Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Mailer was adamant that he had won the debate. Buckley had used most of his thirty minutes attacking various prominent people on the left—Murray Kempton, Mailer, and Castro—while Mailer had analyzed the nature of the right wing. “The crowd was high partisan that night and cheered separately for us with the kind of excitement one expects in a crowd at a high school football game,” he wrote, and “I had succeeded in pushing a salient into the intellectual territory of the Right.” Therefore, he argued, the laurels should go to him. Coming after his nimble-footed performance in Edinburgh, the Chicago debate gave him another reason to feel cocky about his extemporaneous speaking abilities. Roger Donoghue, Mailer’s second, scored it in the manner of a ten-round boxing match: six, three, one for Mailer.

  “I was full of myself,” is how Mailer described his state of mind on the eve of the championship bout. He was certain that Patterson would defeat the heavier contender, Sonny Liston, who was favored by the oddsmakers. Patterson was agile and experienced, but Liston’s weight and reach proved too much, and Patterson was down and out at two minutes and six seconds into the first round. Some fans hadn’t even found their seats when the fight ended. Mailer published his report as his February 1963 “Big Bite” column in Esquire. Titled “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” the twenty thousand-word essay (10K per minute) is to sports writing what “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” is to political reportage—a revamping of the genre. Its power resides not only in his extended slow-motion analyses of the action, but in his stunning similes, as in his description of another fight, in which Emile Griffith pounded Benny Paret to death.

  Paret got trapped in a corner. Trying to duck away, his left arm and his head became tangled on the wrong side of the top rope. Griffith was in like a cat ready to rip the life out of a huge boxed rat. He hit him eighteen right hands in a row, an act which took perhaps three or four seconds. Griffith made a pent-up whimpering sound all the while he attacked, the right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken through the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin. I was sitting in the second row in the corner—they were not ten feet away from me, and like everyone else, I was hypnotized.

  What further distinguishes the essay from other first-rate sports writing is the way Mailer opens his focus to include portraits of the fight crowd, the celebrities, the dignitaries, the hangers-on, and the reporters who covered the fight: “Have any of you ever been through the smoking car of an old coach early in the morning when the smokers sleep and the stale air settles into congelations of gloom? Well that is a little like the scent of Press Headquarters.”

  It is like being at a vast party in Limbo—there is tremendous excitement, much movement and no sex at all. Just talk. Talk fed by cigarettes. One thousand to two thousand cigarettes are smoked every hour. The mind must keep functioning fast enough to offer up stories. (Reporters meet in a marketplace to trade their stories—they barter an anecdote they cannot use about one of the people in the event in order to pick up a different piece which is usable by their paper. It does not matter if the story is true or altogether not true, it must merely be suitable and not too mechanically libelous.) So they char the inside of their bodies in order to scrape up news which can go out to the machine.

  The Mob is at the fight—Liston had connections to the underworld—and Mailer devotes a thousand words to a group portrait. A sample: “Heavy types, bouncers, plug-uglies, flatteners, one or two speedy, swishing, Negro ex-boxers, for example, now blown up to the size of fat middleweights, slinky in their walk, eyes fulfilling the operative definition of razor slits, murder coming off them like scent comes off a skunk.” His metaphors are surprising but precise: “If a clam had a muscle as large as a man, and the muscle grew eyes, you would get the mood.” The Mob bosses are “hawks and falcons and crows, Italian dons looking like little old shrunken eagles, gulls, pelicans, condors.” The essay expands the scope of the sports essay, reshapes it, then transcends it.

  But it is Mailer’s inclusion of himself in the piece that most sharply distinguishes it from the writing of fight reporters of the quality of Red Smith and A. J. Liebling, writers saturated in fight lore, but men (there were no female fight scribes yet) who bowed so deeply to the canons of objectivity that they could not conceive of making themselves major characters in their own work. Mailer, on the other hand, is present from the beginning, depicting his exchanges with other reporters and with handlers, trainers, and managers, including Patterson’s, the legendary Cus D’Amato: “He had stopped drinking years ago and so had enormous pent-up vitality. As a talker, he was one of the world’s great weight-lifters, not brilliant, but powerful, nonstop, and very solid. Talk was muscle. If you wanted to interrupt, you had to bend his arm off.” Toward the end of the piece, Mailer moves to the center of the action.

