Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  For Mailer, Lawrence’s literary and personal life stood as clear evidence “that a firm erection on a delicate fellow was the adventurous juncture of ego and courage.” Successful coitus was an achievement, but loving sex was harder, yet Lawrence believed in it with all the passion of the last romantic: the love affairs he depicted in a half dozen novels—Lady Chatterley’s Lover was Mailer’s favorite—“come in like winds off Wuthering Heights—but never had a male novelist written more intimately about women—heart, contradiction, and soul; never had a novelist loved them more, been so comfortable in the tides of their sentiment, and so ready to see them murdered.” Like Mailer, he was spoiled, “and could not have commanded two infantrymen to follow him, yet he was still a great writer, for he contained a cauldron of boiling opposites—he was on the one hand a Hitler in a teapot, on the other he was the blessed breast of tender love, he knew what it was to love a woman from her hair to her toes.” The parallels with Mailer—recall Lindner calling him “a pint-sized Hitler”—are obvious, and when we hear that Lawrence’s incompatibles were intensified by an “intellectual ambition sufficient to desire the overthrow of European civilization,” it is clear that he identifies with Lawrence as much as with Hemingway, and owes him a deeper debt. “Lawrence’s point, which he refines over and over, is that the deepest messages of sex cannot be heard by taking a stance on the side of the bank, announcing one is in love, and then proceeding to fish in the waters of love with a breadbasket full of ego. No, he is saying again and again, people can win at love only when they are ready to lose everything they bring to it.” Mailer elaborates masterfully on Lawrence’s derision of “meaningless fucking . . . that was the privilege of the healthy,” and his celebration of genuine sexual love as “the only nostrum which could heal,” but only when the partners were without what Lawrence called “reserves or defenses.”

  The son of a mother who loved him “outrageously,” and a father who despised him, Lawrence was a sickly youth, “bone and blood of the classic family stuff out of which homosexuals are made,” Mailer avers, and became masculine only by willpower. Lawrence stole Frieda von Richthofen, a German baron’s daughter, from her husband. She left him and her three children, risking everything for a poor miner’s son from Nottingham. The love of Lawrence’s mother and that of Frieda empowered Lawrence psychologically even as he was slowly dying of tuberculosis. He was dead at forty-four. Mailer says he was “possessed of a mind which did not believe any man on earth had a mind more important than his own,” a mind that created a novelistic manifest for heterosexual love as the saving power of humanity. Mailer compares him to a general, deploying his words as battle troops. Reading Mailer’s forty pages on Lawrence, a brilliant interpretation of Lawrence’s profound belief in erotic instinct and risk, reinforced by a close reading of a dozen key passages (restored from Millett’s truncations), one cannot escape the conclusion, as one critic put it, that Mailer’s books—“through their familiar litany of concern with love, sex, inhibitive society, and modern mechanization—appear like a karmic reformulation of Lawrence’s own most prominent preoccupations.” In a 1985 letter to another Lawrence scholar Mailer said, “Lady Chatterley changed my life.”

  BOTH OF A Fire on the Moon and The Prisoner of Sex were nominated for the National Book Award in 1972, the former in the sciences, and the latter in contemporary affairs. Neither won, but the publicity helped sales and eased his financial burden somewhat. Prisoner brought in just under $200,000 in royalties, and Fire earned nearly $500,000. In late 1974, he would begin to receive advances from Little, Brown for a trilogy of unwritten novels. Rivers of money flowed in, rivers of money flowed out. While his needs were great, the sums he was earning would have been sufficient had it not been for the amount he spent on filmmaking and play production—close to $400,000. These projects put him in a deep hole, and the IRS began dunning him. He began taking on more and more lecturing, flying around the country to pick up a few thousand here and there, shoveling honoraria against the tide of debt. Ultimately, he was forced to get loans from Scott Meredith ($185,000) and from his mother ($90,000, her life savings) to keep solvent.

