Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Goodwin said she loved talking to Mailer. “I felt he respected women. One time he gave me the nicest compliment in the world. He said, ‘You’re not the smartest person I ever met; you’re not the nicest person I ever met, but you’re the smartest nicest person I ever met.’ I thought it was great.” She likes to tell the story of one memorable visit. In the morning when they sat down for breakfast, Mailer informed his hosts that there was a problem with the toilet in the guest suite. When Doris Goodwin asked what it was, he said, “The water level is high, and when you get old, your balls hang low.” If she wanted him to return, she’d have to get it adjusted. The story always brought laughter, even when she told it at Mailer’s funeral in Provincetown. “He genuinely liked women,” she said. “And he was also a sensual guy. You felt a physical strain that came from him.” As for his numerous affairs:

  All these women he had the affairs with still care. I think the answer is, perhaps serially, the fact that he loved them. You can’t fake that. Women know if you’re just using them and I think he never did. He had to fall for someone to be really interested in them. Maybe I’m being too overly positive toward him, but my guess would be it’s one thing to have a whole series of love affairs, whether it’s three days or sixty years, versus just using women for sex. I don’t think he did that; at least that would not be the man I knew. He might have done that earlier. He just loved women and that’s what is so bad about the rap he got from some of the writing that he did. I felt to the contrary that he totally respected my opinions and feelings on things. He would ask me, often at dinner, what I thought about this or that. There was never a sense of, a moment of, condescension.

  Mailer was a fan of Goodwin’s new book about Lincoln, Team of Rivals, and talked about it with Lennon, as he wrote in his “Mailer Log.”

  NM and NCM have both read Doris’ book about Lincoln, Team of Rivals. He told me how much he likes the language, written and spoken, of the time. When I asked if he liked Abe’s homespun metaphors, he said no, not particularly. It is the high rhetoric of statesmanship and congressional debate, the speeches and passionate letters about abolitionism that he enjoys. This made me remember that many years ago I asked him what he thought of the Elizabethan Age, with its cast of daring, dashing players: Essex, Raleigh, Marlowe and so on. He said that he much preferred the Victorian Age with ladies in layers of petticoats and corsets, and men in vests and cravats, and went on with glee about the efforts needed to undress and possess the beauties of that time. NM relishes formal (if humorous) rhetoric, long, rolling, Melvillean sentences. He also admires Carlyle and has been compared to him, as well as to Spengler, Emerson, Edmund Burke. This love of slightly pompous, slightly humorous, somewhat ponderous prose is just one side of his linguistic identity, but it is perhaps the dominant one.

  IN 2004 AND early 2005, working in Provincetown, he made steady progress on The Castle in the Forest. He had no desire to travel, but he needed the speaking fees. Norris was not strong enough to travel with him, and so either one of his sons or Lennon accompanied him. He was still fuming about Bush and the Iraq War, now in its second year, and wrote a number of additional pieces on American arrogance and greed. Three of them, one each in Playboy, New York, and Stop Smiling, were conversations with John Buffalo, who came up with the idea of enlarging them into a book that would examine a range of topics: politics, sex, God, boxing, morality, poker, George W. Bush, and the war.

  John Buffalo and Michael accompanied their father to Toronto, where he was a boxing consultant on the film Cinderella Man, based on the career of James Braddock, the heavyweight champ in the mid-1930s. Before the trip Mailer read up on Braddock, played by Russell Crowe, and watched old footage of his fights. Ron Howard, the film’s director, listened to his analysis of Braddock’s bout with Max Baer, whom he defeated for the championship in June 1935 at Madison Square Garden. A 10–1 underdog, Braddock won a unanimous decision. “Baer got spoiled,” Mailer said, “he wasn’t used to getting hit.” For the film, Crowe trained hard for a year in Australia, boxing and weight lifting, to get ready for the role. He and Mailer, according to Michael, got along well. After completing one scene, Crowe was sweating and took off a black fleece vest that had the name of Crowe’s training camp on it. He gave it to Mailer, who brought it home. He wore it with dark sweatpants and Uggs, Australian sheepskin boots with fleece on the inside that were comfortable and required no socks—one fewer time waster, he remarked. Mailer liked Crowe, who reminded him of Brando. “He’s suspicious and mercurial, but genuine,” he said.

  He was paid $100,000 for his advice, but it was a stopgap. Mailer was still locked in what he called “the bowels of cash flow,” and needed a new paying project every few months. In the fall of 2004, he agreed to appear with Stephen on an episode of The Gilmore Girls, a long-running comedy series about a single mother and her daughter living in Connecticut. Stephen was cast as a reporter, and his father played “Norman Mailer.” A few years earlier, he and Stephen appeared in the pilot for a series called Street Time, directed by his friend Richard Stratton. Mailer was “Saul (Two Canes) Cahan,” a Jewish mobster just released from twenty-seven years in prison who has to report regularly to his parole officer, played by Stephen. One cast member said that Mailer was convincing because “he has a certain rough kind of look about him—his voice, his mannerisms.” Mailer loved playing an old wiseguy and slipped into the role easily. He would put on his sunglasses, look you up and down slowly, and say in a leathery voice, “Who the fug are you?”

  Financial relief arrived in the spring of 2005 when the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas–Austin agreed to purchase Mailer’s archive. The deal was brokered by Glenn Horowitz, a New York rare book dealer who got Mailer $2.5 million for his papers, to be paid over six years. The delivered archive contained five hundred cubic feet of material, including manuscripts and personal papers from Mailer’s childhood through the early 2000s, and approximately 45,000 letters. It is the largest author collection in the center’s extensive holdings. Mailer became friendly with the center’s longtime director, Tom Staley, and made two trips to Austin in connection with the transfer. In addition to the price, Mailer said he liked the idea of his papers being in Texas because of his wartime service with the 112th Cavalry.