  Drinking all night at Hefner’s mansion, he convinced himself and several reporters that he knew how to publicize the inevitable rematch of Liston and Patterson so as to make it ten times more profitable. His plan is to present the idea the following morning before Liston’s press conference. He explains how in the “plot-ridden, romantic dungeons of my mind” he has reconceived Norman Mailer as a version of Castro, a man who knows the impossible may be accomplished. He drinks until seven A.M., washes up, and goes to the hotel where he learns that Liston had moved his press conference up a half hour, thus stealing Mailer’s crowd. He walks into Liston’s meeting with reporters, plops himself down on the dais, and tries to insinuate himself into the event. He fails. Removed physically by house detectives, his caper is over, although later he does shake Liston’s hand, and they agree they are both bums.

  Mailer’s drunken behavior was widely reported. His probation officer read about his stunt. He was called in and told that his probation, about to end, would be continued until June 1963. He had paid a high price for his actions, and so reflected at the close of the essay that “some ghost of Don Quixote was laid to rest in me.” Once more, after a notable victory, Mailer overreached. It was now a confirmed pattern. He called his essay “a mélange de genres,” but it is one of the glories of sports writing, and ample recompense for his embarrassing ejection from the press conference. Remembering his story “The Notebook,” one can wonder if Mailer staged the stunt in order to write about it. He invariably had two motives for his actions. Although he never revealed his idea, which died aborning, for staging the rematch (beyond billing it as a struggle between Good and Evil), Mailer genuinely believed he was on a mission to crown Floyd Patterson as a genius for the nation to admire. He had yet to meet Muhammad Ali.

  A FEW DAYS after the boxing match, Mailer sent a telegram to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy: “Go to Oxford, Mississippi, or arrange a way for me to go down. I can talk to those students.” He was referring to the situation of James Meredith, the first black to enroll in the University of Mississippi. Robert Kennedy had sent federal marshals that President Kennedy backed up by army troops to quell violence and compel his admission. The civil rights movement had grown hugely since the federal desegregation of the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools in the fall of 1957, and by the fall of 1962 there were outbreaks of violence all over the South arising from the actions of thousands of black and white “freedom riders” who flouted Jim Crow laws by riding on buses and trains, and eating in segregated terminal restaurants. Mailer wanted to get involved, but there was trouble on the home front, and he stayed in New York to try to save his marriage, already in jeopardy.

  His relations with Jeanne had frayed since Kate was born. He was traveling a lot, and when he wasn’t, attended meetings in Manhattan or wrote in his studio. Jeanne lived on the first floor of the brownstone for a time and then moved out. She had her own journalistic career. Much was left to Anne Barry and Jeanne Johnson, a twenty-year-old woman Mailer had met at Bellevue, who became his ward and helped with chores at the apartment. Mailer had assumed that he and his wife would agree to some sort of household routine. “Having grown up in the middle class, l
ife and background,” he said, “I was very responsible to appointments, habits, agreements. For her it was just will-o’-the-wisp. So we could agree to be doing something, and she would change her mind at the last moment. That used to drive me nuts because I thought we couldn’t get along without structure.”

  Jeanne also didn’t like living in Brooklyn. “She had a feeling that her social life was swallowed up. I don’t know how powerful a factor that was because she was never someone who said, ‘I’m giving up more than I’m prepared to give up.’ She wouldn’t have talked that way,” he said. Another factor was Jeanne’s strained relations with Fan. “My mother was prepared to accept any woman I was married to, but I’d never pretend they liked each other,” he said. Barney, however, with his British manners, got along well with her. Mailer said that infidelities weren’t the largest problem: “There may have been a few en route, but that was hardly part of it—I mean, I was screwing everybody I could—she certainly had the right. It was more, that we never could build anything. It got worse and worse. And she was a dreadful cook. I remember she’d invite people over for dinner and it was comic to watch them eating and screwing their mouths—it was awful swill—and they’d say, ‘Oh, it’s delicious, Jeanne.’ Then they’d leave and I’d say, ‘You’ve no idea what an awful cook you are.’ ” By late fall, the marriage had begun to splinter.

