miss the feeling that history is being made around me.” Jeanne, now pregnant, was also ready to move. Until the final decade of his life, Mailer shuttled regularly from city to country and back.

  Just before Christmas, Jeanne got an assignment to cover the two-day summit meeting in Bermuda between President Kennedy and British prime minister Harold Macmillan. The meeting was to discuss the Berlin Wall, which had recently been constructed by the East Germans to separate the Russian zone from those of the British, French, and Americans. At one of their meetings, Kennedy famously told Macmillan, “I wonder how it is with you, Harold. If I don’t have a woman for three days, I get terrible headaches.” Campbell’s contact with the president was no doubt restricted to press meetings, but she had had a brief affair with him before she met Mailer, rendezvousing with him at her Georgetown town house. Mailer wrote to Knox about Jeanne’s trip, adding that she would be flying from Bermuda to her grandfather’s villa on the Riviera for a week. “I’ll be a bachelor during Christmas. How could this happen to me?” he asked.

  Emile “Mike” Capouya of Macmillan wrote to Mailer offering $10,000 for a book on Castro. He was tempted but wanted a larger advance, as well as an assurance that he could travel around Cuba with Castro, as Sartre had done. While waiting to hear, he plugged away at the novel, writing only a few pages at a time. On New Year’s Eve he missed Jeanne and cabled Randolph Churchill, whom he had met in England, asking him to please call Jeanne at her grandfather’s villa and ask his “old honey bun, dearest alley cat,” to come home. She flew back almost immediately. Divorce proceedings with Adele were dragging on, he told Knox, and he and Jeanne “are still together, sometimes in and out.” But with a child on the way, he was eager to get married. When Clay Felker contacted him about writing a long piece on the first lady and the upcoming televised tour of the White House she was conducting, he agreed instantly, happy to end his feud with Esquire and have a paying reason to shelve the big novel.

  THE WINTER 1962 issue of Dissent contained a fairly harsh critique of the Kennedy administration by left-wing social critic Paul Goodman, whose 1960 book on the disaffection of young people, Growing Up Absurd, made him well known. Mailer knew him casually; both contributed regularly to Dissent. In the course of his essay, Goodman criticized Mailer for describing Kennedy as a hipster, calling Mailer “a chump” for missing Kennedy’s true intentions. Mailer fired off a brilliantly ad hominem letter to the editor that began by saying that he did not read Goodman often “because his style reminds me of the gray unfortunate odor in a prison laundry.” He continued:

  I do not know that the cause of pacifism, anarchism, socialism, radicalism, existentialism, Goodmanism, Mailerism, priapism, or the breath of a new underground is going to be enlivened much by Goodman calling me a chump. The insult is not powerful nor accurate enough to touch a creative sore and so sharpen my appetite to work, it is not on the other hand insignificant enough to be ignored. The result has the unhappy effect of an old creep’s fart. It seeps into the air and dulls the mood at an office party. Time which takes such gas for sneaks of oxygen will end no doubt by quoting Goodman on Mailer.

  His letter, “delivered exactly to the jugular,” as he later put it, made Dissent’s editors unhappy; they wished to avoid unpleasantness, and Mailer agreed, reluctantly, to withdraw it. He liked his association with the journal, “although his private mixture of Marxism, conservatism, nihilism, and large parts of existentialism could no longer produce any polemical gravies for the digestive apparatus of scholarly Socialist minds.” Mailer remained on Dissent’s board for twenty more years, but never wrote anything for it again. It was another sign that the 1950s were over. For the next decade, the bulk of his magazine work would appear in Esquire, the Voice, and, at the end of the 1960s, Harper’s and Life.

  Something close to 75 percent of the national television audience watched the first lady give a tour of the White House on February 14, 1962. All three networks showed the program, A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy. Unhappy with the lack of authentic furnishings, she had led an ambitious restoration effort and proudly displayed the results during the program. Earlier, Mailer met with press secretary Pierre Salinger in Washington to ask for an interview with the first lady. A few days later, it was denied. Mailer was piqued, as he said in the essay: “One’s presence was not required. Which irritated the vanity. The vanity was no doubt outsize, but one thought of oneself as one of the few writers in the country.” If she was going to be the nation’s muse, or “queen of the arts,” he felt she should be willing to stand for an interview. His letter to her about the honor of the Marquis de Sade had not been forgotten, and he would have to write the essay, “An Evening with Jackie Kennedy,” from a distance. He was critical of Mrs. Kennedy and the program as stultifying. Mailer’s essay was a last yelp of anger against the decorous tedium of the Eisenhower era, one he feared had not yet ended.

