Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  The interview also contains his first public comments of any length on the Egyptian novel, made to correct Scott Meredith’s remark that the novel would follow a Jewish family for a few thousand years. “Some early scenes in the book may take place in Egypt,” Mailer said, “but that’s not to say that the book begins there and inches along chronologically.” Actually, he had no settled idea of the novel’s structure at the time. The country was moving into “apathetic hippie beatdom,” he told Stratton, and it was time for him to “look for some ground on which to rally.” In the late summer of that year, he found it in Africa.

  MUHAMMAD ALI WAS twenty-five years old, undefeated, and perhaps the fastest heavyweight champion of all time when he refused, after being drafted in 1967, to enter the army. “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger,” he said, a comment treasured by antiwar activists. He almost went to prison, was stripped of his title, and forbidden to box. In 1970, he regained the right to box, and over the next four years won and lost some major bouts—including the 1971 bout with Joe Frazier that Mailer wrote about in “Ego.” By 1974, he had earned the right to challenge the current champion, George Foreman, who had destroyed Frazier, knocking him down six times in their match. Foreman was twenty-five, seven years younger than Ali. The fight was scheduled for the end of September 1974 in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire. The publicity buildup was massive; some said that Ali was the most famous man in the world. Early that summer, Mailer was unable to resist a ringside seat at what promised to be one of the greatest prizefights in history. So he put Scott Meredith to work selling a magazine deal so he could obtain press credentials. In the meantime, there was time “to think over the peculiarities of a passion for boxing which could take a man away from his work for months and more,” and time to ponder the depth of his loyalty to Ali.

  He made the decision in early July, just about the time he wrote to Crowther to say that he hoped to see him in New York. I want to explain “the transformations of the Egyptian gods,” he said. “To fuck a lady of their choice they were ready to become a hippopotamus, baboon, a reptile or a beetle. Anything to get in,” he said. “Those daimons knew how to live.” He also responded to a friendly invitation from Kate Millett (who, he had learned, was one of Susan’s instructors at Columbia) to have a drink. “Only the Irish could invite you so pleasantly to have a drink,” he wrote, although he was in New York too briefly to get together with her or Crowther. He flew to Cairo from New York in early September. Before he left, he learned that Playboy would publish his account of what would be called “The Rumble in the Jungle.”

  Mailer had never been to the Middle East and “was hardly a Zionist,” but his week-long visit to Cairo made him feel more sympathy for Israel. The Ramadan–Yom Kippur War had taken place the previous year and the city had not recovered. He was repelled by “the collision of overflowing new wealth and scabrous poverty, teeming inefficiency, frantic traffic and cripples walking on sores.” The opening of Ancient Evenings takes place inside the Pyramid of Khufu, and Mailer wanted to see it. A guide drove him there at six A.M. and they began the illegal climb. “I always thought when I got up to the top of the pyramids I would have an epiphany, but just as I got to the top, heaving and panting, my vision blurred, there were the smoke plumes of the police coming through the desert.” He got down just as the police arrived. Later, he realized that “I could do my book only if I didn’t go back there.” He left the next day for Kinshasa, arriving on the day that the fight was postponed. Foreman had been cut over his eye while sparring, and the fight was rescheduled for October 30.

  He remained in Zaire for “three miserable days,” then flew back to New York. Along the way, he picked up some kind of undulant fever and stayed in bed for ten days. He wrote his army friend, Fig Gwaltney, when he was recovered that he was worried about getting sick again, but he couldn’t afford not to go back; he needed the money. “I’m beginning to think that part of Hemingway’s genius was that he knew how to keep from getting the Turistas, as simple as that.” At the end of October, he flew back to Kinshasa.

