BOUND GALLEYS WERE sent to reviewers in May, and October 2, 1991, was set as the formal publication date, giving reviewers the summer months to digest Mailer’s behemoth—a couple of reviewers quoted what Hollywood mogul Jack Warner said when asked if he had read Hervey Allen’s 1,224-page novel Anthony Adverse: “Read it? I can’t even lift it.” Waiting for the reviews, he wrote a review of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel of contemporary consumerism and sadism American Psycho. It was his first assignment as Writer-in-Residence at Vanity Fair, where Tina Brown had been editor in chief since 1984. Mailer had developed a warm relationship with her after she published two long excerpts from Tough Guys Don’t Dance in the magazine, and helped him raise funds for the PEN congress. They had become good enough friends for her to request a letter endorsing her application for a green card (she was a British citizen). He said she had lifted Vanity Fair out of a “bog-ridden beginning,” making it a magazine of “distinction and high style.” He would write four more essays for the magazine over the next year, and continue his relationship with her when she became editor of The New Yorker in 1992.
Mailer did not review many books over his career; they can be counted on two hands. Some special circumstance had to entice him. In Ellis’s case, it was the outcry from editorial writers and women’s groups over the detailed descriptions of mutilation, torture, and dismemberment of innocents committed by the novel’s protagonist, Patrick Bateman, a serial murderer and obsessive consumer of state-of-the-art commodities. Ellis had received a $300,000 advance from Simon & Schuster, but on November 15 the firm canceled the book just before copies were to be shipped to bookstores, a response to editorials condemning scenes of “unmitigated torture” in the novel—in one, a half-starved rat is introduced into the vagina of a half-slaughtered woman. Bateman, Mailer wrote, “kills man, woman, child, or dog, and disposes of the body by any variety of casual means.” Ellis’s goal: “to shock the unshockable.” The novel was picked up by Vintage and published on “a tidal wave of bad cess,” in Mailer’s words, that made it a paperback bestseller.
Mailer found the novel’s violence, after the first few shudders, to be repetitive and boring. “Murder is now a lumbermill where humans can be treated with the same lack of respect as trees.” After torturing women, Bateman enjoys some yuppie delicacy—“swordfish meatloaf with kiwi mustard”—and then admires his girlfriend’s “silk satin D’Orsay pumps from Manolo Blahnik.” Is there any good reason, Mailer asks, for readers to tolerate the novel’s endless catalogues of luxury goods and its many “acts of machicolated butchery”? His answer is that art will tolerate almost any extreme if something new and valuable is learned.
Fiction can serve as our reconnaissance into all those jungles and up those precipices of human behavior that psychology, history, theology, and sociology are too intellectually encumbered to try. Fiction is indeed supposed to bring it back alive—all that forbidden and/or unavailable experience. Fiction can conceive of a woman’s or a man’s last thoughts where medicine would offer a terminal sedative.
Ellis intimates that Bateman resembles Raskolnikov sufficiently to use an epigraph from Dostoyevsky, but Mailer concludes that the snobbish yuppie is a cipher. “Bateman is driven, we gather, but we never learn from what.” If Ellis hoped to reveal something new about the links between gratuitous violence and American materialism, then he had “to have something new to say about the outer limits of the deranged” in his chief character. “In the wake of the Holocaust,” he says, it is legitimate for a novelist to seek an understanding of extreme acts of violence, but when we have finished with American Psycho “we know no more about Bateman’s need to dismember others than we know about the inner workings in the mind of a wooden-faced actor who swings a broadax in an exploitation film. It’s grunts all the way down.” He ends by saying he cannot forgive Ellis for forcing the reader to go unnecessarily through his chamber of horrors.
