Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Until the end of her pregnancy, Carol traveled regularly with Mailer. She was three months pregnant in late August, when they went to Italy for the showing of Maidstone. Prior to their arrival in Venice, a friend had made arrangements for them to visit Ezra Pound and his companion, the violinist Olga Rudge. Carol remembers that Pound “was in a period of silence, but did say something to Norman.” The old poet, she said, had “the most intense, penetrating blue eyes.” A year after their visit, an American journalist visited Pound. He noticed a copy of Mailer’s book of poems, Deaths for the Ladies, on a bookshelf and asked how it got there. Rudge said that Mailer had given them a copy. She added, “I had heard this Mailer was a wild man and I was a little afraid, but he was on his best behavior. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.” At this point, Pound interrupted: “Mailer? Nice . . . young . . . fella.” Rudge said that she read his poems to Pound and then turned to him: “And you liked some of them. Do you remember any?” Her thin, frail companion answered, “All of ’em!” Mailer later wrote of Pound, “The funny thing is that my poetry in Deaths for the Ladies while having unfortunately little of the sensuous quality of his work does subscribe to a few of his poetic principles.” The difference, he said, is that “I have no talent—not for poetry but the prose is awfully good.”

  STOCK MARKET LOSSES plus a “staggering” income tax bill on the horizon led him to consider a proposal from Willie Morris to write an essay on the Women’s Liberation Movement. He had hoped to begin another “big book”—the Egyptian novel, as it came to be called—but had to work his way out of his financial hole first. Earlier, in the summer of 1970, he received a call from Time editor Henry Grunwald as Mailer recalled in his essay, “The Prisoner of Sex” (republished unchanged as a book five months later). The magazine wanted to interview him. Mailer was interested because a cover story might help him find a distributor for Maidstone, but he demurred largely because the idea of his five children “cavorting for Time’s still camera did not make him happy.” In addition, Stevens, to whom he dedicated The Prisoner of Sex, was present and she was “too proper to be photographed, too proud to be passed over.” Grunwald said he was not proposing a cover story; rather, he wanted Mailer’s opinions on the women’s liberation movement, which was the burning topic of the day. Grunwald told him that he was the movement’s “major ideological opposition.” This announcement surprised and tempted Mailer: “To be the center of any situation was, he sometimes thought, the real marrow of his bone—better to expire as a devil in the fire than an angel in the wings.” His strong suit was to “mobilize on the instant” with sharp remarks about “the ladies of the Liberation.” But, finally, he said no: “Only a fool would throw serious remarks into the hopper at Time.” Pithy statements for magazine readers came best from wits like Gore Vidal, he said.

  Mailer had learned again about Time’s proclivity for unfairly condensing one’s statements, most recently at a press conference in Venice. Asked by reporters to comment on the charge that his depiction of a brothel for female customers in Maidstone contributed to the exploitation of women, he went on for five minutes in a fairly complex fashion to discuss Women’s Liberation. Time boiled his commentary down to this: “Exploitation of women? But it is impossible to exploit her because she has magic powers. I am against the emancipation of women just because I respect them.” Mailer complained about what he believed to be unfair treatment by the magazine in a letter that it printed, but these three sentences do, in fact, encapsulate one of the major arguments of his Harper’s essay “The Prisoner of Sex” on gender, sex, procreation, and women’s rights.

  “There was a tissue of communion between the children and himself” that summer, he wrote, but by Labor Day the children had returned to their respective mothers to prepare for school and Mailer and Carol returned alone to Provincetown. He continued to worry about Maidstone, awaited the publication of Fire on the Moon in January, and worked on his “big, fat discursive piece” for Willie Morris. At the beginning of November, a copy of Women’s Wear Daily containing a profile of Vidal came his way. Amidst a stream of remarks, Vidal noted that he was in unison with the Women’s Liberation Movement on the lack of substantial difference between the sexes. He was different in this regard, he continued, from his colleague Norman Mailer, who “often sounds like the deranged commander of an American Legion post, particularly about women, whom he doesn’t like very much. He has made politics out of sex.” Vidal himself, as he explained, held that everyone is bisexual, although “not everyone practices it.” Mailer read this as an endorsement of unisex, which he considered an abomination. He sent a letter to the paper a week later saying that Vidal’s comments should be seen in the light of some statistical evidence: “marriages, Vidal-0, Mailer-4; children, Vidal-0, Mailer-6; daughters, Vidal-0, Mailer-4.” While these figures were not conclusive, he continued, one might conclude that “Gore neither wed nor bothered to sire because he put womankind in such high regard that he did not wish to injure their tender flesh with his sharp tongue.” The exchange was the beginning of a small war between the two that went on for more than fifteen years.