  As a fight reporter with Playboy credentials, Mailer had access to both Foreman and Ali, especially the latter, as they were more than just acquaintances. He observed their training regimens, their friends and flunkies. He also walked the streets of Kinshasa, and noticed that “the black crowds moved about him with an indifference to his presence that succeeded in niggering him; he knew what it was to be looked upon as invisible,” like Ralph Ellison’s protagonist. Initially, this revived the resentment toward blacks that he recorded in Of a Fire on the Moon, but this feeling passed as he perceived the “tragic magnetic sense of self” in the slim, tall Zairois. All at once, he felt the uniqueness of Africa: “even if Kinshasa was to the rain forest as Hoboken to Big Sur—yes impossible not to sense what everyone had been trying to say about Africa for a hundred years, big Papa first on line: the place was so fucking sensitive! No horror failed to stir its echo a thousand miles away, no sneeze was ever free of the leaf that fell on the other side of the hill.” The book that helped him to fathom this quality was Bantu Philosophy by a Belgian priest, Placide Tempels.

  The gist of the book is that the Zairois see humans not as beings, but as forces. People are more than the sum of their parts; they are the vectors of the energies that possess them, emanating from the living and the dead. A man, in Mailer’s extrapolation, is not merely “a human with his own psyche but a part of the resonance, sympathetic or unsympathetic, of every root and thing (and witch) about him.” Without ever having said so in as many words, he recognizes it as something he had always believed. The boxing match Mailer would watch and then retell would be presented as the battle of two men wielding their ever-changing n’golo (the Congolese word for life force). It would be a bout enveloped in “the messages, the curses, and the loyalties of the dead.”

  HE MET FOREMAN in the lobby of a Kinshasa hotel. When they were introduced, the champion made a generous comment about Mailer, who greeted him and held out his hand. “Excuse me for not shaking hands with you,” Foreman answered softly, “but you see I’m keeping my hands in my pockets.” This tautological remark made Mailer remember his week of work at the mental hospital thirty years earlier, and the catatonic who remained motionless for hours, “only to erupt with a sudden punch that broke the jaw of a passing attendant.” Foreman practiced a similar discipline: “One did not allow violence to dissipate; one stored it.” The champ wanted no unnecessary contact. Ali was the hero of Africa, and Foreman’s “concentration would become the ocean of his protection against Africa.” When Mailer saw Foreman training he realized how much power was there.

  Hitting the heavy bag is a daily task, and it is hard work. Foreman’s eighty-pound bag (some are heavier) hung from a chain, and it was held to keep it from swinging wildly. Foreman hit it 150 times in 3 minutes, took 30 seconds off, and did it again, four times altogether, 600 hits in less than 15 minutes. His punches, Mailer wrote, “were probably the heaviest cumulative series of punches any boxing writer had ever seen. Each of these blows was enough to smash an average athlete’s ribs; anybody with poor stomach muscles would have a broken spine.” As he worked, his sweat formed a circle about his feet; the bag developed “a hollow as deep as his head.” Foreman’s strategy was palpable in the purest sense of the word. When Ali got tired in the late rounds and could no longer slip punches, or absorb them on his arms, then Foreman would hammer him as he did the bag.

  Foreman reappears in the book before the account of the fight, but briefly. There are nineteen chapters in the book, and Ali dominates most of them. We meet his team, watch him train, and follow him as he circulates through the country, press corps in his wake, collecting accolades from his fans, and absorbing n’golo as he can. Mailer and Ali had known each other since Las Vegas in 1963, well enough for Mailer to go jogging with him. Mailer had done no exercise to speak of for two months. The run starts at three A.M. and Mailer does not sleep bef
orehand. He runs a mile and a half and then has to drop out. Ali commends him for doing so well in his fifty-second year. On the walk back to Ali’s villa, Mailer hears a lion roar. It was “no small sound, more like thunder,” the same sound described by Hemingway in his Africa stories. He begins running, impelled by the thought of death by carnivore. His only solace is that such an end would all but guarantee ensconcement in the canon of American literature. “To be eaten by a lion on the banks of the Congo—who could fail to notice that it was Hemingway’s own lion waiting down the years for the flesh of Ernest until an appropriate substitute had at last arrived.” When he tells Ali’s retinue the story, they laugh. The lion lives in the nearby zoo.

  Every move Mailer makes before the fight is calibrated to help Ali defeat Foreman, whether by inveigling his body around a partition separating his seven-story balcony from the balcony of the adjacent room (done while “good and drunk”), accepting derision for telling the lion story, or happily losing at the casino as a way of gaining compensatory n’golo. Spin and reverse spin. By doing these magical things (even as he is “furious at the vanity” of thinking that he can affect the outcome), he is acting out of conviction: if Ali wins, Mailer ardently believes, it would be “a triumph for everything which did not fit into the computer: for audacity, inventiveness, even art.” Ali’s victory would demonstrate how an artist can regenerate his powers. “What could be of more importance to Norman?” he asks.