In contrast, the reviews of Harlot’s Ghost were better than any Mailer had received since The Executioner’s Song, but there was little sympathy for its length and a division of opinion about the words he placed at the end: “TO BE CONTINUED.” Some said the sequel could not come too quickly; others felt enough was enough and that the sequel would not be missed any more than the unwritten parts of other gargantuan works—Spenser’s The Fairie Queene comes to mind. The tersest summation of the reviews is captured by Don DeLillo’s comment: “extremely impressive if only he’d forgotten Uruguay.” Except for Kittredge, Mailer’s characters, both historical and fictional, were generally praised, especially Montague and Harvey, with Hunt and Modene Murphy not far behind. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, like most reviewers, found Kittredge to be “unbelievable and inconceivable as a character until one begins to think of her as Norman Mailer.” She acts so much like him, Lehmann-Haupt argues, and is so obviously a mouthpiece for his ideas that her effectiveness is sorely diminished. When she speaks, we hear her creator’s characteristic locutions: “Vanity is the abominable conceit that one could run the world if only one weren’t so weak.”
We last see Harvey in the spring of 1966 in Rome, where he is chief of station. He has bungled relations with Italian intelligence, and Hubbard has been sent to tell him that he is being recalled. By this time Harvey is a dead-end alcoholic, and is recovering from a heart attack. Drawing on David C. Martin’s account in Wilderness of Mirrors, Mailer ends “The Game” with an account of Hubbard’s all-night meeting with Harvey over two bottles of bourbon. Harvey tells Hubbard, “I am ready to return in the first body-bag that can be passed through a pig’s asshole.” As they get drunk, Harvey keeps taking out his pistol and pointing it at Hubbard’s forehead. He complains that he has been refused access to the Italian agents that Montague cultivated in World War II, and calls Montague his worst enemy, one he would shoot if he were in the room. After hours of fascinating rambling about JFK’s assassination, Oswald and Castro (foreshadowing “Harlot’s Grave”), Harvey tells Hubbard that when he fingered Kim Philby, he suspected that the Russians blew the Brit’s cover to protect someone else, “Someone larger.” He doesn’t name the person, but he doesn’t have to: “One part of my brain,” Hubbard said, “was singed forever with the fear that it was Harlot.” As he is departing with Harvey’s promise to resign, Harvey head-butts Hubbard, Mailer-style, an unmistakable tap of approval from the author.
After a brief coda situating Hubbard in his Moscow hotel room in March 1984, the novel ends with the three words of Mailer’s now famous broken promise. It is worth noting that March 1984 was when Mailer first arrived in Moscow, and checked into a hotel not far from Lubyanka Prison. If Hubbard’s suspicion is correct, it would be the likely residence of the defector, Hugh “Harlot” Montague.
The generally positive response Mailer received from reviewers about his portraits of Harvey and Harlot was matched by equally warm comments about the portions of the novel which cover the years 1960 to 1963, from the preparations for the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba and the ensuing missile crisis through the unsuccessful assassination attempts on Castro (under Harvey, with Hunt, Sinatra, and Giancana as players) to the successful assassination of JFK. John Simon, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said that “Mailer really comes into his own and vividly evokes the internecine intrigues among the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Pentagon and the State Department” in these adventures, a view echoed in other reviews. He has special praise for his depiction of the invasion—“a clandestine nocturnal operation by sea and land against Cuba is a gem any novelist could be proud of”—but goes on to rail against the novel’s “lopsided” shape and the many exfoliations of the Alpha-Omega theory. He was not alone in making such complaints. Both John Aldridge and Christopher Hitchens found fault with the Uruguay section (as did almost every other reviewer), although they did not see the novel’s defects to be as serious as Simon did. Aldridge says that the South American operation moves “at the pace of a paraplegic snail,” but calls the novel Mailer’s “best written,” an accompli
shment showing that “he possesses the largest mind and imagination at work in American literature today.” (Mailer circled the passage for use in ads for the novel.) Hitchens sees merit in the “continuous emphasis . . . placed on the concept of ‘doubling’ and division,” and says he has personally known and read of many CIA men who had the same “bipolar mentality” of Mailer’s agents.
