Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Rushdie was still in hiding three years later when Article 19 published a collection of letters to him from twenty-seven writers. In his letter, Mailer said that he had begun writing as a young man “with the inner temerity” that if he kept on eventually he would “outrage something fundamental in the world” and endanger his life. Rushdie had done just this and now was in “a living prison of contained paranoia.”

  It is hard enough to write at one’s best without bearing a hundred pounds on one’s back each day, but such is your condition, and if I were a man who believed that prayer was productive of results, I might wish to send some sort of vigour and encouragement to you, for if you can transcend this situation, more difficult than any of us have ever known, if you can come up with a major piece of literary work, then you will rejuvenate all of us, and literature to that degree, will flower. So my best to you, old man, wherever you are ensconced, and may the muses embrace you.

  JUST BEFORE THE controversy, he wrote to congratulate Styron on receiving the MacDowell Medal. Mailer, a past winner, had been on the committee that selected him and wrote to say it was “great fun” the day he was voted in. “I think I can whisper to you that the finalists were Styron and Bellow and you won out.” Styron sent Mailer an article about the ceremony, which included a George Plimpton speech in which he described a trip Styron had made.

  A number of years ago, on a trip up the Amazon, Bill persuaded a group of tribal youths that the English word for “good morning” was “Norman Mailer,” intoned in a curious sing-song rhythm, and to be delivered with a bright smile. He got them doing this in unison—fifteen or twenty of them “Nor-man Mai-ler!” My mother, who is 87, is thinking of taking a trip up the Amazon, and I have warned her about this—so that she can take it in stride if a row of semi-clad, spear-carrying tribesmen appear at the water’s edge and call across the water: “Norman Mailer!”

  Mailer told Styron that the Amazon story had given him a good laugh, which he needed because Harlot’s Ghost was “in the doldrums.”

  In April he wrote to daughter Kate, who was touring with The Cherry Orchard in Russia, to say the novel was “now approaching the 1,500 page mark in manuscript, and God knows who will ever read it other than scattered members in the family, which is not large enough, I fear, to support me.” He wrote a few more letters, and then stopped his correspondence completely for the next six months in an attempt to wrestle with what he called “a 300-lb greased beast.” He used a more carnal metaphor in a letter to Mickey Knox, “I’m still staggering along with the novel. I tell anyone who’s willing to listen that it’s like fucking an elephant. Sometimes I believe I’m really in and working away, only to discover to my horror I’m out—I’m not in at all, I’ve merely been screwing a wrinkle in the hide.” He worked steadily for the rest of 1989, taking some time off for July and August in Provincetown when the family came in shifts, but taking no trips and publishing nothing until November of 1989.

  In that month’s issue Esquire published a two-page restatement of his theological ideas. It is notable for its discussion of God’s gender: “It has occurred to me, despite my reputation as a male chauvinist, that God may be referred to as ‘She’ as legitimately (for all we know) as ‘He,’ or, even better, as ‘They,’ if one can conceive of divinity as marriage between a godlike Male and Female.” It seems likely that the piece might have been intended for the novel, which is rife with theological speculation. Harlot, like Angleton, is a profoundly religious Cold War warrior who believes that “Communism is the entropy of Christ.” He repeats Mailer’s belief that when Christ said, “Forgive the sons for the sins of the fathers,” sanction for the scientific method was given, that is, once fathers knew that their children would not suffer, they were free to experiment, probe nature’s secrets. “That,” Harlot says, “was the beginning of the technological sleigh ride which may destroy us yet.” Harlot also repeats a thought from Milton’s Paradise Lost that Mailer learned from his Chicago friend Paul Carroll: “The Devil, you must never forget, is the most beautiful creature God ever made.” He would repeat it several years later when he depicted Satan in The Gospel According to the Son. All through the fall he wrote rapidly and nothing interfered with his routine.

