Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Undeterred by the weddings, Beverly continued her appeals. Her lawyer, Gerald L. Nissenbaum, accused Mailer of committing bigamy. “And I call it trigamy,” he said, “because he’s gotten married twice since his divorce” from Beverly, which because of appeals was not final, he argued. Eventually, the case went to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, which in September 1982 decided against the fourth Mrs. Mailer in a ruling that overturned previous rulings that had allowed many divorce cases to go on interminably. It ruled that once a probate judge grants a divorce, the party seeking the divorce cannot seek dismissal merely to seek a better settlement—“forum shopping”—in another venue. The decision, in effect, rewrote the state’s divorce laws going back to 1933. The New York Times, in a brief editorial titled “Mailer’s Ring Cycle,” praised him for reminding the world of the merits of marriage at a time when the institution was in question. “Call the novelist a matrimoniac, or call him a mensch. We call Norman Mailer a still point in a turning world.” Mailer’s lawyer put his own seal on the situation: “Norman Mailer won’t get married again. And you can quote me on that.” He was correct: Norris and Norman lived together as man and wife for one day short of twenty-seven years.

  WHILE THE DIVORCE case was dragging on, he was making final changes to The Executioner’s Song. By the end of March the revisions were completed and the manuscript whittled down to 1,681 pages. As soon as it was in the hands of Ned Bradford at Little, Brown, Mailer composed a form letter to the hundreds of people to whom he owed letters. After the salutation—“Friends, Penpals, Champions, Calumniators, and Occasional Correspondents”—he went on to announce his divorce case and the submission of a manuscript “a little short of 400,000 words.” He added that it was “as long as The Brothers Karamazov and one-quarter as good.”

  He told Mort Yanow that it had been enjoyable in the past “to explore the states of your own feeling,” but all he had done recently was “a lot of slogging.” The book’s completion, made him feel like “a con who’s counting the days since he stepped through the gate” to freedom. Louis and Moos got only a few words on the book—he told them “it reads as easily as greased peanuts. You can’t stop.” He also talked about John Buffalo, who had just turned one: “He’s sturdy as hell,” with “a glint of pure intelligence in his eye.” Mailer was 55 when John was born, and had more opportunity and inclination to observe his qualities and quirks than any of his other children. John later called his father “my best friend.” Mailer would never call John his favorite, but the bond with his youngest child was strong. Mailer had also grown close to John’s half-brother Matthew, who had decided a few years later to change his last name to Mailer.

  Mailer’s favorite correspondent during this period was Jack Abbott; he made his most extensive epistolary comments on Executioner’s Song in a long letter to the convict. He said he had considered incorporating some of Abbott’s experience into Gilmore, but didn’t because he wanted to exclude anything he was not certain Gilmore had felt or said. Also, he said, Gilmore did not share Abbott’s Marxist-Leninist thinking. He was “a profoundly religious man with an unshakable conviction of karma” who was “softer” than Abbott, and gave “much more parley to what you would consider the enemy,” that is, the prison administration. For many years, Mailer told Abbott, he had been a disciple of Jean Malaquais, but “turned away from his thought because I found it—and this word will infuriate you—unendurably arid.” Entering into a genuine dialogue with Abbott, he said, would depend on openness to each other’s arguments. But he sensed the same granitic intellection in Abbott that he saw in Malaquais, who had harangued him the previous evening. “He said the same thing he was saying to me for twenty years,” he said. Finally, his old mentor began to irritate him and he said: “You are like a monkey who’s lost his arms and lost his legs and clings to the top branch with his teeth. You’re so afraid that if you fall into the pit below, you might have to accept one spooky or divine notion of existence.” Malaquais’ mind was fully formed and impermeable to new ideas, Mailer believed. They remained friends, but engaged in fewer deep discussions.

  Abbott told Mailer that Israel was the puppet of the capitalist democracies. Mailer replied that he was “no automatic Zionist hardon,” a partisan who had the same question for all propositions: “Is this good for Israel?” Abbott also kept reminding Mailer that he didn’t understand what a long-term convict’s experience was like, and Mailer came back strong.

