Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Joan Didion’s review, in The New York Times Book Review stands with Kazin’s on Armies as one of the finest and most influential appreciations of Mailer’s work. She points out that the dominant speakers in “Western Voices” are those of women, and that “Eastern Voices” is largely comprised of stories by men: “Men tend to shoot, get shot, push off, move on. Women pass down stories.” She quotes what Bessie Gilmore says after she learns that Gary is under arrest for murder: “I am the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of pioneers on both sides. If they could live through it, I can live through it.” Didion calls this “the exact litany which expresses faith in God west of the 100th meridian.” Her key perception, however, is that the first half of the book, because its strongest speakers are women, is “a fatalistic drift, a tension, an overwhelming and passive rush toward the inevitable events that will end in Gary Gilmore’s death.” These western women do not generally “believe that events can be influenced. A kind of desolate wind seems to blow through the lives of these women.” Conversely, the men of “Eastern Voices,” the lawyers and reporters and prison administrators, “move in the larger world and believe that they can influence events.” The contrast, she says, gives the book its immutable form, a symphony in two movements. She concludes her review: “This is an absolutely astonishing book.”

  Discussing Didion’s characterizations of the two parts of the book, Mailer said, “Yes, she’s absolutely right.” But he didn’t see it at the time. When he was writing “Western Voices” he was thinking of cowboy movies, and for “Eastern Voices” he had a vision of media hordes coming from New York. “I saw the first half of the book as masculine and the second half as feminine.” After reading her review, however, he realized the opposite was also correct—“women playing a masculine role in the first half of the book and men playing a feminine role in the second half.” It was not done intentionally, he said. “If it emerges out of something you haven’t thought about, out of the unconscious preoccupations of your mind, where you sort of half-see what you’re doing and someone else sees the other half, that’s always the ideal.” Years later, he offered another metaphor for what he often referred to as the navigator, which reinforces his comments on the composition of Executioner’s Song: “What I found as a writer is that signals from the unconscious are faint. It’s as if you are on an outpost in the North Pole and your radio is weak and you can barely hear what people are saying.”

  TWO WEEKS AFTER Executioner’s Song was published, Mailer flew to Illinois to give Jack Abbott a copy. He traveled via Chicago, and stayed at the Drake Hotel on Lake Michigan. When he checked in, the front desk receptionist, an attractive middle-aged woman named Eileen Fredrickson, recognized him. She asked if he would sign her copy of Naked and the Dead, and he agreed to do so the next day when she brought it to work. The next morning, she told him that she had forgotten the book. He asked where she lived and said he’d be happy to take a cab there to sign it when she was off work. They set a time, and Eileen, who was excited, called her sister to tell her. “Be careful, he stabbed his wife,” she was told, but Eileen said she wasn’t worried. Mailer came and stayed the night. In the morning, she recalled, “I took him back to the Drake about seven-thirty in the morning in my car. I said to him, ‘Norman, just consider it a one-night stand.’ The next day he called me and said, ‘If I came over again it wouldn’t be a one-night stand, would it?’ And I said, ‘No.’ ” The relationship they started would continue until the year he died. He called her often, sent her autographed copies of his books, and got together with her when he was in Chicago.

  J. Michael Lennon, a young professor at the University of Illinois–Springfield, had been working with Mailer to put together his latest essays and interviews for what would become Pieces and Pontifications, and when Mailer told him that he was coming to see Abbott, he offered to pick him up at the airport. His brother, Peter, who was familiar with southern Illinois, came along, and on November 3, 1979, they drove Mailer to the prison. Peter recalled the visit.