  This flurry of activity on the topic of Women’s Liberation was the direct result of the publication of a fierce attack on male chauvinism by Kate Millett, an apologist for feminism whose stated goal was “enlarging human freedom.” Written originally as a Columbia University thesis, Sexual Politics was published in August 1970, exactly fifty years after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution that gave women the vote. “There was a great wave of feminism building,” that summer, Millett wrote, and her book rode the crest. She appeared on the cover of the August 30 Time, and every literate person in the country, it seemed, had an opinion about her polemic. Mailer ordered a copy and was soon plowing through what he called “Kate Millett’s hard clay.” Although he commented on a score of feminist works (including Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, also published that year), The Prisoner of Sex was a concerted attempt to rebut and discredit Millett.

  Mailer wrote to a friend that “the first inkling I ever had of woman’s liberation” was when he heard his sister speak passionately about The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking exploration of the ways that women had been marginalized through the ages. Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, was also a powerful influence, and is often credited with initiating the “second wave” of feminism in the United States after the reverses that had followed the achievement of suffrage. Its “fundamental argument,” as distilled by New Yorker writer Louis Menand, “is that there is no such thing as women’s essential nature. The belief that women are biologically destined to be domestic and subordinate, is just a construct, constructed by psychologists and social scientists.” Mailer never argued that women should be homebound cooks and babysitters, but he did believe that they shared an immutable biological identity.

  The Women’s Liberation Movement gained momentum all through the 1960s, aided by governmental action—President Kennedy’s National Commission on the Status of Women in 1961 and the Equal Pay Act of 1963, for example—and the formation of innumerable organizations supporting women’s rights—Friedan and other women and men founded the National Organization for Women in 1966—and reached its full flowering with the publication of Millett’s Sexual Politics. She attacked the positions of a wide range of male thinkers in her study, including Freud, Reich, and Erik Erikson, but her three chief targets are D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Mailer.

  In late December, he received his advance copies of Of a Fire on the Moon, which reproduced as cover art René Magritte’s painting of a huge rock and the sea, Le Monde Invisible. The official publication date was January 11, 1971, and the major reviews came out that month. They were generally positive, but less glowing than those for Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago. The old pattern of evenly divided reviews repeated and would continue until the end of the 1970s. Benjamin DeMott’s review in Saturday Review straddled the
extremes. He complained of Mailer’s “unremitting self-involvement and self-regard,” but also argued that the author’s narcissism “blesses him as an enthusiast,” one who writes “pages that physically breathe with the vitality of the writer’s will to pack in the whole, nail the kit complete—all two million functioning parts, every sensation, every fear, every lucked-out crisis” of the Apollo 11 mission. So it went through the rest of the reviews: encomiums for Mailer’s ability to drill through NASA’s layers of bureaucracy with his diamond-hard ego, and protest against the revelation of his personal life and theology, especially his “Manichean ox-team—his God and Devil in harness pulling on the universe in opposite directions,” as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described it in his New York Times review. The book’s length put off some reviewers; others were troubled by what Morris Dickstein in The New York Times Book Review called “a certain slackness of execution” in some of the technical descriptions, paralleling the tedious parts of the cetology chapters in Moby-Dick. But these lapses are small, Dickstein argued, and Mailer’s attempt, not just to bridge science and the humanities, “to leap over and back, to reclaim the event for mystery, romance and human dread,” made the book exemplary.

