Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  To the surprise of some of Mailer’s friends, he did not break with Farbar. “I figure some dealer was throwing my name around in an attempt to impress people,” Mailer said. “The feds must have heard it on somebody’s wiretap. You could smell their lust from here to Laos.” Asked if he was angry at Farbar, he said, “There was a squeeze on Buzz of a horrendous sort. He was trying to protect his family. If I had been in the same situation, what would I have done?” He visited Farbar and Stratton in prison, and wrote to them regularly.

  He did not visit Abbott, but he continued to write to him for several years, and sent him books, as did Robert Silvers. Mailer encouraged Abbott to write, sending him some of William Burroughs’s novels. He put others in touch with Abbott, including his friend, Mashey Bernstein, who corresponded with Abbott about Judaism. The biggest obstacle you face, Mailer wrote Abbott, “is that the past draws you back like a magnet and you get so sorrowful and so enraged and so bilious, so incoherent with rage, and so vengeful and so mournful and so contrite and so proud and so much this and so much that that you can’t think straight.” His own troubles, Mailer said, “are on the other side. With rare exceptions, the past has lost its vividness for me, so I feel these days as if I’m writing with an empty gut.”

  Fig Gwaltney, the army buddy at whose house he had met Norris, had died a year earlier. Mailer had promised his wife, Ecey, that he would come to Arkansas in March 1983, give a talk, and donate the honorarium to a scholarship in his memory. Fig was his oldest friend, and although they had not seen each other recently, Mailer remembered his loyalty. A few days after writing Ecey, he turned sixty. He said, “Fifty caused a long, continuous woe. Fifty had an awful sound to it. Worse than 60. Sixty feels all right. Forty felt great. Thirty felt lousy. Maybe I’ve just got something against odd numbers. Maybe at 70 I’ll go into a tailspin.” In fact, his next decade, while not free of difficulties, would be one of his happiest.

  HE HAD BEEN paid handsomely for Ancient Evenings, but the money was gone and he was again in arrears to the IRS. In mid-January he flew to Boston to try to renegotiate his contract with Little, Brown. He had already received $1.4 million, and the contract called for an additional $2.5 million for the final two novels of the trilogy, but the executives were not eager to advance much of this sum until they knew the sales of Ancient Evenings. They were fearful, Mailer said, of losing three quarters of what had already been advanced. The contract also called for a short novel to be delivered in the fall of 1983. Having pushed back deadline after deadline for him over the past decade, Little, Brown was insistent that he meet this one. But before he could begin thinking seriously about this new novel, he had to go on a very demanding tour for the current one. Mailer had stated publicly that the Egyptian novel was his masterwork, and he intended to take every opportunity to hold forth on its merits.

  His first big outing for the book was at the Lotos Club in New York on January 28, a luncheon meeting with six out-of-town book editors. Mailer was expansive on his research for the book, citing Budge’s edition of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of prayers belonging “to an infinitely remote and primeval time.” These prayers were painted and inscribed on the tomb walls and sarcophagi of the wealthy, written on papyri placed in their coffins, and also on the narrow linen bandages that swathed the remains. “Properly uttered,” Budge wrote, these prayers “enabled the deceased to overcome every foe and to attain the life of the perfected soul” in Aaru, the abode of the blessed. Those souls virtuous enough to traverse the Land of the Dead, the Duad, would enjoy unspeakable eternal happiness in the company of numerous gods and goddesses, and ride in the Boat of Ra pulling the sun through the heavens. There is no definitive version of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, or even complete agreement about the nature of the Duad and Aaru. The possibility of the soul expiring after the body, however, was accepted dogma. The Egyptian belief in a possible second death “had huge interest for me,” Mailer said, “because I’d really been writing about that in one way or another for a long time.” Gary Gilmore’s desire to protect his soul by sacrificing his body is one instance. Rojack’s similar fear in An American Dream is another. At the luncheon Mailer also mentioned Flinders Petrie, a pioneering Egyptologist, who in 1896 discovered a stele or monument stone, on which a pharaonic victory over a tribe from Israel is recorded, the first mention of that nation in an ancient Egyptian record. Moses’s revolt in Egypt is noted in passing in the novel. Using a dictionary compiled by Budge, Mailer began learning hieroglyphics, but found it too difficult. What fascinated him was its dialectical nature, how “words often reverse themselves in different contexts,” an existential language.

