Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  If Mailer could hear these words, he might respond by saying he came on strong with his children and friends to keep the dialectic supple, to encourage a strong response. “It’s through opposition that creative possibilities rise,” he maintained. A tension between being open-minded and being overbearing was characteristic of Mailer from his mid- to late thirties and on. He knew it, and explained it in a letter to a writer friend, Peter Arthurs.

  We’re all divided between the moralists in ourselves and the novelist. The moralist is full of platitudes and mother’s milk, always telling others how to live. The novelist, who always has an eye like a pair of tweezers, never fails to pick up a detail. The novelist is amoral, witty, private, and there to be followed in each of us. What I mean is if one relaxes the moral, authoritative side of one’s nature and gets over the idea that one has to say something with one’s novel, and merely allows one’s characters to take their turns, and is, indeed, even surprised by the turns these characters take, as if they do in some fashion have life of their own, then marvelous things can come out of it.

  During 1985, Mailer’s correspondence burgeoned, as it usually did when he was not writing on deadline. He kept up with all his regular correspondents—Abbott, Stratton, Knox, Don Carpenter (west coast friend), Farbar (like Stratton, still incarcerated), and another writer, Bruce Dexter, as well as to people unknown to him who wrote with questions. To the editor of The American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell, who had inquired about his current reading, Mailer said that John Cheever’s collected stories was “the discovery” of the year, and that he regretted that he had never had a good discussion with him when he was alive—Cheever died in 1982. The other book he named was M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. He made no comment on it, but it clearly influenced the opening of Harlot’s Ghost, which he would soon begin. In his letter to Dexter, he repeated something that he had announced to friends more than once: “I am a phenomenon to myself.” He told Dexter that “no one to my knowledge has ever had the same apercu about me that you had.” Dexter had seen clearly that

  I always was my own experiment, and that is such a simple way to live, and no one could ever comprehend it. I don’t even think it took great guts, just my intense scientific curiosity about one’s subject, myself and the bizarre phenomenon of myself. At any rate, those years are behind me now. I’m tempted to say alas. Once you lose the power to experiment on yourself, you lose half your ideas as well.

  FAN MAILER, NOW in her nineties and failing, spent the summer of 1985 with her family. Barbara and Al were renting an apartment in Provincetown, and all of the children came to town as well. Fan spent most of her time in bed in the front bedroom overlooking Commercial Street. The local tour bus came by daily and Fan could hear the driver pointing out “the home of the famous writer Norman Mailer.” Norris recalled that she and all five of Mailer’s daughters, as well as Barbara, took turns sitting by her bed to keep her company. A woman named Eva, hired by the family, was almost always there. In late August, Fan and Eva were back in Brooklyn. When Barbara visited, she was disturbed when she saw that Fan was having difficulty swallowing. “The motor of the family,” as Mailer called her, was shutting down. On August 28, Susan’s birthday, Fan died. Eva called Provincetown. Mailer was out for a swim when the call came. Stephen recalled that he and Michael swam out to where their father was snorkeling to give him the news. “The three of us then, solemnly, walked back to the house with weighty, unspoken remorse.” Fan was buried in the family plot in Long Branch next to Barney. Born (probably) the same year, 1891, she outlived him by almost thirteen years.

  In a letter to Stratton, Mailer told him how at the end his mother “could no longer see, she could barely walk, she was bent over from arthritis, the forefront of her memory was gone, so that conversations with her consisted of her asking you the time, like clockwork, every twelve and a half seconds.” But she was still feisty on occasion.

  Once, maybe a month before the end, she was complaining to her companion, a Jamaican lady [Eva] who took care of her, about how miserable she felt, and said, “I just wish I was dead,” whereupon the Jamaican lady, who was probably fed up with her—she was not the world’s greatest fun to take care of—said to her, “Would you like me to help you?” At that point, my mother drew herself up as well as she could with her bent back, and glaring at the woman with her sightless eyes said, “Drop dead.” That was my mom.