Simon’s review infuriated Mailer—not what he had said, but that he had said it at all. Not only had Simon panned Marilyn, he had been one of only a very few critics who gave a negative review to The Armies of the Night, calling it “a demented Waring blender churning away at sexual, political, and literary power fantasies, sadomasochistic daydreams.” Given these reviews, why did the Book Review editor, Rebecca Sinkler, give Simon the job of reviewing Mailer’s magnum opus? Mailer contacted Times publisher Punch Sulzberger, whom he knew slightly, to ask for a meeting with Sinkler. He got it, and asked her for space to write a rebuttal to the review. Sinkler, now in a somewhat defensive position in that she had not dug out the negative review of Armies, only the slam of Marilyn, told Mailer that Simon had read both advance excerpts from Harlot’s Ghost in Rolling Stone. He liked them, she said. Simon’s approval of the excerpts, coupled with his assurance that he could write a fair review convinced her to give him the assignment, which four others had turned down. The last thing Mailer laid on the table at the meeting was Simon’s disapproval of Kate Mailer’s 1988 performance in The Cherry Orchard. After he had read it in New York magazine, where Simon was the drama critic, Mailer put out the word to everyone who knew Simon: “Tell him,” went the message, “not to get into the same room with me.”
This last complaint added no luster to his request for a rebuttal, but the overlooked review of Armies apparently did, and Sinkler gave Mailer space for his piece. In it, Mailer repeated every bad thing Simon had said about him and suggested that the bad review of Kate’s performance was really a barb at him. Simon was given space for a counter-rebuttal, and pointed out that Mailer made no attempt to refute anything in his review, so what was the big deal? His chief complaint about the novel, he repeated, was its “prolixity.” In her concluding note, Sinkler said that in her judgment Simon had written “a fair and balanced review that met the standards of this newspaper,” but also admitted that the editors had not been aware of the negative review of Armies, a tentative mea culpa.
Letters taking sides poured in over the next few weeks and the Times published twenty of them, about evenly divided. Sinkler said she took satisfaction in the fact that “in the long run readers got the last word.” She said she still stood behind Simon’s review, while adding that Mailer had been a “pussycat” at the meeting and after the episode “has never been rude or unpleasant.” She and her colleagues “often chuckled,” she said, “about how we got 1,600 words out of Norman Mailer without paying a cent.” The dustup kept the novel in the public eye through the end of the year. Despite its high price—it was the first trade edition of an American novel to sell for $30—and weight of four pounds, it made the bestseller list for four weeks, his ninth book to do so.
One other review requires mention, that of Howard Hunt, who spent thirty-two months in federal prison for his part in Watergate. He recalled meeting Mailer and Jeanne Campbell at a dinner party given by Bill Buckley (a former CIA man recruited by Hunt), but says that the meeting was “what in espionage jargon is called a ‘brush contact.’ ” Being included as a major character was an “unwanted distinction,” he says, although he found no fault with his portrait. Hunt’s generally favorable review ends the speculation that Mailer, once properly trained, might have joined the ranks of the CIA-backed Congress of Cultural Freedom back in 1949–50, an organization that sent its members—including Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, and Arthur Schlesinger—to challenge Mailer when he spoke at the 1949 Waldorf Conference. It is, therefore, unlikely that Mailer would have joined the agency. But he would have been tempted.
In the novel, Hunt proposes another qualification for a good CIA man, and he passes it on to Hubbard: “I will suggest that if anyone ever inquires why you think you’re qualified to be in espionage, the only proper response is to look them in the eye, and say, ‘Any man who has ever cheated on his wife and gotten away with it, is qualified.’ ” Mailer certainly had this qualification, and believed it was indispensable to his novelistic understanding of the CIA. His working principle, as stated by Lenny Bruce (when Hubbard, Harlot, and Kittredge see him perform) was: “Never tell your wife the truth. Because biologically it has been proven. Women’s ears are not constructed to hear the truth. They will slaughter you if you tell it like it is. So, lie your ass off.”
Mailer did. He continued his affairs for the length of time it had taken to write Harlot’s Ghost. Not long after it was completed, Norris confronted him, and he faced the third great crisis of his life.
