Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  He was however working on a piece of fiction begun in 1962, perhaps earlier, and then set aside. Known initially as “The Fisher Novel,” and then “The Book of the First-Born,” it was completely separate from the long-delayed big novel, and like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, begins with the protagonist Stephen Merrill in utero. Over the next decade, he would occasionally read “First-Born” aloud to friends and family, who found its half-stately, half-mock-heroic descriptions of Merrill’s earliest days—his breech birth delivery (“the contractions of birth came with the panic of convicts who discovered their dynamite is not sufficient to blow the doors”), his circumcision (“an animal wounded wantonly”), and his breast feeding (“the infant’s mouth flew like a hawk to the nipple”)—to be riveting. Barbara remembered her brother reading it to her in Provincetown during the summer of 1963; Carol Stevens recalled him reading it to her in the early 1970s. Mailer signed a contract with Walter Minton for the novel and received an advance, but never got beyond eighty pages.

  Merrill is born on Mailer’s natal day. His head is wrenched by the forceps of Dr. Blucher (much as Tristram Shandy’s nose is injured by those of Dr. Slop), although it recovers its shape nicely. He has a big head and will eventually wear a size 73/8 hat (Mailer’s size). Merrill also has Mailer’s large red ears. His parents, Jenny (née Fisher) and Archibald “Archie” Merrill (born Mirilovicz), are Jews whose families emigrated to the United States from Lithuania, Archie’s via South Africa. Their portraits instantly call to mind Fan and Barney. Jenny “a woman with the courage of a lioness and the innocence in 1923 of a nineteenth century heroine,” goes into the hospital with little knowledge of the difficulties of childbirth. She resembled, he wrote, “those healthy women with large pleasant features one sees in photographs put out by the offices of propaganda for Soviet womanhood, strong, direct, free of perversion and the imagination for it.”

  Archie has Barney’s barrel chest, spats, and silver-rimmed eyeglasses; they both look a bit like F. Scott Fitzgerald, “except that Archie’s mouth was narrower, his nose was shorter, he looked even more like a Goy than Scott (which is one of the reasons—let us not make Jenny too much of a heroine—that she had been drawn to him) and indeed Archie’s speech was English, a touch fraudulent, and stuffy as phumpherdom.” Called by his future father-in-law “the strangest Jew I’ve ever seen,” Archie has aspirations for his unborn child (he senses it will be a male), and while he doesn’t pray much, his dreams “searched high places.”

  Jenny, the daughter of a rabbi, prayed to Solomon (“in order that her child take its place among the brightest who ever lived”), King David, the Bal Shem Tov, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and to England’s only Jewish prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. The narrator explains that the high hopes of mother and father are not just matters to be inculcated as the child grows under their tutelage, no, “the contract was already in his flesh as he was being conceived.” Jenny, sentenced to be “a duchess in her family and a small little woman in the world,” produced an egg that sought to incorporate “qualities in herself a little opposite to herself.” She did not love herself, and “so she wanted a warrior,” a son who would “go to places she had never gone and he would change life rather than be shaped by it.” This is fiction, and the novelist has license to speculate on the concerted powers of will and aspiration transforming and uniting sperm and egg, but Mailer’s personal beliefs, in fact, varied little from his narrator’s. When mind, body, and spirit were in special accord—not balance, but a mystical configuration—then remarkable children could be conceived, or as he put it a few years later, “Good fucks make good babies.” This is the crudest distillation of his long essay on gender, sexuality, and feminism, The Prisoner of Sex, published in 1971. “The Book of the First-Born” prefigures the polemical essay.