  Mailer made a comment about the first lady’s “surprisingly thin, not unfeverish” legs in the piece, comparing them to the legs of southern girls walking down the street when he was stationed at Fort Bragg. This remark was seen by conservative readers, he said, “as an attack on the flag.” Not long after, Mrs. Kennedy came to o
ne of George Plimpton’s parties. Gay Talese recalled that as she was escorted in by Plimpton, the host surveyed the large crowd, pausing to decide which of his hundred-odd guests he would introduce to her. “And I could see that the long guest list suddenly got very short. I remember one guy he wouldn’t introduce Jackie to, and didn’t, was Norman Mailer, who was probably the most famous writer in New York at the time.” Mailer’s memory coincides with Talese’s: “It was a pretty mean piece, actually. Anyway, Jackie walked into George’s party, and I remember she made a point of talking to Styron for the longest damn time. I was dying.” It didn’t end there.

  In 1965 or 1966, Mrs. Kennedy asked Richard Goodwin, who had been one of her husband’s speechwriters and an important figure in his and the succeeding administration, to help Norman Podhoretz put together a party where she could meet a group of prominent New York writers and editors. Mailer, of course, would have been at the top of any such list, but one of the conditions given to Podhoretz was that he not be included. “So,” Mailer said, “Norman, my good friend, didn’t invite me.” Styron, “who was then my dire rival,” was invited, another blow. Styron’s star receded somewhat in the next decade, and Mrs. Kennedy broke off her relations with Podhoretz in the late 1960s. In the 1970s, she would become friendly again with Mailer.

  In late February 1962, he flew alone to Mexico to finalize his divorce from Adele, and then took a two-week trip to France with Jeanne to inform her father and grandfather of her pregnancy. They visited her father at the ducal seat, Inveraray Castle in western Scotland. Jeanne recalled the visit: “Because my father is really almost out of medieval times, for Norman that was like being put down in the middle of . . . a Japanese court.” Mailer remembered the duke as “one of the coldest, nastiest men I’ve ever known.” At dinner, Mailer was seated at the opposite end of a long table from Argyll, with Jeanne in the middle. “He talked to her throughout the entire meal; I was out of it,” Mailer said. “It was the stuff of a novel, a comic novel, on a very high level.” The visit to Beaverbrook was easier, Jeanne said, “Grandfather and Norman had a meeting ground. Both were intellectuals, they were both very interested in politics, both men of action.” Mailer described the visit to La Capponcina at Cap d’Ail, across the bay from Monte Carlo:

  As I was saying goodbye to Beaverbrook at the end of a surprise visit Jeannie and I afforded him (for we did land without warning), I said to him in parting, “Well, sir, under the circumstances you’ve been gracious,” at which point the, I suspect, famous gleam came into his eyes and he repeated in an evaluative voice, half statement, half question, “Under the circumstances.” I would like to think it amused him but I can’t bet on it.

  They were married on May 4, as Jeanne remembered, “by a Black woman Methodist minister in the Maryland Woods.” No friends or relatives were present. Later that month, they took possession of the five-story brownstone in Brooklyn that Mailer had first seen two years earlier. The building at 142 Columbia Heights overlooks the East River’s Buttermilk Channel, with a matchless triptych of the Statue of Liberty on the left, the lower Manhattan skyline in the center, and the Brooklyn Bridge to the right. Several famous writers have lived in the Heights, including Walt Whitman, Thomas Wolfe, Hart Crane, Carson McCullers, W. H. Auden, and Mailer’s erstwhile neighbor Arthur Miller. Fan and Barney, and Truman Capote, lived around the corner on Willow Street. Mailer used to tell friends that Irish politicians favored the Heights as a place to ensconce their mistresses, who then looked longingly across the river to Manhattan. He lived there for the rest of his life.

  With the help of a carpenter, Mailer redesigned the top floor to give it the feel of a yacht, with rope and wooden ladders, hanging lines and catwalks. The ceiling was teak, and bowed downward like the side of a ship. He also purchased a brass engine order telegraph and compass binnacle, which remained for decades. To get to his small writing room eighteen feet up, he had to climb a rope ladder and then walk across a ten-inch catwalk. He explained to Yamanishi that to get all the way up to the ridgepole and skylight, twenty-five feet up via the rope ladder, was “so arduous that I have been able to climb successfully to the top only a few times, and then during periods when I’m not smoking.” He purposely did not attach the bottom of the ladder to the floor so that it swung and twisted with the exertions of climbing, giving him exercise without “the monotony of calisthenics.” Coming down was even more difficult because “one is tired and devils seem to get into the rope.” The children enjoyed the rigging and played on it all the time. The chief reason for installing it, he said, was that “Jews have a bad head for heights,” and the setup “keeps a small sense of danger present so that it can, I suspect, serve as a tonic for my much-abused liver.” The nautical setup (and his memory of walking narrow ledges in San Francisco in 1963) would also help him imagine what negotiating the narrow stone parapet in the Waldorf Towers was like for Stephen Rojack in An American Dream.