  The fall of the year was given over to fundraising and arrangements for the eight PEN Celebrations. Richard Snyder, the head of Simon & Schuster, Tina Brown, editor of Vanity Fair, Gay Talese, and “takeover baron” Saul Steinberg and his wife, Gayfryd, were some of the key people who worked with Mailer to secure contributions from publishers and philanthropists for the congress. Talese was instrumental in convincing Donald Trump to donate two hundred hotel rooms for visiting writers. Added to the income from the PEN Celebrations, the total from major givers was more than sufficient to meet the budget. Talese, who headed the planning committee for the congress, said that without Mailer “and his fund-raising efforts, we would not be having an international congress.” His eagerly anticipated evening with Vidal on November 17 drew a sell-out crowd, but the event was a dud. Both men criticized American imperial ambitions but with no special insights or revealing disagreements. Mailer’s sister recalled that Vidal was the better speaker that night. Before introducing Allen and Updike at the final Sunday event in December, Mailer apologized for his appearance with Vidal, calling it “a meeting of two toothless tigers.” As best he could during this hectic period, Mailer kept working on the new novel, and by the end of 1985 had four hundred pages of manuscript that he was describing to friends as “a spy novel.”

  In the midst of the PEN events, he learned from his doctor, as he told his boxing friend, Jeffrey Michelson, in early October, “I don’t have a bad heart, but I don’t have a good one either.” Boxing was over for him he said, because of his wind. “It got to be sheer, simple hell just to get through a round,” he said. “My chest used to feel like it was going to explode.” He said he planned to eat a more healthy diet and asked Michelson to keep his condition confidential.

  The news about his health came about the same time that he was selected by McCall’s magazine as one of the ten sexiest American men over sixty, along with Paul Newman, Cary Grant, Joe DiMaggio, and President Reagan. Meredith was asked for comment on Mailer and declined. When told, Mailer said that he would have given a quote: “At long last, love.” He told Knox, “It’s all such marvelous crap.” Confirming his confused status in the public eye, a few months later the Feminist Writers’ Guild made him the “Guest of Dishonor” at their ninth annual meeting, where those present played a game called “Pin the tail on Norman Mailer,” a protest against “his antifeminist writings.” Mailer had no comment. He received one other award, on November 20, the Lord & Taylor Rose Award made annually to “a person of public accomplishment.” Previous recipients included Lillian Hellman, Walter Cronkite, and Ella Fitzgerald. Michael Mailer was the master of ceremonies, and Liz Smith, Plimpton, Buckley, and Milos Forman spoke. Mailer was among friends. When he got to the lectern, he said just that morning he had been talking to his wife about the award. “I said to her how nice it was that Lord & Taylor is honoring me on my 60th birthday. She smiled at me and said, ‘You’re 62 and it’s not your birthday.’ ”

  THE 48TH INTERNATIONAL PEN Congress opened on January 12, 1986, at the New York Public Library with welcoming remarks by Secretary of State George Shultz. The majority of the conferees from both the United States and foreign countries were left-leaning and Shultz was not received warmly, even though he condemned censorship. Mailer had invited him at the suggestion of John Kenneth Galbraith, but without consulting the Executive Board—a blunder that he later apologized for—and there was significant opposition, given the unpopularity of the Reagan administration among liberals. Mailer said he thought it was appropriate to have the nation’s top diplomat welcome the in
ternational delegates. E. L. Doctorow wrote an op-ed piece saying that Mailer’s action had put PEN “at the feet of the most ideologically right-wing Administration this country has seen,” and sixty-five of the seven-hundred-plus delegates signed a petition opposing it. Things improved slightly after the opening day furor, but the sour mood never dissipated. One commentator described the conference as “a week of petitions and statements and strategy meetings, of walkouts and protests and confrontations.” Aesthetics withered in the ideological heat.

