Another experience that heightened his interest in the Bible had come in 1994 when he read Crossing the Threshold of Hope by Pope John Paul II. Written in the form of an interview, it deals with a range of topics, including the relationship of Christianity to other faiths. He read it because he remembered John Paul’s 1987 encyclical On Social Concerns, which had impressed him enough to recommend that PEN offer the pope an honorary membership (which was opposed by Sontag, who succeeded Mailer as president), although it was never voted on. Mailer admired its analysis of the Cold War and the two superpowers, America and Russia (the former representing, as John Paul put it, “the power of greed,” and the latter “the power of oppression”), and the poor in the Third World, as well as the underprivileged in the superpowers. The pope kept mentioning the Gospel of John, and this prompted Mailer to read it. “I was curious now,” he said, and after reading John he read the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, first in Paris, and then several times in the United States.
He then realized “how good a story it was” and called it “the spiritual or psychological keel of Western civilization.” But while Jesus’ unique voice and profound sayings are “at the least worthy of Shakespeare,” he found the story as a whole “not well written.” The prophetic voice of John is memorable, but the narratives of the other three evangelists, who carry the burden of linking the early life of Jesus with his death and resurrection, are filled with clumsy transitions and vague descriptions. “I wanted to retell it the way all writers want to retell a classic story,” he said. “There are easily one hundred writers who could do a better job, and I’m one of them.” Ignoring his promises to Random House about “Harlot’s Grave,” and telling no one save Epstein, Norris, and Judith, in early 1995 he began working on his version of the New Testament, told in the first person by Jesus, speaking long after the events he describes.
Asked what motivated him to write it, Mailer said, “If suddenly I had picked up a copy of The Iliad and said I wanted to do a new version of it, people would have understood.” But this was not the case with the New Testament; people “have stronger feelings about it,” and a Jew rewriting the central story of Christianity was likely to be seen as a poacher, as he had been with Picasso. When he told Norris his intention “to write a book that her father would read,” she told him he was crazy. Initially, Epstein was also against the idea. “I remember arguing with him at length about his book about Jesus,” he recalled, “which I thought was simply not for him, and probably not for me either.” Mailer was not moved. He described his attraction as “almost animal-like—the way an animal knows it’s time to come out of hibernation, so it digs its way up to the surface whether or not it has a clear take on what the weather might be.”
He did some research, reading two books by Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels and The Origin of Satan. Mainly, however, he relied on various versions of the New Testament and his own sense of Jesus’ inner life. “Celebrities,” Mailer told Charlie Rose, “are used to living with two personalities.” The first is the “at-home personality; when you’re brushing your teeth you’re like everyone else.” The other personality “has power in the world” and “people virtually p-e-e in their pants when they meet you.” He said he felt he had “a small insight into what it was like to have a double nature since I’ve lived with it all my life since I was 25.” He hastened to add that being a celebrity was far, far different from being a half-divine person. He was confident that he could make reasonable surmises about Jesus’ dual nature by reference to his own. He continued working on it off and on through the first half of 1996, and then put it aside during the summer so he could attend the political conventions.
