Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  His time with Conrad and another unnamed astronaut made him see that they were “not dull people,” and “not all of a piece.” The Apollo 11 trio, however, remained off limits except for carefully orchestrated appearances. Consequently, Mailer’s portraits of the three men may be the weakest part of the book. He demonstrated that he could repackage official biographies, quotes from staged events, and cursory interviews with the three national celebrities behind a glass wall as adroitly as any talented reporter. But not much better. He admitted years later that he was unhappy with what he had written about the trio: “I tended to lean too heavily on the few times I saw them in interviews with other writers,” he said. “I saw them for a total of perhaps about three hours, and on that I attempted to understand them to write a book, and it got me into great trouble. I would have been better off if I’d never met them.” There is a tendency if you meet someone for a little while, he said, “to see all of their personality as being similar to the little bit you glimpsed.” Mailer spent his first days in Houston with the herd of reporters, all of them cramming.

  Before he began to write the first installment for Life, Mailer told his new editor at Little, Brown, Ned Bradford, that he didn’t know “how to locate myself in reference to it,” and he had to figure it out because “one’s stance determines one’s style.” He had a similar conversation with Willie Morris, who wanted Mailer to write about the moon shot for Harper’s but could not match the offer from Life. Remembering that the writing he had done for Harper’s required him to participate, more or less, in the events in question, Mailer asked, “How can I participate in a landing on the moon?” It was not entirely a rhetorical question. “God dammit,” he told Morris, “I really would like to go to the moon,” and said that he would get into good physical shape if he could get a seat on the rocket. In early 1971 shortly after Fire on the Moon was published, he was asked if he would have liked to make the trip himself. He said, “If I could have gone up it would have made a better book. I keep thinking I’m going to spend all my life pleading with NASA to send me to the moon, and then they’ll finally decide to send John Updike.” Mailer interviewed NASA officials, read technical manuals, and pondered his approach to the event.

  During the summer, Beverly embarked on a love affair and traveled to Mexico. The unraveling of the marriage drove Mailer deeper into his work, and may even have aided it. He said many times that some of his best work was done when he was depressed. Life’s deadline for the first installment was in early August. The editors were expecting under ten thousand words, but as he said in some prefatory comments to his piece, “I can’t write anything in 5,000 words, and 10,000 words is just for poker money.” Working eight to ten hours a day for a fifteen-day stretch, he completed his thirty-thousand-word account of the Saturn V launch on schedule. “The pleasures you get writing,” he said, “are the pleasures of the marathon runner.” Life was mainly a pictorial magazine, although it occasionally published long prose works—Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, for example. The editors were not accustomed, however, to huge slabs of marbled prose in a nonfiction report. When it appeared in the August 29 magazine, his 26,000-word report—he cut it slightly—was by far the longest nonfiction piece the magazine had published in a single issue.

  Mailer’s description of the Saturn V rocket, as long and heavy as a U.S. Navy destroyer, seen from the press grandstand three and a half miles away, is the best thing in the installment. The influence of Moby-Dick (especially “The Whiteness of the Whale”), which years later Mailer admitted to be “enormous,” is evident, especially when he compares the innards of the rocket to the innards of a whale—miles of tubes and massive tanks. Mailer had already stood in awe of the rocket as it was being readied for flight in the Vehicle Assembly Building, the largest building on the planet. The sight encouraged him “to release the string of the balloon and let his ego float off.” He recognized that “a Leviathan was most certainly ready to ascend the heavens—whether for good or ill he might never know.” Saturn was a furnace filled with a million gallons of varied fuels—kerosene and liquid oxygen and hydrogen. At blast-off, the flames sluiced away on each side for two hundred feet, “and in the midst of it, white as a ghost, white as the white of Melville’s Moby Dick, white as the shrine of the Madonna in half the churches of the world, this slim angelic mysterious ship of stages rose without sound out of its incarnation of flame and began to ascend slowly into the sky, slow as Melville’s Leviathan might swim, slowly as we might swim upward in a dream looking for air. And still no sound.” When the noise of blast-off does come, it is with “the sharp and furious bark of a million drops of oil crackling suddenly into combustion.” The wooden bleachers begin to shake, and he hears himself saying over and over, “Oh, my God!” Then he has “a moment of vertigo at the thought that man now had something with which to speak to God.”

  After the launch, he flew back to Houston to watch the four-day trip to the moon, the walk on its surface, and the flight back to earth. The astronauts’ capsule splashed down in the Pacific on July 24, after eight days in space. By then Mailer had returned to Provincetown, where he watched the capsule being fished out of the water by the crew of the aircraft carrier, USS Hornet (CV 12). He wrote his Life articles, and then commenced work on the book. Beverly was gone, and Carol Stevens, who had visited Mailer in Houston, joined him. He rented an apartment for her nearby. She met his children, his father, and Uncle Louis, Barney’s brother, who was visiting from South Africa. “Barney was adorable,” she recalled, “greeting me with, ‘Oh, what a beautiful girlie,’ in an accent hard to repeat. A mix of Jewish and South African, unlike any accent I have ever heard. Uncle Louie was charming and persuasive, urging me to join them. He said jokingly that he was ready to leave Moos [his wife] for me, and Norman agreed we would make a perfect pair.”