  The fight ends in the eighth round. Ali comes off the ropes and throws a combination of punches ending with a hard right that knocks Foreman down. But the final punches Ali threw were effective only because of the amazing innovations of the previous rounds. Possessed of exceptional reach (eighty inches), and one of the greatest left jabs of all time, Ali threw straight right-hand punches in the first round. Right-hand leads are usually reserved for the later rounds, and Foreman is shocked by them. Ali also had the fastest feet of any heavyweight fighter, and bragged about his ability to “dance,” but in the second round, he retreated to the ropes and let Foreman pound him. No one had ever seen what Ali later called his “rope-a-dope” tactic; it seemed insane to let the hardest puncher alive hit you at will. “For as long as Foreman had strength,” Mailer wrote, “the ropes would prove about as safe as riding a unicycle on a parapet. Still what is genius but balance on the edge of the impossible?” Ali covered his head with his hands, his belly with his elbows, and leaned back on the ropes (which had been loosened just before the match by Ali’s team), forcing Foreman almost to fall on him. “Blows seem to pass through him as if he is indeed a leaf spring built to take shock.” Ali taunts Foreman. “Can’t you hit,” he says. “You can’t hit, you push.” His scorn maddens Foreman, who overextends himself.

  The rope-a-dope is a stupendous success. Foreman has a good round in the fifth, but after that tires quickly and begins to look “like a drunk, or rather a somnambulist, in a dance marathon.” Mailer avails himself of every weapon in his metaphoric armory to capture the stages of the champion’s disintegration: “Foreman was becoming reminiscent of the computer Hal in 2001 as his units were removed one by one, malfunctions were showing and spastic lapses.” By the seventh round he was moving as “slow as a man walking up a hill of pillows.” On the occasions when he was able to put together a flurry, Ali would reach over the barrage and “give a prod now and again to Foreman’s neck like a housewife sticking a toothpick in a cake to see if it is ready.” After Ali hits him with the winning combination in the eighth, Foreman “went over like a six-foot sixty-year-old butler who has just heard tragic news, yes, fell over all of a long collapsing two seconds, down came the champion in sections.” Guile bested force; art defeated power.

  He began work on his account right away, as Playboy had scheduled it for the May issue. As usual, he gave them far more than they were expecting, approximately 54,000 words, which they published in two parts in May and June. When it appeared in book form in late July, it had grown to 67,000 words, but was still divided in two parts, “The Dead Are Dying of Thirst” and “N’golo.” It is perhaps the most detailed, certainly the most dramatic, and arguably the most engrossing description of a major prizefight ever written, as well as a demonstration that professional boxing, brutal, sleazy, and corrupt as it often is, can be the locus of artistry of the highest order. As Mailer said later, it is “a book about a genius.” But pleased as he was to depict Ali’s abilities and applaud his against-the-odds comeback, he had doubts about continuing to write this kind of nonfiction.

  He states this baldly in The Fight, speaking of himself: “He was no longer so pleased with his presence. His daily reactions bored him. They were becoming like everyone else’s. His mind, he noticed, was beginning to spin its wheels.” He could continue chasing events, writing a book every year, but he was having some doubts about his ability to read the river of American life. His reputation “had been burning low in the literary cathedral these last few years,” he admitted. The reviews of The Fight were generally positive, but were few in number. It could be argued that Mailer’s fecundity in the late 1960s and early 1970s irked the literary world, especially after the story appeared about his million-dollar advance for a novel, the “descendant of Moby-Dick,” promised in Advertisements for Myself. “Let us see this masterwork” was the unspoken sentiment.