  You the fuck don’t know what it is to be a Jew. You don’t know what it is to have six million of your people killed when there are only twelve million of them on earth. You don’t know the profound and fundamental stunting of existence that got into the blood cells of every Jew after Hitler had done his work. It’s easy for you, it’s contemptuous, you say “There’s Israel doing the lackey’s work for the U.S. against the bold, brave Arab nations”—who, as you know full well, have the most hideous prisons in the history of civilized existence. Yet you have your kneejerk reflexes, and one of them is up the Arabs down the Israelis.

  Mailer’s stance on his Jewish identity throughout this remarkable letter is similar to Bellow’s, who gave a talk in 1988 about his identity as a writer, a nonobservant Jew, and an American. Like Mailer, Bellow found it neither possible nor desirable to escape from “the Jewish past—not only its often heroic suffering but also the high significance of the meaning of Jewish history.” Watching the 1945 newsreels of army bulldozers pushing piles of bodies into burial pits had given Bellow “a deeply troubling sense of disgrace or human demotion,” his version of the “profound and fundamental stunting of existence” Mailer felt when he and Adele had visited Buchenwald.

  In later letters to Abbott, Mailer brought up the Jewish experience several times, and encouraged him to read Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews, and the Talmud. Mailer owned the six volumes of the former and twenty-six volumes of the Soncino edition of the latter. He offered to send Abbott a single volume of the Talmud, saying it would take him two years to read it properly. Some years later, Abbott converted to Judaism.

  A GOOD DEAL of Mailer’s time during this period was spent in Boston going over the manuscript of Executioner’s Song with Little, Brown’s lawyer, John Taylor “Ike” Williams. Because of the large number of living people who speak or are spoken about in Executioner’s Song, there were multiple legal issues to deal with: privacy, defamation of character, copyright, and the legality of the releases Schiller had obtained from scores of people in Utah. Williams had met Mailer once before in 1963 (at a rowdy New York party where Williams punched him in the nose—both were drunk), but he did not know Schiller. As Williams recalled:

  So, here is this heavy guy with all those cameras around his neck. This was at Haussermann, Davison & Shattuck, Little, Brown’s law firm. We were in this conference room which we had to ourselves for weeks. My job was to legally vet the manuscript with Norman. This guy was always popping in and out and taking pictures, and I said, “Who the fuck is that?” Norman said, “That’s Larry Schiller. There wouldn’t be any book without him.” He explained that Larry was the one who went out to Utah early on, got the rights from the Gilmore family tied up, and gathered up interviews. And Larry was the one who attended the execution. When Larry approached Norman, he already had this enormous body of material. He said to Norman, “I just don’t know how to write the narrative on this spectacular material.” I didn’t really have an idea then about how important Larry was to the book. It was deserved, but at that point for Little, Brown this was Norman’s book. Norman never said, “You’ll have to ask Larry.” Larry never sat with us. Norman had mastered the material and felt it was his book.

  Ned Bradford died on May 12, 1979, and another Little, Brown editor, Roger Donald, began working with Mailer. Shortly before Bradford’s death, Mailer and Schiller met with him to talk about the marketing of Song, which had been announced as a forthcoming nonfiction book. Schiller was worried that it would be reviewed in tandem with a forthc
oming crime narrative about another real-life murderer, Charles Sobhraj, in Thomas Thompson’s Serpentine. Tom Wolfe’s book about the Mercury astronauts, The Right Stuff, was also to be published at the end of the year, and Wolfe, like Mailer, was writing it as a straight narrative, excluding himself. Schiller saw these developments as potentially “devastating.” He told several people—not including Mailer—that if nothing changed, Mailer might be throwing away a Pulitzer. Schiller recalled the meeting: “I’m sitting with Norman and Ned Bradford at Little, Brown, and Norman says, ‘Well, Ned, I’m not going to put this on the nonfiction list. It’s going to go on the fiction list and I’m going to call it a true life novel.’ And of course I immediately inside myself say, ‘Thank God, because a novel is never reviewed in tandem with a nonfiction book.’ ” Asked if Bradford or anyone else at the firm objected, Schiller said, “No. Ned needed a little explanation by Norman; he didn’t understand it for a few moments. Norman explained to him that there are areas in which he had extrapolated. Between A and C he’d written B. I personally believe he never would have won the Pulitzer if it was on the nonfiction list.” Schiller may have been correct. To win in nonfiction, Executioner’s Song would have to have beaten Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, a classic study of cognitive science and creativity in three geniuses (which did win the Pulitzer). In fiction, the other two contenders were Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer and William Wharton’s Birdy, important books, but less distinguished than The Executioner’s Song, which is indisputably one of Mailer’s finest works, perhaps his greatest.

