In a 1965 interview, Mailer said it was important to understand Kennedy’s nature “because his nature once understood helped to point toward a way of understanding America. So, on a vastly smaller scale, I think some people may be interested in me because something of the same process may be present.” After the assassination, he thought and wrote about Kennedy as much as he did Hemingway, returning again and again in works of fiction and nonfiction to the assassination and what might have been. Near the end of his life, he said that no public event in his lifetime had affected him as powerfully. Although he says that a comparison with Kennedy is unfair, he was willing to make it, willing to propose the personality of insider-outsider-left-conservative Norman Mailer as a replacement for the slain president’s, and a new key to the deeper meanings of the nation, and would do so for the remainder of the decade. Noting that a comparison was inappropriate, but then making it anyway was one of Mailer’s characteristic rhetorical gambits.
In December, he flew to Juárez, Mexico, to finalize his divorce from Jeanne. They disagreed on custody provisions, and Mailer saw their daughter only rarely for the first four or five years of her life, until they came to a new understanding and he saw Kate more regularly, especially in the summer. A few years later, Jeanne recalled her marriage to Mailer: “A holocaust of a love affair in many countries and many rounds of mind,” a marriage that produced “a daughter Kate who grows in beauty with hayseed speckling her yellow-green eyes. A bad divorce and a long term of silence, then years of close friendship and some good work together.” The collaboration she refers to is his 1968 experimental film, Maidstone, in which she played an important role. Mailer’s summation: “A remarkable girl, almost as interesting, complex and Machiavellian” as himself. “I was crazy about her,” he said, but “our two worlds were pretty far apart.”
Matters were much improved with Beverly (whom he called “my Georgia peach”) running the household. She developed a warm relationship with Fan, who shared her son’s favorite recipes. Beverly and Anne Barry organized Mailer’s schedule and visits from the children—Danielle and Betsy came almost every weekend. On December 29, shortly after his divorce was final, he married Beverly, now six months pregnant, in the living room of his Brooklyn Heights apartment. His gloom over Kennedy’s death retreated somewhat, and he submitted the fourth installment of the novel on schedule in mid-January 1964. Novel writing on demand was getting interesting, as he wrote to Fig, comparing it to “playing ten-second chess. You have to take the bold choice each time.” He was full of metaphors for the effort; perhaps the best was embodied in a story he told Vance Bourjaily.
Years ago, Theodore Reik was being analyzed by Freud, and as a talented young man he was naturally interested not only in being a superb analyst but a musician, a writer, a lover, a boulevardier, a vigilante, even a mad genius. Freud listened and got angrier and angrier. Finally, he said, “Reik, you want to be a big man? Piss in one spot.” So that is what the serial business puts you up to.
The serial may have given Mailer more focus, but writing ten thousand words a month did not completely occupy him. In addition to his college lectures, he wrote a tribute to Kennedy for the New York Review of Books’ memorial issue; revised his answers to a long interview with Steven Marcus published in The Paris Review; engaged in a debate with Yale professor Vincent Scully on modern architecture in Architectural Forum; published a short story he had written in 1960, “The Killer,” in Evergreen Review; and debated Bill Buckley again, this time on David Susskind’s television program, Open End. At one point, Mailer asked Buckley why he agreed to go on television with him if he disapproved of him. Buckley answered, because “you are a magnetic field in this country.” Mailer also flew to Miami to watch a young heavyweight he had met during his Las Vegas trip, Cassius Clay, defeat Sonny Liston for the title, a bout that so intrigued him that he asked Hayes if he could postpone an installment to write about it. Hayes said no, and he went back to work.
The novel’s protagonist, Stephen Richards Rojack, a forty-four-year-old Harvard graduate, World War II veteran and New York intellectual, might easily be confused with Norman Kingsley Mailer, who was forty-two when he addressed these similarities in 1965: “Rojack is still considerably different from me—he’s more elegant, more witty, more heroic, his physical strength is considerable, and at the same time he is more corrupt than me.” Even so, Rojack, who is half Jewish, half WASP, must be considered Mailer’s stand-in. The resemblances, Mailer knew, would do the novel no harm. But those between Rojack’s wife, Deborah, who has “a huge mass of black hair and striking green eyes,” and Jeanne Campbell were another matter, potentially libelous. In the first chapter of the novel, after Rojack strangles Deborah and then pushes her body out the window onto the FDR East River Drive, it is clear that he had brazenly modeled her on his third wife. Both are tall, strong, intelligent, and self-assured women who come from privileged cosmopolitan backgrounds. Like Jeanne, Deborah “could not utter a sentence for giving a tinkle of value to some innocent word,” as Rojack says of his wife, although Mailer took the precaution of making Deborah Irish and Italian. There was a more worrisome problem. Esquire publisher Arnold Gingrich told Harold Hayes to kill the serial after he read the graphic description of anal intercourse—a first in mainstream American publishing—between Rojack and his wife’s German maid, the carnal Ruta. Mailer’s description of the “high private pleasure in plugging a Nazi” was based, at least in part, on the five days he had spent with Regina, the German barmaid in 1959. Only after “a pruning job as delicate as any in the annals of magazine editing” by Esquire’s fiction editor, Rust Hills, did Gingrich allow the serial to go forward.