FOURTEEN
A MERRY LIFE AND A MARRIED ONE
In the seven years after Harlot’s Ghost, Mailer published four books—three varieties of biography and a mammoth anthology of his work—and more political commentary and journalism than in any period since the 1963–72 outpouring. He covered the political campaigns and conventions of 1992 and 1996, traveling around the country with other political reporters on buses and planes. The oldest reporter on the campaign trail, he was referred to as “the Dean.” He took pleasure in his ability to keep up with the younger reporters, and to write books on figures as disparate as Oswald, Picasso, and Jesus Christ. But he was deeply unhappy with his inability to begin the sequel to Harlot’s Ghost. This failure in the creative realm was matched if not eclipsed by a near-disaster in the domestic one.
In the fall of 1991, Mailer’s secret life all but ended. He was forced to break off, or drastically alter, relationships with several women in order to save his marriage. The crisis in his relationship with Norris continued for over a year, and for a time they separated. It was a private struggle; few people outside the immediate family realized how close the marriage had come to foundering. In public, they went through the motions, in private they fought. After much pain, they reaffirmed their commitment to each other, although Norris did not trust him completely for several years, if ever. His work was affected for a time, especially after Norris learned the full extent of his infidelity. But “he was still able to compartmentalize,” she wrote in her memoir, and kept working all through this period.
As the situation unfolded, he took on a variety of small tasks. Some of these were related to the novel—the selection of excerpts from Harlot’s Ghost for several different publications, including three long ones in Rolling Stone, a U.S. book tour (thirty-five interviews over two weeks), and another in England—and some were more enjoyable activities. Governor Mario Cuomo, upon the recommendation of a committee chaired by Albany novelist William Kennedy, appointed Mailer to a two-year term as New York State Author, an honor that came with a $10,000 stipend and few duties. Mailer also began organizing a dramatic reading of George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell with Gay Talese, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal, a benefit for the Actors Studio, where he was still involved. At the request of John Updike, he agreed to write a chapter in the official history of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, A Century of Arts & Letters. After it was clear that Bill Clinton had the Democratic presidential nomination wrapped up, Mailer wrote Hillary Clinton a long letter recommending that her husband focus on racial tensions in his acceptance speech at the 1992 convention, hoping that it might gain him some sort of role as an unofficial advisor. Continuing as Vanity Fair’s Writer-in-Residence, he published several more pieces in the magazine. His report on the Republican convention of 1992 was published in The New Republic. The companion piece on the Democratic convention was written but never published. Mailer felt that it was too obviously approving of Bill Clinton.
He continued to state in interviews and letters that he was on the cusp of beginning “Harlot’s Grave,” a
nd many of his efforts during this period were connected to JFK’s assassination, which he had handled obliquely and briefly in the novel. He planned to remedy this in the sequel. For example, when Updike proposed that Mailer write the chapter on the 1960s for the history of the American Academy, he accepted immediately, seizing an opportunity to revisit his favorite decade. For a Vanity Fair piece, he tried to arrange an interview with Castro, who was coming to New York for a U.N. meeting. Mailer sent his request to Castro via the Cuban U.N. delegation, and also asked Gabriel García Márquez, a close friend of the Cuban dictator’s, to intercede. “I can promise,” he wrote to Castro, “that your ideas will receive an honest display” in Tina Brown’s fast-growing magazine, and gain related attention in other media. Castro’s reflections on the assassination, presumably, would have been an asset for the sequel.
If Castro responded to Mailer’s request, no record of it has surfaced. But Mailer was able to speculate on the assassination in two of his published Vanity Fair pieces. One was a review of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK. Mailer praised the film, which won two Oscars, for presenting a controversial hypothesis about the assassination that rejected the conclusion of the Warren Commission that Oswald was the sole assassin. Mailer called it “the worst of the great movies,” and applauded Stone for stirring the pot in an imaginative way. The other piece was a one-act play, “Earl and Lyndon: An Imaginary Conversation,” which depicts, quite humorously, the arm-twisting techniques—lofty, carnal, and threatening—employed by a manipulative President Johnson to convince Chief Justice Earl Warren to head the commission investigating JFK’s death.
Norman Mailer Page 82