  Mailer describes Song in his afterword as “a factual account,” one which is “as accurate as one can make it.” Given the fact that the material from the transcripts, legal documents, media, and psychiatric reports was not altered in any significant way, and that no one came forward later to complain that words had been put in their mouth (as they had with Capote’s In Cold Blood), the obvious question is how could he call the book a fiction, a “true life novel,” as the dust jacket says. When asked this question by a New York Times reporter, Mailer admitted that his decision had caused some confusion, but defended it by noting that “nonfiction provides answers and novels illumine questions. I think my book does the latter.” Readers a century from now, he continued, people who know nothing of Gilmore or Mailer, “would say, ‘That’s a good novel.’ ” He wanted the book “to read like a novel, feel like a novel, to smell like a novel.”

  If you feel like you’re in the room with people, the events have taken place before you and you don’t know what is going to happen next, and you want to know what happens next, then you’re in the presence of a novel. I thought that this is what the true definition of whether something is fiction or non-fiction. I think that non-fiction bears the same relationship to life as vitamin pills bear to food. In non-fiction, there’s a tendency to digest the material, absorb it, and return it to you as vitamin pills. The essence is gotten out of the various experiences, compressed and delivered to the reader. The reader can then digest the non-fiction and convert it back to fiction, convert it back to reality.

  Mailer wanted it both ways: accrue every benefit of factuality and historicity—“this really happened”—while adding fictional immediacy and interiority. No one made too much of a fuss about his generic claim, and Mailer was fairly successful in distinguishing his “true life novel” from In Cold Blood, Capote’s “nonfiction novel.”

  Schiller remembered Mailer and Capote meeting several months before Executioner’s Song was published. He and Mailer walked into the bar at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. “Sitting there all alone at the bar is Truman Capote. Norman doesn’t even notice him, but I do. And being my normal bold self I say, ‘Mr. Capote, I’m a friend of Mr. Mailer’s. Would you like to join us for a drink?’ And he gets this twinkle in his eye and a little smile and says, ‘Of course.’ ”

  He sits down next to Norman, and says—I’m paraphrasing all this—“Norman, about this book you’ve written, it’s awfully long isn’t it? I hear it’s very, very good. But awfully long, isn’t it? It’d be nice if every once in a while you could condense something a little.” Norman says something like, “I don’t think you’ve ever understood anything I’ve written.” And Capote says, “How could I understand it? I get lost because it’s so long.” At which point there was a bit of pleasant conversation, and then Truman said, “I’ve got to go. It’s so delightful to see you, Norman.” I forget exactly how he said it, but definitely that word—delightful.

  In a 1983 interview with Lawrence Grobel, Capote recalled that in the introduction to his 1980 collection, Music for Chameleons, he had pointed out that Mailer had won several prizes and earned a great deal from his nonfiction books, “although he has always been careful never to describe them as ‘nonfiction novels.’ No matter; he is a good writer and a fine fellow and I’m grateful to have been of some small service to him.” During a subsequent television interview with Grobel, Mailer said he didn’t mention his debt to In Cold Blood because it “was so famous that you didn’t have to give credit to it.” Capote saw this program and was angry. He said he had “no respect” for Mailer’s book because “he didn’t live through it day by day,” as Capote had with his murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. “He didn’t know Utah, he didn’t know Gary Gilmore, he never even met Gary Gilmore,” he said. Mailer’s book “just really annoyed me.” As for him calling Mailer a copycat, “Well, Norman has been copying me for years.”