  The theme of the conference, the brainchild of novelist Donald Barthelme and poet and translator Richard Howard, was “The Imagination of the State,” intended to generate a discussion of two kinds of imagination, artistic and governmental. But many argued that states don’t have imaginations, just the opposite; states have agendas, narrow sets of self-serving goals rarely lubricated by literature. Shultz, many believed, was the servant of an administration that had no imagination, not even a brain. It was Mailer, after all, who said later that the first precept of President Reagan was: “Be as shallow as spit on a rock and you will prevail.” The conference theme was echoed in many of the titles of the panels: “How Does the State Imagine?” “Censorship in the U.S.,” and “Alienation in the State.” Susan Sontag chaired one of these and led off by stating that she didn’t understand the theme to be discussed. Mailer, who was in the audience, reminded Sontag that the panel themes “had been around for six months,” and said, “Couldn’t you have picked up the phone and asked?” Sontag, it was later revealed, was a member of PEN’s program committee. “I was livid,” he said.

  On the fifth day of the conference, Mailer was attacked again, this time for the underrepresentation of women. A petition was presented to Mailer noting disproportions in the number of women involved in the Congress—there were only twenty-odd women out of 140 on conference panels. Earlier, when Betty Friedan confronted Mailer on the issue, he answered, “Oh, who’s counting?” Friedan, joined by Grace Paley, Erica Jong, Margaret Atwood, and several others, was counting, and they wanted an explanation and a public apology. Mailer pointed out that at least two dozen important women writers had declined invitations, including Mary McCarthy, Iris Murdoch, Diana Trilling, Joan Didion, Barbara Tuchman, Mavis Gallant, Ann Beattie, Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Yourcenar. His answer did not mollify the protesters, and the atmosphere worsened, especially after he said it was a bad idea to construct literary panels based on gender balance, adding that in many countries “there are no good women writers” because of the ingrained sexism of the culture that feminists deplored. Mailer started to dig himself into a deeper hole with comments about the mistake of stirring affirmative action into the literary pot, and some in the audience wondered if he would escape with his skin. Only after Gay Talese whispered some words of advice in Mailer’s ear did he promise that the petitions would be addressed, and shortly afterward closed down the discussion. An ad hoc committee, headed by Grace Paley, was established afterward to examine the demands of the protesters. Vonnegut, another PEN official, said at the time that if he had been in the president’s position he would have constituted the panels almost exactly the way Mailer had, given the roster of conferees from which to choose.

  In point of fact, Mailer had little to do with selecting panel members, as he explained to novelist Mary Lee Settle, who wondered why she hadn’t been chosen for one. “I stayed away from that,” he wrote to her. “If I had started picking too many people, charges of nepotism, or whatever the word is, would damage us all.” Most of his effort had gone into fundraising. The participation petition called for PEN to “include women in the decision-making roles.” In a postmortem with The New York Times, Mailer said that the issue had not received much previous attention because “we have so many women in positions of such power.” At the time of the congress, women headed six of the eight permanent committees and occupied three of the six vice presidencies. Half of the seven-hundred-plus individuals that attended the conference were women. “What are people who are calling for change going to change?” Mailer asked. But given the paucity of women panelists, Friedan’s credentials, the backing of major figures such as Grace Paley, Erica Jong, and Nadine Gordimer, not to mention the feminist bull’s-eye on his back, the protest could have been foreseen. The “brilliant end run,” as Time called it, of inviting Shultz didn’t help him, and continuing anger over the final defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment a few years earlier may also have contributed, although Mailer was on record as supporting it. He continued with PEN until mid-1986 when his term was up, and stayed on the board for a time, but felt bruised by his treatment at the congress. When asked in later years about PEN, all he could say was “cannibals.”

  The congress was not given over entirely to squabbling. There were lively receptions in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; at Gracie Mansion, hosted by Mayor Ed Koch; at the New York Times Building, hosted by publisher Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger Sr. Nearby coffee shops, restaurants, and the bars of the two hotels where most of the panels and readings took place, the St. Moritz (Trump’s hotel) and the Essex House, were crowded with writers in conversation. Mailer enjoyed the many dinners and cocktail parties, although the presence of Carole Mallory in the same room as Norris gave him no happiness.