  Whatever his domestic problems, he continued to write a lot, mainly essays and book reviews, while making no progress on the big novel. After more than seven years of work, albeit interrupted work, all he had to show was a handful of fragments. But he couldn’t interrupt the flow of shorter pieces; he needed income. The reputation of Advertisements for Myself and “The White Negro,” the debate with Buckley, and his “Big Bite” column in Esquire led to many requests for interviews and paid speaking engagements, and he accepted virtually all of them. In 1963, he agreed to give talks at Harvard, the universities of Connecticut, Michigan, Chicago, and Wesleyan University. He also rented Carnegie Hall for a May 31 performance titled “An Existential Evening,” and drew a paying crowd of 1,200. Playboy and Esquire wanted more material from him, and Cosmopolitan interviewed him for a profile. But the big novel went begging and debts accumulated. Besides household expenses and the large mortgage payment for 142 Columbia Heights, he was responsible for support payments for several of his children plus alimony for Adele, Anne Barry’s salary, and Jeanne Johnson’s expenses. Royalties from The Naked and the Dead helped, but his lectures and columns for Esquire and Commentary paid little, and both his U.S. and British publishers wanted him to deliver his promised novel.

  Jeanne Campbell moved to Manhattan in early 1963. Mailer wrote to Adeline Naiman about the situation. “Jeanne and I are apart, yet not apart. We see each other almost every night, come together a bit, go away a little—it’s deadening in the extreme. Limbo.” Desirous of family stability, but eager for affairs, he was torn: “When I was young I was always married and rotting my liver with envy that I was not free. Now that I am almost middle-aged I am of course free, and see for the first time that there can be something rich in a large family and lots of responsible detail.” The breakup was prolonged, and even as late as mid-June he wrote to Knox saying there were “indications” that they might patch things up. “She’s the toughest babe I’ve ever known,” he wrote, but “most of her friends I find intolerable and sickening, and of course that’s a fundamental division in my psyche when I as a radical am traveling around with upper-class types.” He had learned all he cared to about these “types.” But to New York Times columnist Harvey Breit, he spoke of the relationship in the past tense, and bemoaned the losses incurred when his marriages had ended.

  Part of the absolute funk is that one ties one’s creativity to one’s mate, and when they start grinding you into dry goatball powder and there’s nothing left but to split or become a whining piteous concentration camp victim, well there one splits if there’s one sperm cell left, but there’s a near mortal anguish which consists of even more than the awful execution of the love that’s left. For one’s killing part of the creativity in oneself—all those delicate habits and projects which were built up around the half-ass life one had with the beloved. And I think it’s almost as bad as a woman losing a baby. I’ve lost three wives, and there was something large to lose in each of them, but I also lost three large chambers of the talent.

  A few days later in a letter to his Aunt Moos (married to Barney Mailer’s brother Louis), one meant for family consumption, he made it clear that the marriage was over: “She’s got a will at least as strong as mine and was no more ready to become a Brooklyn housewife (of the grandest sort, I assure you) than I was ready to become Mr. Lady Jeanne.”

  There was one bright spot: collecting his recent journalism, interviews, essays, and a few pieces of the big novel for a new collection. He had over 200,000 words, which Putnam’s wanted him to cut in half, a task he savored. Initially, he planned to call the miscellany “The Devil Revisited,” but the title was changed to The Presidential Papers shortly before it was published in November 1963. The focus was to be on Kennedy’s administration, for which he had much pointed advice, all of it unheeded. The work was satisfying, but it was only a holding action. Sometime in the winter or early spring of 1963, he came to the conclusion that he needed to write a short novel, one that would amount to a down payment on his large promise that he would “hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters.” If he wasn’t ready to hit a home run, perhaps he could belt a double, “dare a bold stroke,” one that would give him a big paycheck and enable him, as he wrote to his army buddy, Fig Gwaltney, “to do my big book in relative calm.”