  Mailer had another reason to be upset. Capote had warned Norris that it would be a mistake for her to marry Mailer. “That was the measure of his vanity,” Mailer told George Plimpton. “I wasn’t even furious. I was amused. I thought, ‘My God! He sure doesn’t understand Norris!’ It reminded me of that joke: What’s the epitome of vanity? Answer: It’s a guy floating downstream on his back with a hard-on. He approaches a drawbridge and yells that it’s got to be raised.” In September 1984, two weeks after Capote died, Mailer was asked again about their tiff about acknowledging influence. He said, “I think he was terribly hurt that I didn’t have some sort of dedication page in The Executioner’s Song, which went on the order of ‘If not for In Cold Blood . . . ’ ” Mailer went on: “But this is all nonsense, I mean, we can’t stand around giving credit to each other all the time.” Perhaps. Yet it would have been gracious for Mailer to have included a nod to Capote in his afterword to Executioner’s Song, as he had for Abbott.

  Both writers acknowledged Lillian Ross’s nonfiction narrative Picture: A Story About Hollywood, an account of the making of The Red Badge of Courage. Her 1952 book is fictive, if not fiction, and uses several novelistic techniques. This debt aside, the books of Mailer and Capote are different in several ways. First, Capote’s murderers were not seasoned convicts who had served long terms like Gilmore. Second, they were inarticulate by comparison. Capote tried to make Perry Smith into a litterateur, but his essential banality is apparent. Mailer said many times that the best writing in Executioner’s Song was not his, but is found in Gilmore’s letters to Nicole. He wrote her ten or twenty pages a day for months, about 1,500 pages all told. Mailer includes all or part of fifty-eight of them, including this one:

  Nothing in my experience, prepared me for the kind of honest open love you gave me. I’m so used to bullshit and hostility, deceit and pettiness, evil and hatred. Those things are my natural habitat. They have shaped me. I look at the world through eyes that suspect, doubt, fear, hate, cheat, mock, are selfish and vain. All things unacceptable, I see them as natural and have even come to accept them as such. I look around the ugly vile cell and know that I truly belong in a place this dank and dirty, for where else should I be? There’s water all over the floor from the fucking toilet that don’t flush right. The shower is filthy and the thin mattress they gave me is almost black, it’s so old. I have no pillow. There are dead cockroaches in the corners. At nite there are mosquitos and the lite is very dim. I’m alone here with my thoug
hts and I can feel the oldness. Remember I told you about The Oldness? and you told me how ugly it was—the oldness, the oldness. I can hear the tumbrel wheels creek. So fucking ugly and coming so close to me. When I was a child . . . I had a nightmare about being beheaded. But it was more than just a dream. More like a memory. It brought me right out of my bed. And it was sort of a turning point in my life. . . . Recently it has begun to make a little sense. I owe a debt, from a long time ago.

  Mailer parcels out the love letters carefully over eight hundred pages, from Gilmore’s arrest to the day before his death. Their star-crossed love-and-death affair—few commentators fail to note the similarities to the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet—is one of the story’s two keels; the other is the fierce legal struggle that dominates the second half of the book, one side trying to halt the execution, the other trying to hasten it.

  “Real life,” Ivy Compton-Burnett once observed, “seems to have no plots.” But as Mailer stated several times, nonfiction was much easier for him to write than fiction because journalists and historians do have some sort of a record and usually know beforehand their characters, settings, and themes; they have documents, witnesses, artifacts. Sometimes there is too little information; occasionally, there is too much. In the case of the Gilmore saga, Mailer was initially bewildered by “trying to put people and events together. I really had to work it out. Try encountering a hundred names at once. It’s like looking at the laid-out pieces of a clock.” Even after mastering the huge cast, Mailer faced another problem. On one of their plane rides, he said to Schiller, “I have a problem with the book.” After their suicide attempt, Gilmore goes back to prison and Nicole is sent to a mental institution. “Who’s the character that ties these two people together?” Mailer asked. Schiller had two suggestions. The first was Tamera Smith, the Deseret News reporter who befriended Nicole and obtained copies of Gilmore’s letters to her. But she had no personal contact with Gilmore. The second was Earl Dorius, the chief assistant to the attorney general of Utah. Mailer went to lunch with Dorius, who was then dealing with the legal situations of both Gilmore and Nicole, and then called Schiller up: “Oh, wonderful, nice guy, but he doesn’t work. You don’t know anything about writing books.” A short while later, showing that he did know a thing or two, Schiller pointed out to Mailer that the only other person significantly involved with both Gilmore and Nicole after the suicide attempt was none other than Larry Schiller.