  Shortly after The Prisoner of Sex appeared, Willie Morris resigned from Harper’s under pressure from the publisher, William S. Blair, and the chairman of the magazine’s board, John Cowles Jr. He had been summoned to a corporate meeting in Minneapolis where the centerpiece was the magazine’s balance sheet. It had not made a profit in three years, and Morris’s editorial boldness was very much on the minds of the financial stakeholders. Over his four-year tenure, he had published not only Mailer’s lengthy pieces, but a big chunk of Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, an excerpt from James Jones’s novel The Merry Month of May, and Seymour Hersh’s exposé of the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Editorially, the magazine tilted to the left; the Cowles family tilted the other way. One board member at the meeting said to Morris, “No wonder it’s such a failure. Who are you editing this magazine for? A bunch of hippies?” “The money men won,” Morris said. The entire editorial staff resigned, save a young editor, Lewis Lapham, who at a last-ditch staff meeting with Cowles agreed with him (according to Morris) and stayed behind when the rest walked out. He was later appointed editor and remained in the position for thirty years.

  In his resignation letter, Morris said that “The Prisoner of Sex” had “deeply disturbed the magazine’s owners. Mailer is a great writer. His work matters to our civilization.” It was widely believed, as Time reported, that Morris’s downfall “was precipitated in large degree by a prominently displayed, controversial article by Norman Mailer.” Asked if this was true, Mailer said that he suspected “a strong connection, at least.” He called the resignation “the most depressing event in American letters in many a year. Under Willie’s editorship, Harper’s has been the boldest and most adventurous magazine in America.” Later, in his memoir, New York Days, Morris admitted that Mailer’s essay “was not central to the issue, only part of it,” he wrote, “less at that moment substantive than symbolic.” But at that moment, Morris felt impelled to make Mailer the heroic artist arrayed against the benighted forces of Midwest plutocracy. For some time, the media had shown a tendency to drag Mailer from the margins to the center of events. When it was clear that Morris was out, Mailer said he would never write for the magazine again, and kept his word, as did many other important contributors—Styron, James Jones, David Halberstam, and playwright and novelist Larry L. King.

  Meredith had negotiated a million-dollar deal for a trilogy of novels by Mailer, “the highest known payment agreed to for a single unpublished work of fiction,” according to what New York publishing executives told The New York Times. Mailer would be paid in installments, however, and would not receive the full amount until he had completed the 600,000-word work that would, according to Meredith, “encompass the entire history of a human family from ancient times to the world of the future.” After he finished The Prisoner of Sex and “Ego,” he began assembling a library of books on ancient Egypt, where the first novel of the trilogy would commence. He and Carol had moved to her East 54th Street apartment to await the arrival of the baby, due in early March. After Carol delivered, they planned to go to either Maine or Vermont, where he would begin writing.

  Maggie Alexandra was late, born on March 21, 1971, Earth Day, at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan. Carol remembered the day: “My water broke and suddenly we were in a panic. I was surprised by Norman’s behavior. He was the most anxious of all.” In the lobby of the hospital, people asked for his autograph as the couple waited for the elevator. “We hadn’t a minute to spare as baby presented herself feet first, cord wrapped around her neck,” she said. Mailer described Maggie (safely delivered) to Knox: she has “my mother’s nose, bless her, but when she looks the strongest, you would think you were staring at the bust of a Roman emperor or a big man in the Mafia. Tough!” Shortly after the birth, Mailer rented a house in South Londonderry, Vermont, not far from the New York border.
Before leaving New York, he had to fulfill a commitment. He had agreed to be the moderator at a meeting sponsored by New York University and the Theatre for Ideas, “A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation,” to be held at Town Hall, on West 43rd Street.

  Diana Trilling, one of the four women panelists at the event, writing about her experience, said: “It would be difficult to exaggerate the disorder of the evening: the raucousness, the extreme of polemic, invective, obscenity.” It seemed perfectly clear to the audience that Mailer’s challenge to Women’s Liberation in his Harper’s essay made it incumbent upon him to take his turn on the ducking stool. The New York Times reporter opened his account of the evening by saying, “For a while last night it seemed like Norman Mailer against the world.” Three of the four panelists attacked “The Prisoner of Sex”; the fourth, Jill Johnston, a columnist for The Village Voice, gave a prepared speech in a kind of singsong chant, beginning: “All women are lesbians, except those who don’t know it, naturally,” and “all men are homosexuals.” Another of the four panelists, Germaine Greer, called the evening “Town Bloody Hall.”