  IN THE QUIET months of the off-season in P-town as he labored on the novel, the Mailers occasionally dined with a local contractor, Fred Ambrose, and his wife, Nancy. John Buffalo was the same age as their oldest son, David, and the two six-year-olds enjoyed each other’s company. Ambrose was first invited to the Commercial Street house in the early 1980s to discuss various renovation projects, and he and Mailer hit it off immediately. Ambrose had spent a year in his twenties as secretary to Alan Dugan, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet who lived in nearby Truro, and knew his way around literature. He had read and admired several of Mailer’s books, but their relationship was not a literary one. “We never really talked literature,” Ambrose said. “Norman, from what I could gather—and maybe this is a broad statement—Norman liked people who were involved in real time and liked what they did, whether they were plumbers or politicians.”

  I stayed with current events and, you know, I’d read, so Norman and I were able to really banter for 25 years over current topics, and if I disagreed with him I was usually able to support my position with a point and he’d get upset, so I knew I was gaining some footage. I’d never win, of course, but it was sort of like a boxing match. Norman liked to punch hard on an idea. He didn’t want just a fluffy answer, he liked facts. He wanted the foundation of your argument, your premise, what your premise was. Norman was the Grand Inquisitor.

  Ambrose was hired to replace a large window, the defining feature of the dining room, where Mailer spent most of his time when away from his study. It was an important job, Ambrose said, because views were important to Mailer. Besides the window in the dining room, there was a similar one in his third floor studio.

  It spanned the width of his oak desk, which was very plain; there was nothing up there. I was designing upstairs and I was very intimate with his workspace, and it was very sparse. There was a yellow pad, and pencils, a couple of Hemingway books, a dictionary, and a few odds and ends, and that was pretty much what I witnessed of the writing room. There was a cot on one side. The big window looked out to the west of Provincetown and down through the harbor. If you look at his apartment in Brooklyn, again Norman had these views. Norman always had to have a big pane of glass, and he had to have something really intricate to look at, whether it was Lower Manhattan, or he looked out at the stark view out of the dining room; it just went way out on the bay. The window upstairs in the study was much more complicated and it looked out onto the pier, and then some houses to the right, and then the boats in the harbor.

  The six-by-six multi-paned dining room window had caught the spindrift for years, and was falling apart. When Ambrose redesigned it, he eliminated the small panes. “Norman had a fit,” Ambrose said. “We had this heated conversation. I said, ‘Norman, you got a world-class view out there. You live here because of your view. Live with it for thirty days. If you’re not happy, we’ll put the panes in.’ Norman was really mumbling to himself and not happy.” Mailer’s tastes, Ambrose said, were Edwardian and neoclassical. “After about three months, Norman warmed up to the window and we never heard anything more about it. To this day the window is there.”

  Ambrose is also an inventor and holds a number of patents. Mailer was fascinated, he said, with inventing things. He came up with an idea for a hat that would shield his weak eyes. He had always been quite nearsighted, and in his late sixties developed cataracts. Driving in bright sunlight was difficult. “He wanted me to get involved in producing this bright orange baseball cap. He had taken brass wire and bent it and shaped it and put it under the brim of the hat. And he built this elaborate sliding mechanism under the bill. You could move it left and right and block the sun without impairing your vision. He just loved his invention.” With Ambrose’s help, Mailer built a working model. “In
the marketplace, I don’t think it would’ve gone far,” Ambrose said. “I never told him to stick to his writing and stay out of the invention business. The amount of work he put into that hat was a testimony.” Ambrose still has the model.

  When he was tired of work, Mailer liked to go with Ambrose to local bars, where he knew many of the patrons. “There was a lot of respect for Norman,” he said.