  As late as the fall of 1974 Mailer was fiddling with this fragment (and he spoke of reviving it through the early 1980s), but always stalled. Besides a need for family history, that he never obtained to his satisfaction, Mailer gave two additional reasons for not continuing with “First-Born,” which he described in 1992 as “the saga of the Mailer family back in Russia with my grandfather as I imagined him.” The first is that after he had read the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize–winning writer whose stories of life in the shtetls of Poland are depicted with Chekhovian finesse, he thought, “Oh Lord, there is absolutely no need for my book.” He gave a second reason in a 2006 interview, where he explained that he intended that “First-Born” would be stored on the computers of a fictional Noah’s Ark spaceship that leaves earth sometime in the distant future. The information that the ship’s eighty survivors have about human history before its destruction in a nuclear holocaust (he planned to use his short story “The Last Night” to depict the end of the world) is fragmentary. The chief source for the post–World War II world, he explained, was the biography of “a writer of the period in the second half of the 20th century named Norman Mailer.” The heat of the third novel in the trilogy was going to be the story of Merrill-Mailer as told in “First-Born.” “The scheme was wonderful! The architectonics were exquisite,” he said. Using his American life as an exemplum, a repository of essential cultural memory for unborn generations voyaging to the stars, aligned perfectly with his deepest ambitions. But he was forced to abandon the idea not because he feared sliding into the sloughs of hubris—this troubled him not—but because mastering the scientific-technological physics of spaceships and space travel needed to make the novel credible was beyond him. “My brain power had passed the point where I could retain that kind of information and digest it,” he said.

  Yamanishi wrote in December to ask if he still planned to use his 1962 story, “Truth and Being, Nothing and Time: A Broken Fragment from a Long Novel,” as part of the big novel. Mailer responded by saying that “so many years have gone by, and I have changed so much, that I think the long novel will never be written in its original form.” After ten years of stunted efforts, Mailer had finally given up on the narrative adventures of Eitel and Elena, Sergius and Denise, Dr. Sandy Joyce and Marion Faye. Some of these characters would appear in the dramatic version of The Deer Park that would be staged in 1967, but nowhere else. The big novel was dead. At least this one.

  WITH MAILER’S BLESSING, his friend Bob Lucid had organized an event at the 1965 Chicago conference of the Modern Language Association, and convinced Ralph Ellison and John Cheever to join Mailer in addressing a session entitled “The Modern American Writer and the Cultural Experience.” An overflow audience of approximately two thousand filled the Red Lacquer Room of the Palmer House to hear the three novelists speak. Cheever led off and spoke against Podhoretz’s idea of the novel as documentary, and also lauded the powers of unfettered imagination. Ellison, speaking without notes, castigated sociologists for obscuring the painful realities of urban life with statistics, and invoked the alienated lives of Harlem. Richard Stern, a friend from the University of Chicago, gave the following summary of Mailer’s talk.

  Mailer, in a fine blue suit, vest lapped in black silk, took the microphone like a bulldog and in a voice which gripped every throat in the room, read a corrosive, brilliant, hit-and-run analysis of the failure of American novelists to keep up with a whirling country, their division into opposed camps of those who fed titillating pap to the genteel and those, like Dreiser, who pointed American Julien Sorels to the doors of power (though his clumsiness could not open them). Down the road were “the metaphorical novelists,” Hemingway and Faulkner, one of whom described the paw, the other the dreams of the social beast.

  One reason that American writers had been unable to keep pace, Mailer argued, was that American culture changed ten times faster than other cultures, “a phenomenon never before described.” The country, he said, grew “like a weed and a monster and a beauty and a pig. And the task of explaining America was taken over by Luce magazines.” America had not produced a twentieth-century writer who could “clarify a natio
n’s vision of itself as Tolstoy had done perhaps with War and Peace or Anna Karenina.” Mailer ended his talk about the failings of the nation’s current novelists by saying that the communication “of the deepest and most unrecoverable human experience must yet take place if we are to survive.” Although he didn’t say so, it was the job he wanted, as must have been obvious to the audience. In this grand setting, a month before his forty-third birthday, Mailer, full of beans, and wearing his blue pinstripe banker’s suit (now his public uniform), described the idiosyncratic strengths and weaknesses of novelists as dissimilar as Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Elinor Wylie, Bellow, Capote, James Jones, and Terry Southern, noting the precise location of each in a dynamic artistic constellation of his own creation. Mailer’s speeches were not always successful, but Stern said that for this speech the academics “thundered applause,” their thirst for affirmation of literature’s noble mission “slaked by a master.” It was Mailer’s second major speech of the year and the professors responded to him as enthusiastically as had Berkeley students. When Mailer first began making public speeches, he had tried to make his audiences itch; now he was making them cheer.