  Among the luminaries in the audience were four writers, Betty Freidan, Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, and Elizabeth Hardwick, all of whom threw barbs barely disguised as questions at the moderator. There were plenty of men in the packed auditorium, including two Normans, Rosten and Podhoretz, neither of whom rose to defend Mailer. The Times book reviewer Anatole Broyard tried to frame a question about the nature of heterosexual sex after the women’s revolution, but Greer told him his “unreasonable question” was out of order. The first panelist to speak was Jacqueline Ceballos, the president of the National Organization for Women. She said that it was women’s lib—“not the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement or the environmental movement”—that was addressing the root problem of the country. Mailer, she said, had been “sincerely trying to understand” the movement in his essay, but missed the distorted way women were depicted in our culture. In commercials, she said, the woman “gets an orgasm when she gets a shiny floor.” Mailer, unimpressed, asked sarcastically, “Is there anything in your program that would give men the notion that life would not be as boring as it is today?” The tone for the night was set by this exchange.

  Greer began by suggesting that the masculine artist figure is “more a killer than a creator.” Throughout the evening, she came back to this theme, calling for a return to the anonymous artists of the past such as those who built Chartres cathedral. Greer, who had wanted to meet Mailer and go to bed with him, was quite solicitous toward him during the evening, and passed him a number of notes. To men, she said, “We were either low sloppy creatures or menials, or we were goddesses, or worst of all we were meant to be both, which meant that we broke our hearts to keep our aprons clean.”

  Diana Trilling, the final speaker, was the most cogent and the most sympathetic to the situation of her old friend, whom she referred to in her speech as “the most important writer of our time.” He had been “under most intemperate assault” (she wrote in her later account), and she was therefore happy that he struck back; she did not want to be part of “a symbolical slaughter.” Trilling was a Lawrence scholar, and her partial agreement with The Prisoner of Sex was based on her admiration for the “poetry of biology” in the work of Lawrence and Mailer. Both novelists, and Henry Miller (she said in her speech), believed in “the body as the gateway to heaven.” While avowedly a feminist, she couldn’t join Mailer’s female attackers because she preferred “even an irresponsibly poeticized biology to the no-biology-at-all of my spirited sisters.” Someone called out “traitor” when she made this comment.

  Mailer said that he was in agreement with some of what Trilling and her colleagues said, but he saw no reciprocity. The movement seemed to overlook the fact that “men’s lives are also difficult.” He conceded, however, that “Women’s Lib has raised the deepest questions facing us,” and ended by thanking everyone present “for an incredible evening.” Rarely is Mailer given any credit for writing a treatise that lays out such an array of arguments—shrewd, skewed, impassioned, and crazy (for example, contraception leads to overpopulation)—on every aspect of human sexuality and gender identity, publishing it in a popular magazine, and then taking a stage to debate his ideas with all comers. He had, in effect, put himself into the clutches of his detractors and offered them a bully pulpit to attack his ideas. At the end of the section on Miller in Prisoner of Sex, he notes that Henry Miller’s male readers were not ready to stand with him in any debate with women, no, “the men moving silently in all retreat pass the prophet by.” Few stood with Mailer either. The righteous ire of women was too strong.

  Not long after the Town Hall debate, he ran into Dotson Rader and Germaine Greer at a party. She was “tracking Norman like a bounty hunter,” Rader said. After a good deal of drinking, the three left in a cab. They had a “terrible row” on the ride, Rader said, because she wanted Mailer to return to her hotel with her, and he refused. Mailer yelled, “Stop the fucking cab,” and he and Rader got out. Greer told him to go fuck himself. Rader and Mailer went to a bar.