He wrote two pieces on the political campaigns for George, a new political magazine, but first published in Esquire an article on Pat Buchanan, a conservative political commentator and advisor to Republican presidents. Like his 1994 Madonna piece, it is half profile, half interview. He had discovered that Buchanan, who had just been defeated in the GOP presidential primaries by Senator Bob Dole, had qualities that he admired. Buchanan, a Reagan Republican, was critical of American corporations, angry that they loved their profit margins enough to send American jobs overseas. Mailer had thought that he was the only “Left-conservative” in the country, but now recognized that Buchanan had similar credentials. His growing admiration for Buchanan was based, in part, on his growing disillusion with the president. Mailer had met Clinton a few times, and he and Norris had visited him in the White House, but their conversations had never gotten beyond pleasantries and he had little hope of becoming a Clinton counselor or intimate. Still, he tried. In late 1994, he had asked for an interview. Clinton aides wrote back and asked for a list of the topics to be explored. Mailer declined to be specific (except for promising to bring up a matter on which they would disagree—the Cuban situation) and instead proposed that Clinton give him carte blanche to poke around in the presidential psyche: “I think you owe it to yourself to have one of our best American writers—myself humbly nominated—to take a shot at interpreting your presidency and yourself. My feeling, and it’s paramount, is that the public needs a fresh look.” Let us discuss, he continued, “your more intense concerns, your preferences, your biases.” He offered his piece on Madonna as proof of his ability “to see you as a human being rather than as a public servant and/or politician.” His letter was not as thoughtless as his 1961 letter to Mrs. Kennedy in which he spoke of the “odd strong honor” of the Marquis de Sade, but it was high-handed enough to earn the same response: silence.
Mailer was unhappy with Clinton for not making civil rights a larger theme of his presidency and for practicing what Mailer called “boutique politics”—providing a morsel for every interest group, but not being willing to risk political death for any large idea or policy. Mailer was so angry with what was going on in the country that he actually, seriously, thought about running in the primaries against Clinton. At one point, he said that he was thinking of running as Eugene McCarthy’s second, and had spoken to him about it, but they decided against it. He knew he would lose, but he hoped his campaign might introduce intriguing ideas that would irritate Clinton. When Norris got wind of this quixotic venture, she replied, he said, in “the quiet tones he had come to know all too well—the steel in the voice of a soft-spoken southern woman is as palpable as the cutting edge of a Damascene blade”—that she would leave him if he dared to declare. She was particularly scornful of the speech he planned to give to the media: “I’ve been married six times. I committed a felonious assault against my second wife. I’ve been untrue to every woman I’ve cared about. Gentlemen and ladies of the press: Do your worst! I’ve broken through the media barrier. There’s nothing to ransack in the closet.” His wife, he concluded, was right again: “he was no recognizable grade of presidential timber.” It would be a disaster. “It was the American presidency, after all. As soon could the Marquis de Sade have proposed himself for the papacy.” Yet, at the time, he had been dead serious.
The two George reports—the first on the conventions, and the second on the subsequent campaigns—never enter deep waters. They provide overviews and samples of the speeches, platforms, and debates, and juicy details of political scandals. Dole is compared to various movie stars: “Seen up close, Dole looked tall and spare like a movie man, a leading man. Cowboy roles. Not Randolph Scott, exactly, not Gary Cooper or Clint Eastwood, but a casting director would put him in the file that said: HUMPHREY BOGART ON A HORSE.” Clinton is held up to a range of movie stars and athletes, from Muhammad Ali to Warren Beatty, as well as to Ramses II and J. R. Ewing, the lead character in the television program Dallas. Both pieces are competent, as is the Buchanan profile-interview, but they are devoid of the drama and insight of his earlier political narratives. He was temporizing, running in place, instead of writing the sequel he had put off for over five years. He had long planned to begin it with the assassination of JFK, a fact he could not have failed to recall when he sat dow
n to discuss his articles with the editor of George, the only son and namesake of the slain president.
WITH THE JESUS novel completed in early 1997, Mailer was happy to be given the opportunity to direct another feature film. His son Michael, who had launched a successful career as a movie producer, enlisted him for a proposed movie about an Irish-American boxer, “Ringside,” which Michael and two colleagues had written. “It’s the story of a street fighter who finds redemption through his relationships in and outside the ring,” the younger Mailer said. Filming was scheduled to begin in April 1997. “The only trouble,” Mailer said to a friend, “is I also want to get back to Harlot’s Ghost, second volume, and so am suffering from the best dilemma of them all; there are two good things I want to do.”