  After “10,000 Words a Minute,” the most ambitious piece of this period is “Norman Mailer Versus Nine Writers,” subtitled “Further Evaluations of the Talent in the Room,” which establishes it as a continuation of his earlier essay that had so exasperated Jones, Styron, and Baldwin. In the new essay, begun in early March, he discusses the latest novels by these three—respectively, The Thin Red Line, Set This House on Fire, and Another Country—and recent novels by Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Heller (Catch-22), Updike (Rabbit, Run), Roth (Letting Go), Salinger (Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction), and Bellow (Henderson the Rain King). When it appeared in the July issue of Esquire, it was preceded by a full-page photo of a truculent-looking Mailer in suit and tie standing in the corner of a boxing ring at the Gramercy Park Gym. Mailer was deeply impressed by how the photographer, Diane Arbus, caught his mood that day, and had great admiration for her work. Mailer’s insights are as unflinching as in the earlier essay, but less rebarbative, and slightly more self-deprecatory, as in his opening comments on Henderson the Rain King: “Well, one might as well eat the crow right here. Henderson is an exceptional character, almost worthy of Gulliver or Huckleberry Finn.” He goes on for two paragraphs.

  Bellow’s main character, Henderson, is a legendary giant American, an eccentric millionaire, six-foot four in height, with a huge battered face, an enormous chest, a prodigious potbelly, a wild crank’s gusto for life, and a childlike impulse to say what he thinks. He is a magical hybrid of Jim Thorpe and Dwight Macdonald. And he is tormented by an inner voice which gives him no rest and poisons his marriages and pushes him to go forth. So he chooses to go to Africa (after first contemplating a visit to the Eskimos) and finds a native guide to take him deep into the interior.

  The style gallops like Henderson, full of excess, full of light, loaded with irritating effusions, but it is a style which moves along. The Adventures of Augie March was written in a way which could only be called all writing. That was one of the troubles with the book. Everything was mothered by the style. But Henderson talks in a free-swinging easy bang-away monologue which puts your eye in the center of the action.

  But Bellow falters, Mailer says, perhaps revealing that he is “too timid to become a great writer.” James Jon
es “or myself,” he concludes, “would have been ready to urinate blood” rather than give up “the possibilities of a demonically great ending,” as does Bellow in Mailer’s shrewd judgment.

  He was working on the essay in early March when one evening he went with Roger Donoghue to P. J. Clarke’s, a Midtown saloon frequented by Frank Sinatra and other celebrities. Mailer was nursing his wounds over Jeanne Campbell. A sexy blonde, Beverly Bentley, who knew Donoghue, was sitting nearby and motioned them to join her. Sitting with Bentley was a girlfriend and “the Raging Bull,” former middleweight boxing champ Jake LaMotta. She got Mailer’s attention immediately: “Hey, Norman Motherfuck Mailer, come on over!” An actress from Georgia who broke into show business on Arthur Godfrey’s television show, Bentley (formerly Rentz) had appeared in several films and had had roles in television shows (Naked City) and Broadway plays (Romanoff and Juliet). In the summer of 1959, she had been part of the quadrilla at Hemingway’s birthday party in Málaga, along with several Spanish bullfighters and Valerie Danby-Smith. Papa told her that she reminded him of Marlene Dietrich. The Hemingway connection impressed Mailer. Shortly before he died, Mailer recalled that night at P. J. Clarke’s.

  So I come over and there’s this attractive blonde who was full of pep and vigor. And we’re chatting away and LaMotta turns to me and says, “Hey, get lost.” And I did maybe the single bravest thing—second bravest thing—I’ve ever done in my life. I looked back at him and I said, “I’ll leave when the lady tells me to.” And you know something came off him that was enough to give you pause. But I held my ground and then she came through. I figured, “This bitch, she brought me over here and I could be destroyed, then fuck it, I’ll be destroyed.” In those days, I was hell-bent for destruction. And she said, “No, Jake, Mr. Mailer is my date for tonight.” So he left and she and me just started talking—yakking and chatting. And ended up in bed. Of course. Every one of my wives—one common denominator in all of them is that we all ended up in bed the first night. Which I’m proud of in a way. I think it’s as good a way of deciding something as any.