  He stayed close to home in the first months of 1966. Beverly was due in early March. He worked on Cannibals and Christians, which he hoped would be published in June, and appeared at several antiwar events in Manhattan. As protests against the war increased, President Johnson in February authorized Operation Rolling Thunder, a devastating B-52 bombing campaign against North Vietnamese targets. The expansion incited the protesters, now joined by returning Vietnam vets. That same month Mailer spoke at the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y with Howe, Podhoretz, and Columbia’s Steven Marcus; a week later he took part in a read-in at Town Hall in Manhattan with twenty-eight other writers and performers, including Hellman, Kazin, Sontag, and Lowell. Mailer and Lowell enjoyed each other’s company and began discussing the possibility of traveling to Japan in the summer to speak against the war, and the ominous possibility that the United States would enter into a nuclear war with China. He wrote to Yamanishi to tell him of the possible visit, and also to inform him that he might write a nonfiction book “to explain the country to itself.” He said, “America will soon divide, an underground will form, and there must be a few works whose existence will help keep alive some morale in that underground.” He finished with some good news: “We had a son last week, whom we named Stephen McLeod (yes, after the characters in An American Dream and Barbary Shore) and he’s a handsome boy with calm features and a deep nature, I suspect. Beverly is fine.” Now he was the father of six, and his expenses were mushrooming.

  Never much of a financial planner, Mailer knew nevertheless that he could not shoulder his obligations on royalties from his earlier work and the relatively small amounts he received for magazine work and college speaking gigs. He needed to produce new work. When he was asked to write an essay for a volume on the American dream, he declined, saying that his load made him feel like “a 19th century novelist most of the time, Dickens, dare I say it, Balzac, Dostoevsky, you know.” Despite his commitments, in April he bought a waterfront house at 565 Commercial Street in P-town, next to the one where John Dos Passos had lived for over two decades. Before leaving the city from Provincetown in early May 1966 to take possession, he wrote to Eldridge Cleaver, who was in prison for rape and assault. Cleaver was seeking parole, and Mailer wrote a testimonial to his talent. Later that year, Cleaver, who later became a leader of the Black Panther Party, was released. Writing in Ramparts while still imprisoned, Cleaver praised Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” for being “prophetic and penetrating in its understanding of the psychology involved in the accelerating confrontation of black and white in America.”

  ONCE IN PROVINCETOWN, Mailer reconsidered the dramatic version of The Deer Park. Beverly was involved in a small theater group there, and they began discussing the idea of presenting the play to a summer audience. He began revising, and it took on a new structure. At the same time, he was thinking about writing a short novel for Walter Minton. He had parted company with Putnam’s but still owed them a book, having accepted, and spent, an advance. He began to think about his trip the previous year to Alaska, and came up with a tentative plan. For several years, he had mulled over a story about a group of violent bikers and their women living in the scrub oak thickets of Provincetown’s dunes. The novel was “so odd and so horrible” that he kept putting it off.

  I was, as I say, in fear of the book. I loved Provincetown and did not think it was a good way to write about it. The town is so naturally spooky in mid-winter and provides such a sense of omens waiting to be magnetized into lines of force that the novel in my mind seemed more of a magical object than a fiction, a black magic. Nonetheless, I began the book in the spring of ’66. It attracted me too much not to begin. Yet because I could not thrust Provincetown into such literary horrors without preparation, I thought I would start with a chapter about hunting bear in Alaska. A prelude.

  His plan had been to send “two tough rich boys”—Texans, based on memories of the men he served with in the 112th Cavalry—the father of one boy and a couple of the father’s cronies to Alaska to hunt, and then transfer the action to Provincetown. But what was to be a few introductory chapters turned into a complete novel about the savage slaughter of big game with huge caliber guns, fired in some cases from a helicopter (no one missed the parallels with Vietnam), and climaxing when the two young men, D.J. and Tex, go unarmed into the wilderness. By the time they had returned to Dallas, Mailer realized that he was done with them.