  Seymour Krim, one of his most devoted admirers, was discouraged, as he noted at the end of his generally favorable review: “These reportorial books after a while become something of a sham, a waste, a kind of John Barrymore exhibition for the cash no matter how much fine skill goes into the performance.” When this line was read to him, Mailer said, “I think it’s legitimate,” adding that he had “mixed feelings” about the book. “Maybe I have ten years left to write,” he said, “maybe I have 20.” He had spent a half year on The Fight and he wondered aloud, “was that right, was it sensible?” Looking back now at what is generally considered a masterpiece of sports biography, one could justly conclude that the expenditure of effort was worthwhile.

  IN EARLY 1975, Mailer was in a state of what must be called anomie. Dogged by debt, caught in a web of romantic relationships, displeased with recent work, and uncertain of his ability to deliver his promised big novel, he wanted change on every front. He had to agree with reviewers who were getting weary of him as a lens, a protagonist, an autobiographer, and a self-described “Nijinsky of ambivalence,” and without announcing it he concluded that the participatory journalism phase of his career was over. He would occasionally describe himself in the third person again, but only in short pieces. For the remainder of his writing life—he had 30 more years, not 20—he would move back and forth between the novel and biography of various kinds, sometimes combining the two. But at this point, he knew that he had to heed the message from his navigator, two words repeated over and over: “big novel . . . big novel.” He wanted it and his fans wanted it (his publisher expected it), and so for the next three years he would be faithful, after his fashion, to the Egyptian novel, which he referred to as a forgiving wife, a lady always ready to welcome him home from the fleshpots of other genres.

  The actual lady he was living with, Carol Stevens, showed less forbearance. She suspected that his affair with Suzanne Nye was continuing. Matters came to a head in late 1974. Carol said that they agreed to sit down and have a formal discussion of the situation. “He had tears streaming down his cheeks and I suddenly felt sorry for him. We talked for some time and when I asked him if he wanted to be with her or hold on to what we had, he said he would leave her. We agreed on a six-month period where he would remain faithful. I really believed that he meant it.” He may have. For three or four months, he stayed close to home and worked on The Fight. When it was finished, he went on another college speaking tour. After speaking in New Orleans, he flew to Arkansas in early April to spend a few days with Fig and Ecey.

  The Gwaltneys threw a party for him, attended by Fig’s colleagues and friends at Arkansas Tech. One of the people he met was
a former student of Fig’s, a stunning redheaded schoolteacher named Barbara (née Davis) Norris. When she learned Mailer would be visiting, she got herself invited to the party so she could get her copy of Marilyn signed. Divorced and the mother of a young boy, she was a tall drink of water, five foot ten. That day she wore platform shoes that made her an inch or two over six feet. She said, “How are you, Mr. Mailer,” and shook his hand. He turned and walked out of the room. “The last thing I had on my mind was romance,” she wrote years later in her memoir, although she changed her mind later that night. Mailer had a favorite French expression, force majeure. Norris Church, as she would soon sign her name, was such a force for him, and would be his last great love. It was the same with her.

  She was about to leave the party when he returned. She remembered “the intensity of his blue eyes, and his charisma” (which she compared to those of Bill Clinton, a former lover), and the way he “radiated energy like a little steam heater. He couldn’t sit still.” When he discovered that they had the same birthday, born one minute (and 26 years) apart, he got quite excited. She did as well, being as skeptical as he was about coincidences being accidental. At the dinner party, Mailer told her how beautiful she was, something he would repeat to her often in their thirty-three years together. He borrowed Fig’s car and followed her home, where she offered him a glass of Boone Farm apple wine. They made love on the living room rug, but it was uncomfortable because her son, Matthew, was sleeping in the next room.

  That night, he explained his obligations: three homes, seven children, three ex-wives, an estranged wife, Beverly, and Carol, the woman to whom he was currently married (except in the eyes of the law). All told, he was sole supporter of fourteen people. “It was all rather overwhelming,” Norris wrote, “but I appreciated his honesty.” She did not want to become part of his harem, however. Maybe it was just an “interlude on his lecture tour,” she thought. Getting married again didn’t interest her. Nevertheless, they agreed to think about a meeting in late May when he would be on the road again. He promised to send her a box of his books, as she had read only part of Marilyn, and she sent him a photograph to the address he gave her, a post office box in Lee, Massachusetts, a small town a few miles from Stockbridge. Mailer used it for correspondence with his girlfriends.