  The thing that Norman liked about Provincetown is that it’s a very visceral town. People wear their hearts on their sleeves, and they think with their emotions. Whereas in the city people are calculating; they’re guarded. In Provincetown people are either carpenters, or fishermen, or people very close to the trades, and they didn’t have great secrets to keep so they were very open, and the recourse against them for speaking publicly was virtually nil. So Norman went out and talked to people and if they wanted to chew his ear off—and Norman liked to talk and sit with people—fine, it was always an open, candid conversation. People knew who they were talking with, but that would fade very quickly, and that’s about it. Norman was just a regular person on the street. You have to understand, Provincetown’s a walking town. You don’t drive much. You can get pretty shitfaced in the center of town, and the golden rule was you didn’t get flagged unless you fell off your stool. So you could do a lot of serious drinking and, you know, if you wanted to crawl home that was your business. There was a lot of freedom in Provincetown, and a lot of acceptance. I think it was the freedom that Norman liked in Provincetown.

  Chris Busa grew up in Provincetown where his father, Peter, an important modernist painter, lived for many years. Father and son were both friendly with Mailer, who rented a studio from Peter. The younger Busa gave tennis lessons to Mailer’s sister, Norris, and some of his children, and later sat in on Mailer’s Texas hold ’em games. Mailer was featured twice on the cover of the annual Provincetown Arts, which Busa published and edited, and sometimes Mailer attended the annual July publication party. A year-round resident, Busa wrote that he “took comfort in walking by Mailer’s house and seeing his light burning in the window of the attic, knowing he was working. He was some kind of power in the neighborhood, an engine that seemed to move the leaves as I walked down the street.” Busa recalled an exchange Mailer had with Eddie Bonetti, one that characterizes the kind of P-Town frankness that Ambrose described.

  Norman and Eddie were at a cocktail party one summer afternoon in August. They were standing at the bar, enjoying the company and laughter and stuff, and Eddie says, “You know, Norman, I like you in spite of your celebrity.” And Norman said, “Eddie, how would you like it if I said I liked you in spite of your obscurity?” You know, that’s the kind of verbal play Mailer could always use to equalize the playing field.

  WHEN HE TOOK a break in mid-March 1990 to address the stack of mail that had accumulated, Harlot’s Ghost was only three hundred pages longer than it had been the previous April. Mailer had been backtracking, trying to bring coherence to his sprawling manuscript. That spring, he dictated over 130 letters, most of them notes. He told Knox that “my elephant” will be “two-thirds as long as ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ and half as good.”

  The novel opens in March of 1983 as Hubbard is driving up the icy coast roads of Maine to see Kittredge, his wife of ten years. In a magnificent ninety-page burst, Hubbard spins out in sharp flashbacks and reveries the central characters and events of the previous three decades. These backward glances, comprised of brief vignettes and brisk character sketches, alternate with his depiction of the spooky events on the night he arrives at the ancient, ghost-ridden, Hubbard family home. Shortly after Hubbard arrives, he learns of Harlot’s possible death and confronts the ghost of Augustus Farr, a piratical sea captain, in the vault beneath the house, after which it burns down and Kittredge flees with another agent, a muscular, bisexual masochist named Dix Butler, with whom she is having an affair.

  Harlot’s hypothesis that the Watergate burglary was an attempt to tap the secrets of the Federal Reserve Bank, located on the next floor up, is also presented in this opening section, “Omega” (the last comes first), and we get our first taste of Kittredge’s Alpha-Omega theory. The deaths of JFK, Monroe, and Dorothy Hunt (wife of Howard Hunt, one of the engineers of the Watergate break-in) Hubbard suggests, may be related, as well as Oswald’s. There are also allusions to Castro and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Mailer was preparing to connect the dots between some of the most vexing mysteries of postwar American life, possibly by laying blame at the feet of Richard Nixon, whose crimes and resignation would have to be presented—in some fashion—in the second volume. We don’t know much about Mailer’s plan for the sequel, but there is a clue in one of his notes, which states that the affair of Hubbard and Kittredge was “P[oly] M[orphous] perverse in its early stages, cut off by K after [the rock-climbing] accident.” Given his druthers, it’s likely that Mailer intended to present all the details of their intimacies.