  Two months before the congress, Mailer asked Thomas Pynchon to take part and offered to have a drink with him. Pynchon wrote back with thanks and an apology, saying he would be away when the congress took place. “With luck, however, we may surface together in the same piece of space/time,” he said, making it sound as if some sort of psychic rendezvous was in the cards. He said he would enjoy having a drink with Mailer, although his would have to be “something like Ovaltine.” Mailer wrote back and gave Pynchon his telephone number for the next time he was in New York. The call never came, however. The Crying of Lot 49 was the only Pynchon novel that Mailer ever finished, and he deplored it as an extended shaggy dog story. What might have been said if the entropist and the existentialist had clinked mugs of Ovaltine across the table, across the abyss?

  Mailer’s feelings about postmodern fiction surfaced in a letter he wrote to Gordon Lish a few months before the congress. Lish had edited some of his Esquire essays in the 1970s and had stayed in touch with him, sending him the books he was editing at Knopf, and his own fiction. One of these was Peru, an “obsessively circular novel,” as one reviewer put it. The novel (which might be a memoir, or so it hints) is about the memories the narrator, Gordon, has of a boy he killed in a sandbox by gashing his skull with a toy hoe. The boys are six. Little by little, memory byte by memory byte, Gordon remembers the gory details but with no emotion. Mailer liked Lish but detested his book.

  Lish admired the work of Gertrude Stein, but this earned him no points with Mailer. “I whisper to you that I don’t really care in my secret heart whether Gertrude Stein lives forever or perishes tomorrow in Parnassus,” Mailer wrote. “You have the perfect right to go in your direction”—Stein’s direction—“just as I have to go in mine, but the directions are profoundly opposed.”

  What your work catches is everything I detest about modern life. The entropy first, the breakdown of syntax, of concentration, mobility, all the murky tides that wash at our sensibilities. You capture that perfectly until my teeth are ready to grind. I feel as if literature is beleaguered, and that we must no longer study the disease but erect baroque monuments to stand against it, even if they’re no more meaningful than sand castles against the filthy dull polluted tide. I want literature that has more syntax, more concentration, more in the way of symbols, and not that damned torturous undertow [words illegible] deterioration of forms, pervasive indefinable dread, and anomie.

  He ends his condemnation of postmodernism by saying that he hesitated to write this kind of letter, but remaining silent would only “subject us both to the dirty and mucky tide.” The letter was written just at the point when he was about to break from his spy novel and take up his rainmaking chores
at PEN, and it is fair to surmise that his comments to Lish reminded him of the kind of novel he had begun, which he would devote himself to for the next five years. It would be his longest stretch of uninterrupted novel writing in forty years—almost uninterrupted, that is.

  THIRTEEN

  AN UNFINISHED CATHEDRAL: HARLOT’S GHOST

  “You can no longer write an all-encompassing novel about America,” Mailer said after Ancient Evenings was published. “It can’t be done.” For the eight years following its publication, he published nothing but Tough Guys, a few short pieces and a collection of his interviews. The period of focused effort ended with the publication of Harlot’s Ghost in the fall of 1991. Mailer’s tenth novel cannot justly be called all-encompassing, yet it does provide a privileged perspective on some of the most cataclysmic events and fabled figures of American life in the twenty years after World War II. Like a long freight train, Mailer’s story of WASP intelligence agents in war and peace snakes through upper-class American life (Mount Desert, Yale, the “21” Club), picks up speed as it moves through international intrigues in Europe, slows to a crawl in Uruguay, and then accelerates rapidly as it moves through the CIA’s attempts to poison Castro, its failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Some of JFK’s extramarital love affairs comprise another strand of the novel’s loosely braided narrative of deception, loyalty, betrayal, and heroism.