Almost every month there was a new problem: Hayes left a chapter in a taxicab (later retrieved); the retrospective plot summaries accompanying the later chapters had errors and imprecisions; the magazine’s lawyers peppered Mailer with queries and requests about the explicit sexual descriptions; and monthly copy came in at the last possible minute. He wrote to Harvey Breit on February 11, “I’ve been down in the mines working on my novel, five installments now done, three to go—mortal terror all around that I will run out of gas.” But he didn’t, and interest grew as the installments appeared. The magazine’s circulation jumped to over 900,000, a record, the first month the serial appeared. To capitalize on the buzz, Esquire purchased an ad in The New York Times announcing that Dial Press would publish the book in hardcover, Dell would do the paperback, and Warner Brothers would make the movie.
As Beverly came closer to term, Mailer struggled to tie the plot threads together neatly, always difficult for him. He was also distracted by two major cultural events in February 1964: the arrival of the Beatles in America (he approved of their performance on The Ed Sullivan Show), and the premiere of Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. He wrote to Knox about the latter: “It’s the only great movie I know which is great not because it’s great as a movie but because it’s sociologically great that the thing was made.” While he was “banging away now in the pits of the sixth installment,” and “feeling wrung out, dull, and smoking too many cigarettes,” his first son, Michael Burks, was born on St. Patrick’s Day. Mailer reported to his Aunt Moos that the baby “looks more like his mother than like me,” and that his ears were “benevolently close to his head.” After four daughters, he was enormously pleased.
He was unhappy, however, about the shape of the last half of the novel. He wrote to Knox on April 19 that the fifth, sixth, and seventh installments were “not up to the first four, and I’ve lost the chance I had to write a really major novel.” He continued: “It’s been an incredible push because I’ve had to write figuratively with a locked wrist, since there was no time to explore and follow the kind of incidental bent which two times out of three leads you up a blind alley and then discovers a bigger book within the book.” The inclusion of Rojack’s intuitions about the cosmic war between good and evil was also weighin
g on him. When the serial was nearing its close, he told an interviewer of his fears: “A good writer feels he is dealing with secrets about the nature of things, which inspires an almost biological fear.” He was referring to the fact that two months before Kennedy’s assassination, Mailer had given Deborah’s father (and Rojack’s antagonist) the middle name Oswald, a spooky circumstance that enhanced his belief in divine and/or demonic meddling. “If psychic coincidences give pleasure to some,” he wrote of the coincidence, “I do not know that they give them to me.”
In retrospect, it was fortunate that the book was written under deadlines. Mailer was forced to create a novel with an ending that grew organically from what preceded it. Given the wherewithal to wander leisurely through the alleyways of plot possibility, he might have written a novel twice as long but perhaps only half as good. The first seven chapters of An American Dream came in at just over 77,000 words, roughly the number desired by Esquire. The much foreshadowed climax of the novel, the meeting between Rojack and Kelly, was by now conceived, but Mailer was late in completing it. The presses were literally held waiting for the final pages, which came in at 22,000 words. Esquire’s editors were forced to print part of it in six-point type.
Until Mailer wrote Dream, his most sensually evocative and lyrical novel, his narrators were not his protagonists (excepting Sam Slovoda in “The Man Who Studied Yoga”). Nor had he invested his heroes with his own deepest beliefs, namely a distrust of pure reason, faith in the authority of the senses, psychic growth achieved by risk taking, courage as the cardinal virtue, anger at the greed and corruption of American life, and fear that fascism might be rooting. Underlying these beliefs was the vision of a heroic but limited God locked in a struggle with a powerful and wily Devil. The fate of the world, perhaps of the universe, hinges on this struggle, one in which humans stood on both sides. Rojack shares these beliefs. A near-alcoholic talk show host and author of a popular book, The Psychology of the Hangman (Mailer published a poem, “The Executioner’s Song,” the month after completing the serial), Rojack, like Mailer, is susceptible to omens and portents. He hears voices, studies the phases of the moon, and waits for either cancer or madness to strike his person.