  Over breakfast, he talked at some length about Apocalypse Now and how Brando personified evil in it. He said the atmosphere and combat scenes in it were the best he’d ever seen. He said he was keeping an epistolary promise by visiting Abbott. He seemed eager—not nervous, but curious about the visit. It was a half hour drive through a dense, leafless forest to the isolated maximum security Marion Federal Penitentiary. After Norman announced our arrival (by speaking into a mechanical device a few hundred yards from the walls, at which point you are surveyed from the guard towers), we parked and walked to the main entrance. Norman remarked that everything, the sky, landscape, razor wire and walls were grey and, in fact, colorless. No one liked it. Michael and I were confined to the outer hallway alongside a guard station. Norman had one hour and it was just noon. At precisely one he was back out—book in hand.

  Over drinks later, Mailer said that he liked Abbott and felt that in a few years, he might get out. Abbott deserved a chance, he said.

  Upon his return, Mailer wrote a long letter to Abbott telling him that Cy Rembar had agreed to be his literary lawyer, and would not charge him anything “until you make some real money.” He said that he would find a way to get Abbott a copy of the book (advance permission was required), adding that he wished the situation had occurred when he was still writing Executioner’s Song. “It would have given me more understanding of Gilmore’s vast rage at the regulations,” he wrote. “Somehow I think that the human soul is built to encounter major injustice with more equanimity than the penny varieties.” The meeting in Marion was “terrific,” he continued, “and if you like me, that’s great, ’cause I dug you.” The rest of the letter is devoted to a discussion of Abbott’s writing. He said it was natural for him to write about “the journey of your soul.”

  It is the kind of writing which is very hard to read over long stretches when written by anyone smaller in stature than Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. And while I’d never say you cannot end up ultimately as good as them the odds are obviously not in your favor. Guys like that come along once or twice a century. In any event, I have no hesitation in suggesting, nay, recommending the following because even if it never takes hold and you don’t do much with it, I think it will enrich your writing in general. And that is, I would attempt if I were you to try other forms of writing as exercises, literary exercises, and build up your skills—that is probably anathema to you—in a way parallel to the way some work out to build up their bodies.

  Mailer said he suspected that Abbott would have a flair for drama. In 1987, Abbott proved him to be correct about his dramatic abilities. He wrote and published a play, The Death of Tragedy, which seeks to exonerate him for the crime that returned him to prison three months after he was paroled.

  Abbott finally got a copy of Executioner’s Song, and at the end of November sent Mailer a fifty-six-page letter of commentary. Mailer wrote back to say that while he did not agree with everything, he found it to be “fascinating,” especially the parallels Abbott made between Song and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. He was at some pains to defend why he had not taken a position on various matters in the book. “It’s the first book I’ve written,” he wrote, “without a clear sense of what I thought and what I wanted to teach others.” Abbott felt that Brenda had betrayed her cousin Gary by setting up his arrest. Mailer responded by noting that while Brenda loved Gilmore, he had killed two innocent people in two days.

  She is thinking of the neighbors as well as her family. Gary could shoot the cop, Toby, her neighbor. Hurrah, say you. Horrors, says Brenda. It isn’t necessarily all cowardice on her part although you will think so, and Gary as well. But she lives on the surface of society where you breathe the advantageous air. In that place, the loyalties are on the surface, to one’s neighbors, to society, to the team. Horseshit, you say. And, horseshit, say I, but faintly. Because I don’t know for sure anymore.

  Mailer would soon find himself in a bind similar to Brenda’s, torn between supp
orting a friend and condemning him for a senseless crime.

  With Executioner’s Song selling briskly, Scott Meredith had been able to renegotiate the contract with Little, Brown. He would now “receive $30,000 a month” against the royalties for the projected three-volume novel, and by the fall of that year he had been paid close to $1.5 million, which allowed him to pay off his loans to Meredith and his mother, and finally get even with his taxes. For the first time in a decade, he had enough money coming in to focus all of his energies on the novel. “I leave it for two years and come back,” he told his biographer Hilary Mills, “and it says, ‘Oh you look tired, you’ve been away, here let me wash your feet.’ ” But he saw that the patience of this good wife of a novel was not bottomless. “I think,” he said, “I’ve finally got to finish the Egyptian novel.” By the end of January, he had eight hundred pages of manuscript.