  Jeanne’s pregnancy proceeded well while he worked uneasily on the big novel. He wrote Fig (with whom he had reconciled after receiving his glowing review of Deaths for the Ladies) that he was not so much moving ahead as “making separate starts” on different versions. One of these would continue the account of Marion Faye’s Provincetown party, “Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out,” and then alternate, as Mailer wrote in his notes: “The novel sits in two periods, the present and the future. Present is O’Shaugnessy in Monroe St. [the long whitewashed apartment where Mailer had been attacked with a hammer], Marion out of jail, Joyce [Dr. Sandy Joyce, Denise Gondelman’s shrink] with Elena, etc. The future is O’Shaugnessy as a TV star, Marion as a millionaire and President-maker, and Joyce as a great intellectual who is dying of cancer.” The most important—and final—piece of the big novel to be published is a meditative-fantastical short story worthy of Borges, “Truth and Being; Nothing and Time: A Broken Fragment from a Long Novel,” which he wrote in December 1960 after being released from Bellevue. It appeared in Evergreen Review in September 1962.

  Mailer called it “an odd, even exceptional, essay about: shit. Literally.” It appears to be narrated by Dr. Joyce, the “archbishop of the New Royal Scatological Society,” as he is dying of “a rebellion of the cells.” He explains the nature of his disease with Spenglerian élan, noting that the rate of his cancer’s growth bears a relationship to “the rate of increase in the decomposition of radium to lead.” He describes the anus as “the final executor of that will within us to assign value to all which passes through,” and ponders the digestive process by which we “expel the exquisite in time with the despised”; out of the asshole “pour the riches of Satan.” We are not brave enough to extract the best nutrients from the food we eat, not anymore. The piece can be better appreciated if understood in the larger context of Mailer’s cosmic war between good and evil. He concludes that “the state of Being in the Twentieth Century was close to extinction of itself because of the diseases and disasters of soul over the centuries.” Totalitarianism, in its subtle and blatant forms, and its handmaiden, technology, were seeking to extinguish civilization. Feces was one battleground.

  He was in complete earnest. As the British novelist Anthony Burgess noted in a review of Mailer’s 1983 novel of pharaohs, sex, war, magic, odors, and excrement, Ancient Evenings, Mailer understood that “Egypt is fertile because of Nile mud, and mud is a form of faeces.” Thus, he continues, “The sorcery of the anal passage is the source of power.” And odor is one of the keys to the meanings of excrement, as Mailer concluded in “Truth and Being”: “It is characteristic,” he said, “of revolutionaries, passionate lovers, the very ambitious, the greedy, the stingy, and dogs, to fix on what is excreted by others.” Most commentators passed over his fecal interests holding their noses. He didn’t care. His navigator told him to keep probing. Burgess was one of a small number who did not mock or dismiss Mailer’s hypotheses about shit, but even he could not resist a joke about the matter. The only occasion he met Mailer, Burgess said in his review, was
at one of those “fabulous New York parties (literally because the big modern sources of fable were there—Lowell, Warhol, Ginsberg, et al.)—he said: ‘Burgess, your last book was shit.’ I can see now that he was paying me a compliment.” Burgess may have been correct. Dung was of inexhaustible interest to Mailer. As Mailer wrote in his essay, “Some of the best and some of the worst of us are drawn to worship at the congregation of the lost cells.” In later years when the subject came up, he invariably enjoined: “Never ignore shit.”

  The Mailers spent the summer of 1962 in Provincetown. The previous months had been turbulent, with the couple sometimes fighting in public. Jeanne wrote later that “we could empty a room quicker than any couple in New York.” But the baby was due in August and their lives, perforce, were quieter for a time. He was still working, somewhat fitfully, on various parts of the big novel. Before he left for Cape Cod, he had written to his Bellevue friend, Harry G., with avuncular advice that had personal resonance. He told him to read and “immerse yourself in the past” as a way of confronting his key problem: “your mind is three times more powerful than your culture.” Mailer said that for the first time in many years “there is a small chance I am going out of my particular madness which has been like your elephantiasis of the ego.” The Mailers spent July and the beginning of August in relative tranquillity.

  MAILER WAS AMONG the many novelists from around the world who had been invited to Edinburgh for a five-day conference, “The Novel Today,” in late August. He wrote to Sonia Brownell, George Orwell’s widow and one of the organizers, saying he wanted to come, especially because there would be no speeches, just unrehearsed exchanges among the assembled novelists. He could not be definitive, however, as Jeanne was due close to the dates of the conference. They were thinking of calling the child “Christmas,” Mailer said, which Brownell thought was a marvelous idea. Jeanne’s mother came to New York for the birth and was charmed by Mailer. When she wasn’t with her daughter, Mrs. Kidd found herself being “whirled round the nightspots” by her son-in-law. He was a “mercurial character, loaded with talent, and someone you either loved or loathed. I loved him.” Mailer said he got along “famously” with her. When the baby arrived on August 18, she was named Kate Cailean. He intended to remain home, but both Jeanne and her mother urged him to go to the conference. He flew to Edinburgh on August 21, arriving on the second day. His first statement to the conferees was an announcement of Kate’s birth.