The operatic plot is easily summarized: Rojack’s wife, Deborah, taunts him with her infidelities (he has his share), and attacks his manhood in nasty ways, goading him into a physical attack (which recalls Mailer’s assault on Adele) that ends with her strangulation. Rojack then throws her body out of her apartment window ten stories down to the pavement below. He claims that her fall was suicide and the brunt of the story is devoted to his attempts to convince his and her friends and associates, the police, and her father, Barney Oswald Kelly, of his innocence. No one believes him, but the voices he hears and the balm derived from his night in bed with Cherry Melanie, a young jazz singer (modeled on Beverly and Carol Stevens, who would become his fifth wife), plus Kelly’s indirect manipulations, keep him from being arrested, but just barely. As he overhears the beating of a black man in another room of the station, the police press him hard, but he is able to sidestep their questions. We learn that Cherry had been Kelly’s mistress, and that she also had an affair with an extraordinarily talented African-American jazz vocalist, Shago Martin. He begins to feel the possibility of expiation for his crime, and the end of his moral odyssey. Barry H. Leeds, one of the most perceptive of Mailer critics, says that Rojack moves “from imminent alcoholism, damnation and madness to salvation and sanity. In a modern analogue of Pilgrim’s Progress, Rojack confronts a series of adversaries, defeating them and the weaknesses in himself that they represent, and in the process absorbing their strengths.” Rojack defeats Martin in a fight at Cherry’s apartment and carries off his talismanic umbrella as a victory token. She tells him that she is pregnant with his child, and they pledge their love.
The novel shows Mailer at the height of his metaphoric power. The mood of the novel, which takes place over thirty-two hours, is haunted; it swarms with malign and beneficent presences, especially in Kelly’s apartment. As Rojack enters the lobby close to midnight, Mrs. Kennedy is about to come down from her Waldorf Towers apartment, further heightening the tense mise-en-scène. As he waits, Rojack imagines that he has
died and was in the antechamber of hell. I had long had a vision of Hell: not of its details; of its first moment. A giant chandelier of crystal above one’s head, red flock on the walls, red carpet, granite pillars (as I proceeded) now a high ceiling, was it gold foil? A floor of white and black, and then a room of blue and green in whose center stood a nineteenth-century clock, eight feet high with a bas relief of faces: Franklin, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Washington, Grant, Harrison, and Victoria; 1888 the year: in a ring around the clock was a bed of tulips which so looked like plastic I bent to touch and discovered they were real.
This is a description of the actual Waldorf Towers lobby. But, in this as well as in countless other passages in the novel, the reader is uncertain as to which reality is being presented: imagined, remembered, or presently experienced. Subtly shifting states of consciousness, punctuated by the corporal, the sensuous, the bloody, became Mailer’s hallmark with An American Dream. In December 2005, after reading a portion of the novel, he closed the book, which he was signing for a friend, and said, “I’ll never write that well again.”
In a conversation in Kelly’s bedroom, which resembles a sixteenth-century Italian chapel, replete with a massive gold-framed mirror and a Lucchese bed with “a canopy encrusted in blood-velvet,” Kelly, who suggests he may be “a solicitor for the Devil,” admits he had been in an incestuous relationship with Deborah since she was fifteen; Rojack confesses that he killed her. They speak a little longer and then Rojack picks up Shago’s umbrella, now quivering ominously, and with Kelly following, goes out to the balcony of the thirty-eighth-floor apartment. It is raining with strong gusts, but he knows that he must walk the three-sided parapet of the balcony to propitiate Deborah’s spirit. Kelly approves of the test, and Rojack gives him the umbrella before clambering up to the ledge. Sodden with fear, he walks all three sides, and then turns to Kelly, who attempts to push him off with the umbrella. Rojack turns like a bullfighter, seizes the umbrella, jumps down and gives Kelly one fierce retributive whack across the face. Then he heaves the umbrella, its magic expired, over the parapet. He rushes out of the apartment and goes to Cherry’s, arriving just in time to see her briefly before she dies, beaten to death by a friend of Shago’s, who has also been mistakenly murdered. In the denouement, Rojack drives to Missouri, where he observes the autopsy, and then pushes on to Las Vegas, where he wins $24,000 and pays his debts. Before leaving Vegas, he makes a hallucinated telephone call to Cherry in some chamber of the afterlife. She tells him that Marilyn Monroe sends greetings. Rojack, “something like sane again,” leaves the next morning to work out his destiny in Guatemala and Yucatán.