  His story about the two southern lads was written in an entirely different style—frantic, slangy, and obscene. Marrying a southern woman and becoming the father of two sons also had an influence on Vietnam. He was also writing much more quickly. It is an oversimplification but nevertheless roughly accurate to say that from the mid-1960s on, Mailer had two compositional modalities: fast and slow. When he was in the groove, he could turn out fifteen thousand words a week. When he wasn’t, he could stretch a book over a decade, shuffling, revising, and further revising. His 1967 Alaska novel, Why Are We in Vietnam?, is the same length as An American Dream, but was written in less than half the time. He called these books “bonuses, gifts. You do not have to kill some little part of your flesh to dredge them up.” Vietnam wrote itself, he said, and “I was full of energy when I was done,” which is to say nothing like the shape he was in after completing his previous books.

  Anne Barry had left Mailer’s employ in the spring of 1966. She was replaced by Madeline Belkin in Brooklyn and Sandy Charlebois Thomas in Provincetown. He kept them both busy, Belkin with his correspondence and New York projects, and Thomas with typing Vietnam and the script for The Deer Park. The Mailers had a lot of other help—maids and cooks—and the house was usually overflowing with family and guests, including Buzz Farbar, a young editor Mailer met a few years earlier who would become one of his closest friends. When Vance and Tina Bourjaily visited they saw that the house was full of ropewalking equipment. He said that there was “a mystique” about it for Mailer. “It’s a feat of balancing that has religious import in some societies and is a circus act in others and a kids’ showoff trick in still others. Norman has a capacity not only to get totally absorbed by something like that but also to communicate his enthusiasm for it to everybody else. We hadn’t been there an hour before we were trying to find the right ropewalking shoes and Norman was showing us the basic technique. This remarkable enthusiasm for odd things seems to be an important part of his considerable magnetism.”

  After Mailer stayed with the Trillings in England, Diana Trilling had become his best female friend, vying with Lillian Hellman. The closeness of their relationship is reflected in the number and length of the letters they exchanged over more than two decades. While in Provincetown, he received a long letter from her, and answered at even greater length. She had asked what he said was “an unhappy question.” Did they have a real sense of
each other? Did he address “the real Diana Trilling,” or some construct? His answer explains what he thought about friendship.

  I don’t make friends with people because they satisfy my idea of them. I am friends with people because they make me feel good when I talk to them and since everything on earth is extraordinarily limited I often don’t want even to have too good an idea of them. I don’t want to have too much of a hypothesis to be proved or disproved—rather there’s an animal pleasure in friends. One feels a little safer or a little merrier, one shores up a small bulkhead against the large dread that always waits outside the door.

  He went on to say that there was a new mood afoot in the country, and he didn’t know if he understood it better than anyone else. “These McLuhans, these Pinchens [sic] and Jeremy Larners and this love of electronics and plastics and folk/rock makes me feel like Plekhanov scolding the Soviets in 1917. Sometimes I think we are at the tail end of something which soon may be gone forever, so that in 50 years, for instance, there may not be anyone alive who’s read all of Remembrance of Things Past.” Mailer had already decided that the Twist was evil, and he had limited interest in rock ’n’ roll, although he would later allow that Bob Dylan did know how to write a lyric.

  These sentiments are explored at great length in Cannibals and Christians. It is a difficult book, he told Yamanishi, because “I carry my ideas further than they have ever gone before, including for instance an attack upon the scientific method.” The brunt of this attack derives from his assertion that metaphor had partnered with science for centuries in exploring and presenting life. The scientists of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Mailer wrote in Cannibals, were also “adventurers, rebels, courtiers, painters, diplomats, churchmen.” No more, he said. Because the best metaphorical thinking arose from the profoundest experiences of humankind, he argued, destroying art’s collaboration with scientific vision meant that our expanding knowledge of nature, of the universe, was not truly grounded. In the mid-twentieth century, science progressed mainly through experimentation and laboratory work; “Science has built a wall across the route of metaphor: poets whine before experts.” And what had twentieth-century science produced? The gasoline engine, airplanes, modern architecture, antibiotics, psychoanalysis, the atom bomb, plastics, and the exploration of space. Mailer had reservations about some of these achievements, and deplored the rest. “Modern science may prove to be the final poisoned fruit of the rich European tree, and plague may disclose itself as the most characteristic invention of our time.” The plague in all its social, architectural, and technological manifestations is one of the collection’s three foci; the other two are literature and politics. Much of the book’s political discourse is antiwar argument; it is dedicated to “Lyndon B. Johnson, whose name inspired young men to cheer for me in public.”