  Later, Carol met Mailer’s mother, who, she said, was not quite as friendly. In the fall of 1970 when she was pregnant with Mailer’s fifth daughter, Maggie, Fan “lectured me on the merits of her genius son, explaining how unusual he was, and how he needed more love than other men. I would have to ‘be more, give more, find more love, time, energy, devotion, for HIM.’ That he ‘needed more love than other men’ was a line I obviously never forgot. I guess she was right on about that.” Meeting the children that summer, Carol said, was also difficult. “The girls were young and fragile. They were obviously upset and frightened, more so, it seemed than Michael or Stephen. They were probably afraid to speak. They all acted like terrified little orphans. I think the boys were three and five when I met them.”

  In the fall of 1969, he wrote a brief note to Ginsberg about the “Call to War Tax Resistance” project they were both supporting. He added that the moon shot book, “keeps opening like a string one follows through the caves. So I hardly know where it will lead me.” He had already written about the eight-day round-trip of Apollo 11, the human adventure, in Part I of the account. Now, in Part II, he was exploring obdurate material: the physics of liquefied gases, combustion and thrust, gravity and weightlessness, electricity and magnetism, orbits and the dark side of the moon. Drawing on his Harvard engineering knowledge, he presents superb expositions of these matters as they relate to Apollo 11, viewing them as mysteries to be probed, rather than complexities to be rendered. Few newspaper feature writers covering the moon shot, nor those who wrote full-length books about the event, entered into discussions of this kind. Few could. Nor did many commentators on the moon shot find it necessary to link the Apollo 11 mission with the inflamed state of race relations in the United States. Mailer had begun writing about the situation of American blacks in “The White Negro,” and then did not address it substantively until 1968. He commented favorably on Black Power in a Partisan Review symposium in 1968, and again a year later in an essay in Look, “Looking for the Meat and Potatoes—Thoughts on Black Power.”

  In between these two pieces came his comments in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, which reveal a new ripple in
his thinking about race, one that reflected a shift in the national mood in the late 1960s. Irritated that Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, one of the late Dr. King’s closest associates, was “scandalously late” for a press conference at the GOP convention in Miami, Mailer realized that “he was getting tired of Negroes and their rights.” This leads him to a seven-page reverie on “how to divide the guilt” for black misery and disenfranchisement. On the one side, blacks had burned neighborhoods and threatened “Whitey” in half the major cities in the country over the previous four years. On the other, there were countless incidents of police breaking black heads with impunity, and unforgivable illegal discrimination. An “ugly thought” comes to him as he waits. However much the wealth and well-being of America was dependent on the underpaid or unpaid labor of blacks, “still the stew of the Black revolution had brought the worst to surface with the best, and if the Black did not police his own house, he would be destroyed and some of the best of the white men with him.” Mailer wondered why only five of his fifty friendships with blacks over the past decade continued with any warmth. Who was to blame?

  Although his admiration for black élan continued unabated, he was now “heartily sick of listening to the tyranny of soul music,” and “bored with Negroes triumphantly late for appointments.” Waiting with the other reporters for close to an hour, he became more and more peeved with Abernathy for making him wait “while the secret stuff of his brain was disclosed to his mind.” Mailer’s admissions are candid. He does not mention, however, that his current distaste for black arrogance, his weariness with “the smell of booze and pot and used-up hope in bloodshot eyes of Negroes bombed at noon” that he observes in the subways of New York, is squarely at odds with his praise for the dangerous life of blacks in “The White Negro.” There he notes that the Negro knows “in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war,” and he admires how blacks “subsisted for Saturday night kicks.”

  His views on blacks shifted again the day after the astronauts walked on the moon. He ran into a black professor at a party in Houston. The two had met several times in the past, and were friendly. The unnamed professor, much admired on his Ivy League campus, has the “impressive voice and deliberative manner of a leader.” Mailer observes that he has been drinking heavily, perhaps for several days, “as if he were looking to coagulate some floor between the pit of his feelings at boil and the grave courtesies of his heavy Black manner.” As they talk, he recognizes that his friend is drinking because two white men have landed on the moon and are now flying back, an accomplishment of the “White superstructure which had been strangling the possibilities of his own Black people for years.” Mailer and the professor agree that blacks are “possessed of a potential genius which was greater than whites.” This genius is based not on numbers, but magic and telepathy. There are no black astronauts, the professor observes. No Jews either, Mailer replies. The victory of WASP culture relied on numbers and computers. If there was ever to be a great black civilization, he predicts, “magic would be at its heart. For they lived with the wonders of magic as the Whites lived with technology.” The professor had good reason to drink, he observes. Technology was winning on all fronts, and NASA had scant interest in race relations or, for that matter, Mailer’s hypothesis about the existence of the Thanatosphere, a ring around the moon where the souls of the departed rose after death, waiting, presumably, to be reincarnated. Mailer’s magic side was worried that Apollo 11 might interfere with this celestial holding pattern, but the engineering side took some pleasure in what NASA had accomplished. His deepest loyalty, however, was for magic. Apollo 11, Mailer said later, was either “the greatest achievement of man,” or “the most sacrilegious act that man ever committed.” His navigator would keep him on a track away from technology to the end of his life.