  The editors asked if he had read Vidal’s novel Creation, about ancient Greece and Persia, and he said no. “Gore and I are always working in terribly different directions.” Vidal is a rationalist and an atheist, he said, and comparatively speaking, I am “a diabolist and mystic.” Mailer’s protagonist, Menenhetet I, is a magus who seeks the links between the high and the low, excelsior and excrement. As Robert Begiebing notes in his study of the novel, in Menenhetet’s Egypt, “there is no clear division between the sacred and the secular, no desacralization of the world.” For the Egyptians, “death is risky and adventurous,” he says, and “the debts and wastes of one’s life carry significance beyond earthly existence.” The appeal of such a belief system to Mailer was powerful. He had also avoided Vidal’s novel because he wanted to keep his rational side on short rations during the Egyptian excursion. “Gore is not the worst writer in the world,” Mailer told the editors. “He can even be delightful and he can be seductive.” His anger with Vidal appeared to be subsiding.

  The editors also asked if he was making oblique statements about American imperialism or American class structure in the new novel. “I’ve spent my writing life trying to understand America,” he said, and this novel was an attempt “to try and get some idea of what life was like before anything we know,” before the Judeo-Christian tradition. Over and over during the book tour he was asked if he had allegorical or symbolic intentions linking ancient Egypt and contemporary America. “Piety and snobbery,” Mailer said, are the only traits that existed in both ancient Egypt and the modern world. Going to Egypt, he said, was “pure escapism.” More than one critic compared Ancient Evenings to Salammbô, Flaubert’s novel set in third century B.C. Carthage. Both are bloody, bawdy, and exotic, and both were published shortly after works of excruciating realism—Madame Bovary and The Executioner’s Song.

  One of the earliest inspirations for the novel, he said, was André Schwarz-Bart’s novel The Last of the Just, which begins with the Crusades and ends in the Nazi death camps. He was impressed by how the novel moved swiftly through a dozen or more Jewish cultures. “I thought that I would take a character, start in Egypt, have him reborn in Greece, then Rome, then somewhere in the Middle Ages, and so forth,” following Schwarz-Bart’s example. But Mailer was unable to make the leap after he got enmeshed in the fascinating beliefs and practices of the ancient Egyptians. He was, for example, deeply attentive to the fact that a dung beetle had been deified as Khepera, the god who propelled the Boat of Ra out of the Duad in the morning, and pushed it below the horizon at night. For decades he had been fascinated with magic and had read widely in works such as Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Lynn Thorndike’s eight-volume History of Magic and Experimental Science, both of which he owned. Ancient Egypt, a culture saturated in magic for thousands of years, was the perfect place for him to explore his interests. He was fascinated, he said, by “the substitution of magic for technology” in Egyptian life. “As you start getting into it, the problems they solved with their magic were about as cock-eyed and absurd as the problems we solve with our technology.” When asked what Ancient Evenings was about, he often said, it’s “a novel about magic.”

  He followed his sources with modest rigor. Professor David B. O’Connor, an Egyptologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that he enjoyed
the novel because “Mailer had so well grasped the cultural and historical thrust of ancient Egypt,” despite a few errors. The largest of these, as Mailer readily admitted, the practice of telepathy, was never part of Egyptian belief. Several of his characters send and receive mental messages, and Mailer argued later that at some point in the distant past, before the Egyptians, humans had the power of telepathy. But in modern times, he speculated, “the amount of electromagnetic disturbance all our machines make, particularly our communication machines, has polluted whatever that ring is around the earth that transmits messages.” He based this belief, in part, on the fact that dogs never watch television. “I think,” he said (remembering the clairvoyant Tibo), “they live in so complete a telepathic framework that the set communicates nothing to them.” Such were the wrinkles in the mind of the novelist at sixty.