  Little, Brown pressed Mailer to do some publicity for Fire, and he agreed, but with no joy. In late January, he made appearances in New York, including The David Frost Show, and later traveled to Houston, Miami, and Los Angeles. At almost every stop, the crowd and reporters seemed more interested in his views on Women’s Lib, as it was popularly called, than in Fire on the Moon. He wrote to Aldridge about how much he disliked the publicity grind: “I’m caught these days in the low hope that perhaps the book won’t do too well and so prove my thesis that TV does not sell books.” Mailer never entirely gave up this thesis, even after numerous appearances on television talk shows. What he was looking forward to at the time was the March 8 championship bout between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden. It would prove to be the first of three epic boxing matches between the two men, both then undefeated. Ralph Graves, a Life editor, asked Mailer if he could write a five-thousand-word report for Life on what was being called “the fight of the century.” The magazine’s publication schedule meant he would have to submit the piece two days after the fight.

  Working from seven in the morning until seven at night, he met the deadline and produced a 9,500-word essay. “I never wrote so fast in my life,” he told Knox. “Ego: The Ali-Frazier Fight,” is one of the best depictions of a prizefight ever written. Accompanied by nine color photographs taken by Frank Sinatra (one of many celebrities attending), it was Life’s March 19, 1971, cover story. The piece marks a subtle change in Mailer’s self-referencing. In much of his writing from Advertisements for Myself on, he had used the incidents of his life willy-nilly to illumine whatever topic was at hand. But in “Ego,” he began talking intently about the artist as an exemplary type, comparing, for example, Picasso and Joyce to the boxers with the most powerful egos, heavyweight champions such as Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali. “Boxing is a rapid debate between two sets of intelligence,” he said, likening a championship bout to his public debate with William Buckley. Prizefighting is a language of the body, he argues, one that is “as detached, subtle and comprehensive in its intelligence as any exercise of mind.” From this point onward, he would return again and again to the artist as archetype (with Norman Mailer as the unmistakable signature), using himself as a species of divining rod to explore the psychic depths of personalities as disparate as Marilyn Monroe, Henry Miller, Gary Gilmore, Lee Harvey Oswald, Picasso, Christ, and Hitler. In retrospect, “Ego” can be seen as the beginning of a major phase in his writing career: Mailer as biographer.

  “Ego,” however, was published in the shadow of “The Prisoner of Sex” a few weeks earlier. Willie Morris bought a ten-by-fifteen ad in The New York Times on publication day featuring the cover of the Harper’s issue under this tag: “The Favorite Target of Women’s Lib Chooses His Weapon. Harper’s Magazine.” At the bottom of the page was further enticement: “Pick Up a Copy. Before Your Newsstand Is Picketed.” The ad, aided by Mailer’s incendiary comments in various interviews, worked. Ideologues on both sides weighed in, columnists and pundits gleefully reported the battle between the sexes, and nine days after the magazine arrived on newsstands, it had sold out, if not entirely to his admirers. He was now booed and heckled at some public appearances, mainly by women. The badgering, he felt, was unjust, even though he abetted it. One of the few women who gave him public succor was Joan Didion. Mailer’s position “strikes me as exactly right,” she said. “I think sex is a lot darker than Kate Millett does. I think there is a lot more going on than meets her eye.” Didion defended the sex scenes in An American Dream, for example.

  Making matters worse was a comment he had made to Orson Welles the previous June on The Mike Douglas Show. Welles was “being pious for a moment about women,” Mailer recalled, and he jumped in: “Oh, come on, Orson, women are sloppy beasts, they should be kept in cages.” This pronouncement “poured ice cubes down everyone’s back,” Mailer said. Welles then got solemn, even after Mailer tried to take the edge off his pronouncement by saying that he did not hate women, adding, “Orson, we respect the lions in the zoo, but we want them kept in cages, don’t we?” Years later, he said that he had made the remark “for fun and idiocy” and failed to realize “how intense the anger, fury and frustration, which I had caused, had become. I meant the remark as a joke, but I will admit that it was the wrong remark at the wrong time.” The women’s revolution was nearing its apogee and Mailer became its piñata. His Harper’s essay merely confirmed for feminists, whether they read it or not, that Mailer was a male chauvinist. Later, while on a speaking tour for the book that grew out of the essay, he complained to a Miami Herald columnist that although he’d “spent my life writing about men and women and their enormously complicated relationship,” the feminists were “killing my wallet, my ego, my reputation.” New, young movements, he said, have to “kill someone symbolically. But that person has to have value.” He never stopped believing that he was that scapegoat.