  The reviews for The Prisoner of Sex were significantly less positive than for his previous five books. Because almost every female reviewer attacked the book, as did at least half the males, the ratio of favorable to unfavorable reviews enjoyed by Of a Fire on the Moon was reversed. Brigid Brophy’s conclusion in the Times Book Review that Mailer’s essay “is modeled on a dribble: long and barely continuous” is closer to the tone of the majority than Anatole Broyard’s comment that it was “Mailer’s best book.” Prisoner was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and sold fairly well, but soon it was viewed more as the fruit of a benighted mind than a fair response to Women’s Lib. Proud of “his ability to apprehend what lived on the other side of the hill,” Mailer may have sensed the coming avalanche. He told Vance Bourjaily that he was in “a stinking depression” during its composition.

  Joyce Carol Oates is one of the few female reviewers who showed some sympathy for Mailer’s essay. She called him “a visionary, a poet, a mystic—he is shameless in his passion for women, and one is led to believe anything he says because he says it so well.” Her admiration is qualified, however, by a counterargument to which Mailer gives short shrift: “Sexual identity is the least significant aspect of our lives,” Oates says. She speaks for herself; her primary identity, like Mailer’s, is as an artist. But many women, perhaps most women, have aspirations that equal or exceed the one that he says is paramount: “to find the best mate possible . . . and conceive children who will improve the species.” Mailer detested all technology that sought to supplant or undermine natural procreation—the pill, the diaphragm (“corporate rubbery obstruction”), test-tube babies, extrauterine gestation. In the long term, he believed that technology’s tendency was to homogenize nature, eliminate gender distinctions, and leach out individual differences. He was thinking a century ahead; women were remembering the suffering of the ages.

  Oates argues that for all of human time on the planet “women have been machines for the production of babies,” and until this function is ameliorated or abrogated, women’s full potential will not be realized. “Once we are freed from the machine of our bodies, perhaps we will become truly spiritual.” This is the crux of the issue Mailer confronted: was childbearing a function that could be assumed by technology, freeing women to be more than sacred vessels, or was it an inevitably harrowing but heroic destiny, one that elicits male adoration of women, itself biologically destined? Or both? Oates calls it “a difficult question.” For insisting on women’s procreative destiny, he drew “the rage of Women’s Liberation,” she says. “And we understand slowly that what is being liberated is really hatred. Hatred of men. Women have always been forbidden hatred.” Mailer stepped freely to the center of the target, and Women’s Liberation was pleased to see him pinned and wriggling. Danielle, then fourteen, was present at the Town Hall debate, along with her younger sister Betsy, and her older
sister, Susan. Norman’s sister and mother were also there. Danielle recalled being “devastated by the abuse” of her father. Susan was similarly upset, but kept asking herself why her father kept egging the women on. When she saw a film of the event years later, she realized that he was being playfully provocative, something often missed in his encounters with feminists. Mailer said it was the night his hair turned white.

  WHEN SCHOOL WAS out, Mailer’s six eldest children joined him, Carol, and the baby at a farm they rented in Vermont. Myrtle Bennett, a nanny from Honduras who would become virtually a member of the family, joined them to help with Maggie. It was a huge spread, 470 acres, and they had six horses, three ponies, and several cats. The summer was hot and the bugs plentiful, but it was peaceful. “I haven’t felt as collected in a long time,” he wrote to Knox.

  José and Ramona Torres visited in June and July, and rented a house nearby. Mailer had hung boxing bags in the barn and he and José boxed three two-minute rounds daily. He said later that if he learned anything from Torres in Vermont, it was defense. “He was a marvelous teacher for that because he would tap me with a jab, let’s say, and if I made the same mistake he’d tap me a little harder.” With the encouragement of Pete Hamill, Torres had started writing boxing articles for the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario. He asked Mailer to help him improve his English writing skills, and for over a month, every day, he would bring his new pages to Mailer, who gave him “a fatherly hand with verb tenses.” Mailer said that the book that came out of that summer’s work, Sting Like a Bee: The Muhammad Ali Story, was a “modest phenomenon,” because it offered “a view of boxing which comes for the first time, genuinely and authentically from the inside.” He swore that it was Torres’s book.