He was excited about the script. “Boxing,” he said, “is a wonderful culture, a genre with edges that are rarely explored, and I would like to try my hand at directing one more time.” He told Michael his only condition was that Knox be given a role. But shortly after preproduction work got under way, the backers pulled the plug. “Tough Guys Don’t Dance was an interesting film, but not a commercially viable one,” Michael recalled, and for that reason the backers were “nervous” about Mailer directing the new film. Another factor was that the two leading actors—Halle Berry and Brendan Fraser—were still relatively unknown. “My dad had the reputation of a man who was untested in the arena of Hollywood,” Michael said.
Michael told his father that the money, $3.5 million, had been raised, the actors signed up, but then, for no announced reason, the backers stopped taking his phone calls. “Either they had found another property they wanted to work with more, or they simply didn’t have the funds and couldn’t face us,” the elder Mailer said in a letter. Michael said that he was trying to find new backers. “Lord, I hope he succeeds,” his father said. None of this was true. Michael had decided not to tell his father that the backers had insisted that he find another director, and he had shown them his middle finger. “To this day,” Michael said, ‘it’s my most heartbreaking experience in the filmmaking business.” Norman Mailer’s directorial career was over.
Salving his disappointment over the cancellation of “Ringside” was the reception of the long-delayed documentary about the 1974 Ali-Foreman championship bout, When We Were Kings. Along with George Plimpton and Spike Lee, Mailer was recruited to give retrospective commentary on “The Rumble in the Jungle.” He focused on the way Ali used the rope-a-dope to confuse and tire Foreman, recalling both the nuances and psychology of Ali’s ringmanship. Released in February 1997, the film won several awards, including the Academy Award for best documentary. It is generally thought to be the finest documentary ever made on boxing and is linked permanently with Mailer’s The Fight, often named as the best nonfiction narrative on a prizefight.
Kakutani was again the first major reviewer to comment on The Gospel According to the Son. Her early negative review in The New York Times drums on the theme of celebrity. Mailer is fascinated by it, she says, because he is one. His book, therefore, is “a sort of novelized ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ starring Jesus as an ambivalent pop star and guru: a silly, self-important and inadvertently comical book that reads like a combination of ‘Godspell,’ Nikos Kazantzakis’ ‘Last Temptation of Christ’ and one of those dumbed-down Bible translations, all seasoned with Mr. Mailer’s eccentric views on God.” Saving graces: none. Despite Kakutani’s pan the novel was his tenth bestseller, and reached number seven on the list.
Besides his novelistic abilities, Mailer pointed to two assets he had for writing the novel. His celebrity had been of some help, as he noted in his conversation with Charlie Rose. But his Jewishness, he said, was “an inestimable advantage, because I tend to believe there is virtually a Jewish psychology.” Jesus was “extremely Jewish. He worries all the time, he anticipates, he broods upon what’s going on, there’s an immense sense of responsibility.” In writing the novel, “I began to realize for the first time in many, many years how Jewish I am.” Another trait he shared with Jesus was the notion that you pay a price for everything you get. “That conviction,” he said,
is at the very center of Jewish belief, as opposed to Christian belief, where God takes mercy on you, and you’re lifted and you’re saved. The Jews tend to believe that you never get it without paying something in return. So it is delightful to contemplate these miracles once you recognize that you can use yourself up—indeed the angels whisper to Jesus at a certain point, and say in effect, “Don’t overdo it.”
Critic Frank Kermode, writing in the NYRB, praises the subtle way Mailer demonstrates how “God-given power in a man can be wasted or exhausted.” The drain of healing power is “a major theme” in the novel, Kermode says, even if it meant that he was “infusing Jesus with a strong dose of Mailer.”
Kermode finds Mailer’s book to be daring, a “clever” addition to the apocrypha surrounding the Jesus story, and “the first, so far as I know, to be attributed to Jesus himself, a gospel-autobiography, no less, of the son of God.” Mailer’s midrash, his extensions of the Gospels (Jesus brooding on Herod’s slaughter of the innocents for example), and his theological speculations are not what interest Kermode. “The writer’s powerful mind works in a specialized way, not by theological argumentation, but by telling or retelling story.” This was what Mailer set himself to do, Kermode concludes, and having “accepted the dare, Mailer can make a fair claim to have come honorably close to winning it.”