  THROUGH THE FALL of 1969 and the first four months of 1970, living in Provincetown with Carol Stevens, Mailer immersed himself completely in Of a Fire on the Moon, seldom traveling. Money was tight, as he was now supporting six children, plus Adele, Beverly, and, in part, Carol, who still worked professionally as a singer. He did make a trip to Chicago in January 1970, where he testified at the trial of seven men, including Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, who were accused of inciting a riot at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention. The trial went on for months and was widely seen as polarizing. The seven were convicted, but the verdict was overturned on appeal.

  Mailer complained to Harvey Breit’s son, Luke, who had worked on his campaign staff, that Fire on the Moon was going to take nine months, all told, and he had hoped to complete it in three. But it appears that he had an almost complete draft in hand by the latter part of March because he spent a day answering a huge pile of mail. In his letter to Luke Breit, he describes his quiet writing days.

  It’s like doing a benevolent stretch in stir. The meals are good, the prisoner gets his fresh air and walks, but can’t drink or go out at night for fear of losing the next day’s work. So gray Provincetown winter days go by and nothing happens and not much inner life and all that work until you begin to get the same kind of quiet self-pity that a lifer has. You’re condemned to work at a species of literature for your natural life and it all began with the power of imagination.

  The manuscript was nearly complete when he flew to Washington to serve the remainder of his sentence for disorderly behavior at the March on the Pentagon. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal, and on May 5 he entered the Alexandria city jail for the last three days of his sentence. His jail time was “near agreeable,” he said. “I’m a believer in the rules of the game,” he told reporters after he was released, and “if you cross that line you get arrested.” New antiwar protests were scheduled for Washington the following day, and Mailer cautioned the protesters to avoid violence: “A winning hand this weekend is to have no violence. The point to be made is it’s the administration shedding blood—not the New Left.” At Kent State University in Ohio, four students had just been shot dead by national guardsmen. Mailer said that when President Nixon had called protesting students “bums,” it gave the guardsmen “an out to pull the trigger.” Nixon’s comments about the United States not losing its first war, he continued, “are the babblings of a Chekhovian character.” For good measure, he also called the president a “cathedral of hypocrisy,” and compared him to Dickens’s unctuous villain Uriah Heep. Mailer was driven to the airport by Rip Torn, with whom he was now reconciled.

  The final manuscript of Of a Fire on the Moon went to Little, Brown shortly after he returned from Washington, and he spent the next two months shuttling between Provincetown and New York, where he worked on Maidstone, which now ended with Torn’s attack. He and Carol relaxed before the summer season. In early June, they spent a few days at one of the dune shacks of the national seashore outside Provincetown. The shacks, a dozen or more, are sprinkled across miles of dunes and can be reached only by jeep or a long walk. There is no sound but the wind and the waves. “There are few places on the Eastern Seaboard where one could bury a man as easily and leave one’s chances so to nature,” Mailer had written. The shacks have neither electricity nor running water. According to Carol, it seemed certain to them that a child had been created while they were there. Maggie Alexandra was born a little more than nine months later.

  Ever since his first visit to Maine in 1948, Mailer had wanted to return. In late June 1970, he left Provincetown for Mount Desert Island, where he rented a house for the summer. Acadia National Park is on the island, and within the park is Cadillac Mountain (elev. 1,528 ft.), where the morning sun first hits the continental United States during the fall and winter. The Mailer clan would explore the park on many an outing over the next dozen summers. Mailer would draw heavily on his summers in Maine for his 1991 novel, Harlot’s Ghost. “Fortune Rock,” the house that he rented, is a spacious modern structure built by Wells Fargo heiress Clara Fargo Thomas in the late 1930s. It stands at the end of Somes Sound, a fjord that runs nine miles to
the ocean. The tide shifts are over ten feet in this part of Maine, and at high tide the water was about twenty feet below the house’s cantilevered living room. At low tide, there is nothing but rocks and sand below. Carol remembers that Mailer was always testing himself, and at one point began walking on the narrow railings outside the living room. “He could have killed himself,” she said.

  Carol and all of his children—save Susan, who was in Europe—joined him there, as did his sister, who came to help for two weeks. “It was,” he later wrote, “not an unhappy summer, and he ended with the knowledge that he could run a decent home and sleep without a turn of guilt, knew he could run a home without screaming at children and be as a result thus mind-empty at night that solitaire pleased him.” Danielle, Betsy, and Kate, thirteen, eleven, and eight, helped with Michael and Stephen, six and four. The boys, Mailer recalled, were “small powers out of doors. Inside, on rainy afternoons, their whining gave a hint of the whistle in the pipes of a maniac.” The summer experiment in housekeeping and family excursions—which Mailer referred to as “the paving blocks at the crossroads of existence”—made him ponder parental roles: “He knew at last what a woman meant when she said her hair smelled of grease.” He realized that, with help, he could handle a large family day to day, but he also believed that by doing so “the most interesting part of his mind and heart” would shrivel.