  Mailer provides glimpses of Hubbard’s early life, his tours in Berlin, Uruguay, Miami, and Vietnam, and we learn of his two writing projects, The Imagination of the State (an incomplete and abandoned study of the KGB), and a detailed memoir of his work in the agency since 1955. We never see the first study, but the memoir, “The Game,” comprises the bulk of the novel. Hubbard also asks the questions that the reader will ponder for the next one thousand pages: Is Harlot dead? If so, by his own hand or another’s? Was he a true-blue patriot and seeker of the Russian mole who has infiltrated the agency, or is he the mole?

  There is another possibility: Harlot might have gone deeper into the wilderness of mirrors, switching sides and going to Moscow as a fake turncoat, or triple agent. Mailer’s provisional plan for the sequel (to be titled “Harlot’s Grave”) was for Hubbard to find Harlot in Russia. He has gone there, according to his notes, because the general degradation he feels “convinces him that his life, reputation, career, and sense of inner status can be redeemed only if he sacrifices himself,” exactly how Mailer does not say. But in another note he says, “Watergate operated by Harlot to fuck Nixon since he will make peace with Russians.” Harlot, like Angleton, does not trust the Russians, does not want the Cold War to end, and does not want the CIA’s power to shrivel. Many of the actions of the CIA’s hierarchy are calculated to overestimate Russia’s strength. Mailer later publicly criticized President Reagan for such fearmongering.

  Random House had given him an extension until the end of June 1990, and when he missed this deadline, it was moved to the end of July. When dates are proposed, he said, “I nod my head and agree.” He knew his manuscript would have to grow. One of his models was Thomas Wolfe, who “qualified as great on several counts, and one of them was the great length of his novel. You knew you were reading something important when you picked up ‘Of Time and the River.’ ” Nowadays, he continued, mass booksellers want authors to write eighty-page books so “everyone can make more money, sell more product.” Wolfe’s manuscript, it should be noted, while enormous, was cut severely by Maxwell Perkins. Mailer dismissed most of the suggestions made by Jason Epstein on major excisions, but was always attentive to his editing. Harlot’s Ghost is dedicated to him.

  If he could reach 2,500 pages, Mailer wrote to an admirer, “we can nail half the book to the mast and call it a flag.” Then, he assumed, Random House would give him two more years for the sequel. He worked through the summer in Provincetown, where he went on the assumption that with fewer interruptions, he could “write ten to twenty percent faster.” There were few family excursions and no trip to Maine—he would never summer there again. Deadlines came and went as pages piled up in Provincetown and, in the fall, back in New York. Mailer did not socialize. Around mid-December, he was done, and announced the completion in several letters. In one he called it “a fairly ambitious book—it may, in fact, be my most ambitious.” For the next three months, he worked on the 2,700-page manuscript with Epstein, his secretary, Judith (a doughty grammarian), and the Random House copy editor.
<
br />   Veronica Windholz, Mailer’s copy editor on several of his subsequent books, described her first meeting with him. She was expecting to meet an “egomaniac” but, instead, “met a curious, gregarious, deeply intelligent, knowledgeable, jocular, voluble man,” who was “generous and big-hearted, but he was also all business.” Mailer hated semicolons, she soon learned, and would rewrite an entire paragraph to avoid using one. “He wrote with ease, fast, fluently, and with a smile of satisfaction when he was finished. He loved to write—he loved the challenge of expressing himself just so.”

  Especially in the beginning, before he was familiar with my work, any query or small change I had made would cause him to reread the entire passage—and sometimes, if he found something in his own writing that he didn’t like, a whole page. He’d take the paper in both his hands, lean back in his chair, and recite the prose to himself, rocking back and forth as he said the words out loud. He listened to—and for—the rhythms of his language as if he were composing music. If something was off by even a fraction of a beat, he knew it immediately.

  Everything in his prose, Windholz said, “was subservient to style.” Mailer was not a grammarian of note and had his own rules about punctuation—insisting, for example, that “So” at the beginning of a sentence be followed by a comma. “The heavy lifting” in his prose was handled by cadence, she said. Mailer couldn’t carry a tune, but he was a master of English prose rhythms.