Jesus’ voice is the novel’s largest achievement. Mailer was pleased to present both the spoken words of Jesus and his imagined thoughts. It was a gamble, but as Epstein noted, “Norman’s more of a risk-taker than most of his contemporaries.” Two novelists who reviewed the book, Reynolds Price and John Updike, commented favorably on Jesus’ voice. Mailer’s decision to provide access to “not only His mental weather, but the motives that underlay His titanic claims and actions,” Price says, gives Mailer “powerful moments of invention,” allowing him to “speculate with a welcome freshness on the secrets of Jesus’ nature.” Updike praises “the quiet ghostly voice of Jesus,” rendered in “direct, rather relaxed English that has yet an eerie, neo-Biblical dignity.” In its first draft, the locutions of Jesus were closer to those of the King James Bible, but Epstein objected to the overuse of words like “didst” and “mayhap,” “penny” instead of “coin,” and Mailer toned it down to the final, more modernized vocabulary. He was pleased when his father-in-law told him that he enjoyed the passages that presented the language of Jesus’ thoughts.
Overall, The Gospel According to the Son’s reviews were better than those for Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, worse than those for Oswald’s Tale. The harshest review was in The New Republic. James Wood followed Kakutani in lashing Mailer for saying that his experience of celebrity aided him in understanding Jesus. But Wood’s chief criticism was the first person perspective, which he found to be absurd, and the language, which he called “a spastic simulacrum of biblical style.” However unhappy Mailer may have been with the review by Wood, an important critic, he was furious about the magazine’s cover, which carried a cartoon portrait of Mailer with a crown of thorns on his head under the title of Wood’s review, “He Is Finished.” A few months after the review appeared, in the summer of 1997, Mailer ran into the magazine’s publisher, Martin Peretz, outside a Provincetown restaurant. He had known Peretz since the mid-1960s when Peretz invited Mailer to speak at a Harvard rally against the Vietnam War. “If he’d just said, ‘Hello Norman,’ it would have been all right,” Mailer said. “But he had this huge smile on his face. So I punched him.” Then Peretz went in and told everyone that Mailer had hit him twice. “I guess it was a kind of badge of honor,” Mailer said. Peretz said that Mailer’s punches were “flabby.” Mailer told friends he had hit him “hard, but not hard.”
IN MANY OF the interviews he gave when doing publicity for The Gospel, he was asked about his promise to write a sequel to Harlot’s Ghost. He often b
rought the issue up himself. But the fiftieth anniversary of The Naked and the Dead was less than a year away, and he had promised to write a new introduction for the anniversary edition. It occurred to him that the date, May 6, 1998, would also be a good time for a retrospective anthology. He would turn seventy-five a few months earlier, and the two celebrations could be combined. The editing job would not be particularly difficult, he assumed, and completing a new book only a year after the last would buy him goodwill from Random House, vital if he were to finish the sequel. Such a collection had been on his mind ever since Vidal had published his own retrospective collection in 1993. United States: Essays, 1952–1992 is 1,295 pages long and contains the great majority of Vidal’s literary and political-historical essays, but none of his fiction. Mailer decided that his book would also be long, and would include excerpts from virtually all his works.
As he worked through the spring and summer on the anthology, Mailer wrote a series of commiserative letters to his writer friend, Bruce Dexter, who was depressed about not getting published. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to get various agents and editors interested in his work. An excerpt from a letter to Dexter, who was recovering from a stroke, gives a sense of his own mood. He recalled the lecture he had heard in 1947 about the catastrophe theory of history: “Suddenly a catastrophe occurred and that was a form of history that the Jews knew all too well.”
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