  If the impetus to The Prisoner of Sex was Millett’s twenty-five-page attack on him in Sexual Politics, Mailer immediately realized in writing it that he was addressing all the major issues of his life, as listed by one enthusiastic reviewer, the Times’s Anatole Broyard: “revolution, tradition, sex, the family, the child, the shape of the future, technology, the ethics of the critic, the male mystique, and the rights of minorities.” The framework for Mailer’s argument, as another reviewer, the novelist David Lodge, explained, was how he equated “the technological destruction of nature with the ideological destruction of male-female differentiation, likening Kate Millett to a ‘technologist who drains all the swamps only to discover that the ecological balance has been savaged.’ ” The end result of freeing woman from her reproductive role, Mailer warned, would be “coitus-free conception monitored by the state,” and the death of heterosexual romance. Forty years after his dire warnings, we can observe that sex differentiation is decidedly less clear-cut, but heterosexual romance survives. If he exaggerated the possibility of Big Sister supervising the embryo assembly line, some of the literature he surveyed for the essay looked forward to it. The SCUM Manifesto, written by Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol, proposed a program to “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.” Her manifesto was reprinted in Sisterhood Is Powerful, a bestselling anthology. Solanas’s program “while extreme, even extreme of the extreme,” he argued, “is nonetheless a magnetic north for Women’s Lib.” Technology could win.

  Mailer’s passionate if somewhat tendentious brief against such a world is built on a biological fact about women and an assertion about men: A woman possesses a “mysterious space within,” while a man is “simple meat,” a creature of unrest “who proceeded to become unmasculine whenever he ceased to strive.” The “purse of fle
sh” that was the womb, contained

  psychic tendrils, waves of communication to some conceivable source of life, some manifest of life come into human beings from a beyond which persisted in remaining most stubbornly beyond. Women, like men, were human beings, but they were a step, or a stage, or a move or a leap nearer the creation of existence, they were—given man’s powerful sense of the present—his indispensable and only connection to the future.

  If women wished to enter the male occupations and professions, he argued, “go to work with a lunch pail and a cigar” (sarcasm was not off limits), wear a uniform, and die of male diseases, what would happen to their link to the infinite? He said that he would assent to every feminist demand for equality, certainly all their economic demands; he would “agree with everything they asked but to quit the womb.” But in 1970 it was no longer a simple either/or decision for women (if it ever had been), and in the years since then it became clear that women, while still lagging in paycheck size, have achieved parity in many though not all professions. Equilibrium for women between child rearing and work was possible, but no one would claim it was easy.

  Millett unfairly truncated some of the quotations she took from the work of Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence, or as Mailer put it, “the bloody ground steamed with the limbs of every amputated quote.” He restored the severed parts as carefully as Isis reconstructed the body of Osiris, then situated the sexual investigations of Miller on the ridgeline between love and lust “where the light is first luminous, then blinding, and the ground remains unknown. Henry, a hairy prospector, red eye full of lust, has wandered these ridgelines for the years of his literary life.” Mailer’s admiration for Miller’s pioneering explorations of the ways in which lust “can alter to love or be as suddenly sealed from love,” is obvious. Miller read the essay and wrote him a warm letter from Big Sur, his last retreat. In 1976, Mailer would publish a full-scale examination of Miller’s work, Genius and Lust. The finest chapter in The Prisoner of Sex, however, is Mailer’s discussion of D. H. Lawrence, arguably his most incisive piece of literary criticism.