  The earliest excerpt (published in The Paris Review, four months before the novel was released) is also the one he read to audiences for decades. It comes from the first book (of seven) in the novel, “The Book of One Man Dead,” and is a description of the embalming of Menenhetet’s great-grandson Menenhetet II (called Meni), who died in a drunken brawl at the age of twenty-one. All the sensuous particularities of the embalming process, including the removal of the inner organs, which are sealed in canopic jars and accompany the Remains, the Sekhu, on their final journey, are rendered by Meni himself, the embalmee.

  Somewhere in those first few days they made an incision in the side of my belly with a sharp flint knife—I know how sharp for even with the few senses my Remains could still employ, a sense of sharpness went through me like a plow breaking ground, but sharper, as if I were a snake cut in two by a chariot wheel, and then began the most detailed searching. It is hard to describe, for it did not hurt but I was ready in those hours to think of the inside of my torso as common to a forest in a grove, and one by one trees were removed, their roots disturbing veins of rock, their leaves murmuring. I had dreams of cities floating down the Nile like floating islands. Yet when the work was done, I felt larger, as if my senses now lived in a larger space.

  The embalming tent was “no bloody abattoir,” Meni recalls, but a “herb kitchen” where his body cavity is cleansed and soothed.

  Over time, Meni’s senses become confused; he hears odors, smells colors—synesthesia—and then his consciousness dims as his Sekhu, held down by weights, renders up its moisture in a bath of natron, a salt mixture found in the dry lake beds of Egypt. After seventy days, “I became hard as the wood of a hull, then hard as the rock of the earth, and felt the last of me depart to join my Ka, my Ba, and my fearsome Khaibit.” His aural faculty, the last to go, finally departs, and his Sekhu changes into something rich and strange, “like one of those spiraled chambers of the sea that is thrown up on the beach, yet contain the roar of waters when you hold them to your ear.” Entombed, his Sekhu becomes “part of the universe of the dumb.” The remaining six parts of his being, borrowed mainly from Budge, are: Ka (double); Ba (essential personality); Ren (secret name); Sekhem (soul or vital energy); Khu (guardian angel); and Khaibit (shadow). Mailer introduced these “lights and forces” of the Soul at the beginning of the novel to show the complexity of Egyptian belief, using the terms in the conversations of his major characters, sophisticated and wealthy Egyptians versed in magic and religion—two sides of the same coin for them.

  Those of his friends and family who heard him read the embalming scene more than a few times became familiar with the characteristics he would repeat. His secretary, Judith McNally, who typed large portions of the novel and is thanked in the acknowledgments, knew Egyptian myth and lore nearly as well as her boss. An adherent of Wicca, Judith had a black cat named Khaibit.

  Experts have not found fault with Mailer’s religious explications nor his vivid retelling of the foundational myth—the story of Osiris and Isis. Told in the gloom of the tomb by the Ka of Menenhetet to the Ka of Meni in the novel’s second book, “The Book of the Gods,” it derives in uncertain percentages from various accounts of this magnificent story of the Egyptian gods in their primal years. “In this telling,” reviewer Benjamin DeMott said, the myth “is made utterly new.” Mailer combines episodes from different sources, adds flourishes of his own, and allows Meni to ask his great-grandfather questions that clarify, heighten interest, and provide breathing spaces. The interaction of teller and tale adds immeasurably to the richness of the telling, allowing the reader to share the thrill of discovery felt by Meni.

  DURING THE YEARS he spent writing Ancient Evenings, 1972–82, Mailer gave several important print interviews, but he also turned down many and was chary about talking about his novel in progress. But in the months before and after the novel appeared, his reticence ended. He gave more than fifty interviews in 1983. The media campaign for the novel exceeded those for all his earlier books, but he told one interviewer that too much visibility is worse than too little. Authors who have good sales “get very little personal publicity. We don’t read much about Saul Bellow, John Updike.” He admitted that he had lost the battle with those who carved nasty messages on the sarcophagus of his legend. “So I’ve just said the hell with it.” He often likened his clip file to the tail of a dinosaur. Collectively, the reviews for Ancient Evenings were worse than those received by any of his books since the 1950s. In The New York Times Book Review, DeMott called the novel “a disaster.” Several reviewers—notably Vance Bourjaily, Richard Poirier, Barry Leeds, Christopher Ricks, Anthony Burgess, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, and his former Harvard professor Robert Gorham Davis—reviewed Ancient Evenings positively but, with the exception of Ricks, seasoned their admiration with reservations and puzzlements. The words “audacious,” “paradoxical,” “demanding,” and “risky” recur in these reviews, as well as a general lack of enthusiasm for the novel’s many anal, fecal, and incestuous events, and the swarm of olfactory clues that accompany them—Ancient Evenings rivals An American Dream in this regard. Menenhetet supping on a paste made from bat dung to learn its healing powers is noted by many reviewers; it emerges as the touchstone of Mailer’s outré preoccupations. To fully understand the deadly contest of Ahab and the White Whale, one must labor through the cetology chapters of Moby-Dick; to completely grasp the meanings of Menenhetet’s and Meni’s harrowing journeys in the afterlife, one must be immersed in its abominations.