The stir created by the serialization was strong and before Mailer had completed it, Warner Brothers optioned the novel, ultimately paying $200,000 for it. This brought his total income for the novel to $345,000, a tremendous sum at that time. With the last installment completed, he wrote to Knox, “What a murderous fucking installment this last one has been. I’m in pretty good shape, but of course tense as hell, and all burned out from smoking. I feel just the way a wire must feel after a short circuit.” In mid-June, he and Beverly left for Provincetown, where he would be joined by all of his children save Kate. Assuming there were no major interruptions, he planned to carefully revise the novel over the summer.
UNTIL THE EARLY 1970s, literary projects dropped into Mailer’s lap just in time, all the time. On July 12, after catching up on correspondence and getting the family settled in Provincetown, he flew to San Francisco to cover the GOP convention, on assignment from Esquire. He expected that Barry Goldwater, a conservative senator from Arizona, would get the nomination. The right wing of the GOP had grown strong and was ready to wrest control of the party from the old middle-of-the-road gan
g—retired President Eisenhower, Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania, Governor George Romney of Michigan, and their ilk. Part of Mailer wanted Goldwater not only to win the nomination, but to defeat the presumptive Democratic candidate, President Johnson, whom he distrusted if not despised. His conjecture was that a Goldwater victory might invigorate the left wing of the Democratic Party. Feeling more confident writing about a convention than he had in 1960, he used the same technique as in the earlier essay: slowly delineate an overarching theme while moving from portrait to portrait of the politicians.
His sketches are acerbic, unforgiving, and hit the mark. Ike, the grand old man of the party, who “usually fought a speech to a draw,” comes on like “a cross between a boy and an old retainer.” Romney “looked like a handsome version of Boris Karloff, all honesty, big-jawed, soft-eyed, eighty days at sea on a cockeyed passion.” Scranton, the favorite of the Eastern Establishment, “a pleasant urbane man, so self-satisfied, so civilized, so reasonable, so innocent of butchers’ tubs and spleens and guts.” And Goldwater, who won the nomination easily: “Talking in a soft modest voice, he radiated at this moment the skinny boyish sincerity of a fellow who wears glasses but is determined nevertheless to have a good time. Against all odds. It was not unreminiscent of Arthur Miller: that same mixture of vast solemnity and unspoiled boyhood, a sort of shucks and aw shit in the voice.”
Mailer was convinced that the nation was in terrible shape, gorging itself on frozen food, sappy television, antibiotics, and cut off from nature by technology and the most insidious of substances, one that was becoming ubiquitous: plastic. He never stopped raging against plastic’s lack of any direct organic connection. (In 1981 he had a horrific argument with Norris, his sixth wife, about her purchase of a plastic dishwasher that “smelled like formaldehyde,” and said that if it didn’t go, he would. It went.) That hardly anyone took him seriously about plastic only enraged him more. The prospect of a Goldwater victory, therefore, made him think, almost hope, that it might produce an underground movement rising against the soft totalitarianism Goldwater’s administration might impose. Always disposed to volatilization, Mailer came to this state of happy-warrior-hood at the convention after hearing, day after day, and once at four A.M. in his hotel room, a band of bagpipers, “giving off the barbaric evocation of the Scots, all valor, wrath, firmitude and treachery,” a sound that seemed “to pass through all the protective gates in the ear and reach into some nerve where the eschatology is stored.” “Acute disease is cure,” Mailer had written, and so the idea of a conservative victory was not just exciting, but even necessary, because “like millions of other whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too pointless and a trifle full of guilt and my gullet was close to nausea with the needless compromises of an empty liberal center.” As he put it in one of his “Big Bite” columns, “If we are ill and yet want to go on, we must put up the ante. If we lose, it does not mean we wished to die.” After a decade of being an outsider, he began to think closely about the state of the nation. “One worried,” he said, “about it for the first time the way you worried about family or work, a good friend or the future.” He would continue to brood, and for a time became Dr. Mailer, diagnostician of America’s diseases. Their etiology would be explored in all of his books through 1972.
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