  His focus was intense enough that he forgot to write a second letter for Abbott, supplying some details left out of an earlier one, to the Utah Board of Pardons. He apologized in an April 11 letter, and told Abbott not to read any “psychological substrata into all this.” During a two-month burst of writing, he had failed to write a number of important letters. “I’m just not mentally coordinated enough to put a really big show on the road,” he said. He had delegated to Judith McNally the task of assembling Abbott’s letters into a piece that might be sold to a magazine, buttressing Mailer’s testimonial to the board about Abbott’s literary skills. Mailer had told Robert Silvers, coeditor of The New York Review of Books, about Abbott, and on June 26 the letters were published there. In his introduction, Mailer explained how he had become friendly with Abbott, recounted his decades in federal prisons, which he said had been Abbott’s “secondary school, his university, his family, his culture.”

  HE RETURNED TO Provincetown in July of 1980, his first summer visit there in three years. In August the family traveled to Maine, renting for the first time a sprawling old farmhouse on the water that belonged to the Putnam family, descendants of Rufus Griswold, the scurrilous nineteenth-century editor and anthologist who created the false legend of Edgar Allan Poe as a dipsomaniac and drug addict. Even with a household full of guests, Mailer worked a few days a week on Ancient Evenings. He sometimes tricked new visitors into jumping off the dock into the bone-chilling water. “Come on in; it’s perfect,” he yelled to them. Mailer loved the water and tried to swim daily in the summer.

  In the fall, back in Brooklyn, he wrote to Larry L. King about their abstemious situation—both he and King had quit drinking.

  By temperament, I’m a manic-depressive, which means I enjoy the depressions if they’re deep, rich, mahogany, and melancholy, almost as much as the highs. My idea how to live is to feel in one hour that one is the best damned zapped fucker in the U.S. and then spend the next day mourning the tragic depths of one’s profound incompetence. I’ve always looked upon that as living. Now here I am, trimmed-down Norm, down to 170 from 200, able to jog two miles a day at a peppy clip, brisk and birdlike in my manner to all and sundry who greet me, slightly reminiscent of a Democratic-party equivalent to George [H. W.] Bush, you know, peppy.

  His moods did not alternate much, he said.

  I keep telling myself it’s the dues I must pay, that maybe a year must go by, or two years, before the epiphanies ring in my ears once more. I don’t know, Larry. You’ve had it a lot tougher than me, because you’re a born hell-to-leather drinker, and I was just a nice Jewboy from Brooklyn who acquired the habit, but I console myself ultimately with the thought that it’s curious and interesting to be without booze this long. I find my relations to everyone are as altered as they were during the period when I ran for mayor and found myself shaking hands with individuals whose eyes I would not normally have deigned to spit into. I’m sort of tolerant and bland and can’t stand myself these days, but on the other hand, I boxed three three-minute rounds a couple of Saturdays ago.

  One of the reasons Mailer stopped drinking for eighteen months was to channel all his energy into Ancient Evenings, which could no longer be shunted to a siding while he took on journalism assignments. He now had the time, strength, cash, and patience to complete it. Based on numerous comments he had made in interviews, the literary world half believed he would actually deliver it in the near future. A few hangovers a month would impede the steady progress he was making, not to mention the loss of brain cells. He said more than once that a night of heavy drinking cost him a lot more than boxing three rounds. Sparring once a week during the years 1978 to 1982 was one of Mailer’s distinct pleasures, and a welcome break from writing all day in a tiny room.

  “By the time I was born,” John Buffalo wrote, “boxing had become the family sport. My father and his friends, my brothers and their friends, and my cousin and his friends went to the Gramercy Gym every Saturday morning.” Michael and Stephen had been boxing for years with their father, as had their cousin Peter Alson (Barbara’s son), who was a decade older. From the age of three, John went along with them to the gym, where they were joined by a group of friends, including Jeffrey Michelson, editor of a porn magazine, Puritan, and Sal Cetrano, a poet and high school English teacher. José Torres, who had trained at Gramercy under Cus D’Amato, had a set of keys to the grimy third floor walk-up on East 14th Street. During the week professionals and Golden Glove contenders trained there, but on weekends it was locked. Torres let them in and often stayed to give free tutorials to “the raging Jews,” as Mailer’s amateurs called themselves. Among the group, John Buffalo wrote, there was an understanding: “They were not there to beat the piss out of each other, but to learn a little about themselves.”