  Those reviewers who liked parts of the novel almost always point to the retelling of the Osiris-Isis myth, which Mailer believed could be published as a separate narrative. The Battle of Kadesh, another favorite, could also stand alone. The defeat of the Hittites and their mercenaries by the invading army of Ramses II takes up all of “The Book of the Charioteer,” a 150-page tour de force that is the narrative heart of the novel. The barge trip down the Nile to Memphis in northern Egypt, composed, no doubt, with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at hand, is also cited as one of the novel’s most splendidly imagined passages. But it is the chariot battle that stands out.

  Commentators often point to the complicated way the story is narrated. It is not told by an anonymous narrator as in The Executioner’s Song, but by the Ka of Meni, who, while conversing with his great-grandfather’s Ka in the Great Pyramid, remembers a night fifteen years earlier, a night of dusk-to-dawn storytelling. Menenhetet, however, is the chief storyteller, and most of that ancient evening (and most of the novel) is given to his recounting of his extraordinarily long life, or lives—he has lived four—as they recline in the pharaoh’s sumptuous garden lit by thousands of captured fireflies. Meni is clairvoyant and when Menenhetet pauses in his tale, or holds something back, Meni knows it, and also knows what others are thinking as well. His mother and great-grandfather share this ability. It is the voice of Menenhetet, however, that we hear most, relayed to us by Meni. As Poirier noted, Mailer had “a felt need to justify in some way the telling of story,” and resorted to this awkward provenance. The overlay of voices is strained and confusing—Mailer said later that “the transitions of the
narrator’s voice were the hardest” challenge he faced—but he was wed from the outset to his nested voices.

  Menenhetet is sixty when he tells his stories in the pharaoh’s garden, the same age as Mailer when the novel was published. He denied, repeatedly and unconvincingly, that he was writing about himself in any important way. When his sister told him that it was his most autobiographical novel but couldn’t decide whether he was Menenhetet or Ramses, “he said with uncustomary modesty, ‘More like Ramses IX.’ ” He did not deny, however, that his protagonist’s many careers—charioteer, harem master, high priest, tomb robber, brothel keeper, papyrus merchant, speculator in necropolis sites, wealthy noble, and pharmacist-magus—were of special interest. They were. For example, the research of Menenhetet into bat dung aligns with Mailer’s homeopathic explorations in “The Metaphysics of the Belly,” his long self-interview from 1962.

  In the last three brief chapters we learn that Menenhetet’s attempts to gain a fifth life have failed. After his Sekhu is buried in his great-grandson’s tomb, their Kas proceed into the Duad. They observe with horror the punishments of those with impure hearts, many of which recall the sufferings of lost souls in Dante’s Inferno—boiling lakes, for example. After his great-grandfather’s Ka, unbidden, merges with his, Meni feels hope. He begins to ascend the “ladder of lights” (as described in the Book of the Dead) “where one might gaze like Osiris upon the portents of all that is ahead.” He receives a message that “purity and goodness were worth less to Osiris than strength” (a restatement of Rojack’s belief that “God is not love but courage”), and Meni has an abundance of it, it seems, for he is welcomed into the Boat of Ra. But then he feels a great pain coming, followed by “the scream of the earth exploding.” The knowledge comes to him that his destiny is to “enter the power of the word,” and to be born again as a storyteller. Ra’s Boat, “washed by the swells of time,” sails away and the novel ends as “past and future come together.”