  Torres was the boxing advisor on a movie titled The Main Event, starring Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand, then being filmed in New York. O’Neal was an excellent boxer, a former Golden Gloves fighter, and Torres started bringing him to the gym on Saturdays. At first O’Neal boxed with Torres, but as time passed he began to spar serially with the Mailer crowd. Michael, who would box in Golden Gloves tournaments a couple of years later, was sixteen at the time, and much lighter than O’Neal, but got in the ring with him a number of times. “He was very good and technically proficient,” Michael recalled, “although like a true Irish boxer, he enjoyed taking a punch. I used to hit him at will and marveled at how easy it was to connect on him, but he would punch back and it stung.” His father also liked mixing it up with O’Neal; it was a chance “to get extended in the ring,” Mailer wrote in a boxing memoir, because “Ryan could be as mean as cat piss.” On one occasion, O’Neal broke Cetrano’s jaw. On another Saturday, as Mailer described it, O’Neal threw “cruel left hooks to the stomach until the editor [Michelson] collapsed, still conscious, in the middle of the second round, wholly unable to go on.” Mailer, who was next up against him, saw that O’Neal had turned “angelic,” a bit ashamed of what he had unleashed on Michelson, “a sweet guy, extraordinarily optimistic about life.” “Feeling like an avenger,” Mailer hit O’Neal with several straight rights. In their first clinch, O’Neal said, “You punch harder than anyone here.” Mailer replied, “Go fuck yourself.” He and O’Neal continued to box, and Mailer relished their exchanges: “It was as close as it ever came for me to gain some knowledge of how a professional might feel in a real bout for money with a hard-hearted crowd out there and the spirit of electricity in the ring lights.”

  Boxing, Mailer said, is as close to chess as to football, all three requiring “discipline and intelligence and restraint.” As does writing, which he often compared to boxing. In an interview shortly after Mailer’s death, the British novelist Ian McEwan said of him: “Boxing and writing were wonderfully confused in his mind.” But while Mailer compared the two, he knew how different they were. Take the matter of discipline. Writers and boxers who are professionals must be formidably disciplined to achieve their goals, but in one sense writing requires more discipline because, as Mailer pointed out, “boxing has objective correlatives.” Invariably, one boxer d
ominates the other, he continued, but with writing, “you can’t tell if it’s good on a given day, and you almost don’t want to know.” Over long years, a writer may develop the instinct to see that something is quite well done, but the chance of delusion is considerable.

  There is another large difference between the two pursuits, as Mailer had explained to Torres in the summer of 1973 when they traded writing and boxing lessons. Mailer, Torres recalled, said that writing was about truth but “boxing was the opposite. It’s about cheating and deceiving and lying,” and Mailer predicted that it would be hard for him to learn to write well after years in the ring “cheating with a jab.” Writing is also a form of mendacity, it could be argued, but beneath these differences Mailer believed, was one “huge similarity,” which is “this battle with yourself that goes on constantly, and this demand to get the maximum out of yourself.” Both boxers and writers “have to call up something deep down in themselves in order to continue.” An ambitious boxer wants his victory to be remembered for years, decades, while a writer who is serious seeks “to make a change in the history of one’s time.” In both boxers and writers, there is an inner struggle, an intestinum bellum, between courage and resignation. Great boxers and writers, Mailer said, “become aware that the main bout is with themselves.”

  Also, the bodily toll, he believed, was much the same for professionals in the two fields, as he said in an interview with his friend Barry Leeds. Writing a novel is hell, he said.