  As the deal sending his papers to the Ransom Center was nearing completion, the Mailers were visited by John Hemingway, grandson of Ernest and son of Gregory, whom Mailer had met on several occasions. John Hemingway wanted to talk about a book he was writing about his family. Mailer and John got along famously, and the wine flowed that evening. In a letter to Anne Barry about the evening, Mailer said, “The sad truth is I’m still at my best when half loaded.” He said he over-served himself with Grappa, a very strong Italian brandy that they drank “in honor of Hemingway.”

  I said to Norris the next day, “If you ever see me go near Grappa again, just pick up the nearest heavy object and knock me out with it because the effect will be the same and at least it will save my digestion from having to deal with Senor Grappa again.” Anyway, my sense of the ridiculous as you can see remains firm and complete. Only an eighty-two-year-old would tell drinking stories about his own drinking.

  He ended his letter by noting that after nearly five years of work, he had completed seven hundred pages of The Castle in the Forest. He had interrupted work on it several times, but he also wrote much more slowly than in the past. “I used to pride myself on the white heat of my first drafts,” he said. But now they took more time as he trimmed and polished. “I work them over in return for losing that early speed and smoke and flash and dash. The moment a sentence disappoints me slightly I start looking at what’s wrong with it.” He was continuing to work with John on the collection, which they were calling The Big Empty, and also continuing the theology interviews with Lennon.

  During his first visit to the University of Texas in late April 2005, Mailer met Douglas Brinkley, a prolific young historian and editor. Brinkley wrote a story in The N
ew York Times about the sale of Mailer’s papers and followed up a few months later with a long profile in Rolling Stone. Brinkley used the occasion of Mailer’s April speech at the university attacking Bush and the Iraq War—a “steppingstone to taking over the rest of the world”—to write his brisk overview of Mailer’s career. The day after Mailer’s speech they went to lunch and after disposing of Bush, yet again, Mailer talked about literature. He said that Kerouac’s On the Road was a classic that “captured something hard about late adolescence—the thing about being free enough to travel and take your adventures where they come.” And he talked about his old antiwar comrade the late Allen Ginsberg. In 1979, Mailer was at a National Arts Club event where Ginsberg was the speaker. “He was a little nutty,” Mailer said. “You never knew when Allen the Hun would take over.”

  A discussion followed of Kakutani’s review of The Gospel According to the Son, which led Mailer to say of her that she can’t be fired because “she’s a threefer.” Brinkley asked him to clarify. “Asiatic, feminist and, ah, what’s the third? Well . . . let’s just call her a twofer. They get two for one. She is a token. And deep down, she probably knows it.” Brinkley was amazed. “Why make a quasi-racist remark about the most powerful book critic in America?” Mailer says that one benefit of being over eighty is that “you can say what you think.”

  Kakutani and the Times made no comment, but Esther Wu, the president of the Asian American Journalists Association, wrote a letter of protest to Jann Wenner, publisher and editor of Rolling Stone. She noted that “Asiatic” and “Oriental” were offensive terms to describe Asians and Asian Americans, and lambasted Mailer’s remarks because he “diminishes the accomplishments of all women and journalists of color.” The tabloids jumped into the dispute, and Mailer obliged them, telling the New York Daily News that Wu’s letter was “an excellent example of high-octane political correctness.” Wu countered by saying, “Perhaps if Mr. Mailer were a little more politically correct, he would not be making such racist remarks.” Mailer foolishly persisted.

  To friends at dinner over the Fourth of July weekend, Mailer said that he had “walked right into it” with his remarks, and acknowledged that his words were poorly chosen. He also said that Steve Erlanger, the Times cultural editor, had given him a commitment that Kakutani would not rush her next review of one of his books into print, but Mailer still intended to keep the pressure on. She may be a power unto herself, but “the Times must choose,” he said, “between reining her in and pissing off Norman Mailer.”

  He decided to begin compiling Kakutani’s reviews of other white male authors, looking for a pattern. Asked if he would include reviews of some younger writers—Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, for example, he said, “WR,” or waiting room. In his mind, their literary stature remained to be determined. Over the next several months, he assembled “The Kakutani File,” a collection of thirty-nine reviews of books by ten writers (Bellow, DeLillo, Doctorow, Irving, Mailer, Cormac McCarthy, Roth, Robert Stone, Updike, and Wolfe) over a twelve-year period, 1994–2006. By his count, twenty-two of the reviews had been published four or more days before the books’ publication days, and ten were fifteen to thirty days early. His books got the worst reviews, with Wolfe, Stone, Irving, and Updike doing somewhat better, and Bellow, DeLillo, McCarthy, and Roth getting the best reviews. There was no correlation between the warmth of the review and the date of a book’s publication—early reviews were just as likely to be negative as later ones. But it was clear that Kakutani did like to be out there first. Mailer was uncertain if he should use this survey, and how.

  AFTER A REGULAR heart test on July 13 at Mass General Hospital, Mailer was told he needed an operation. His response: “After I finish the novel.” He detested the thought of dying on the operating table and believed that his status in the hereafter might be enhanced if he was lucid and sharp when he got on the bus. Asked why one’s state of mind at death was so important, he said, “It’s our point of departure, our angle of flight, if you will.”

  I think at the moment we die, we are the sum of all the good and bad we’ve done, all the courage and cowardice we’ve exercised. And so, for example, if we die with a desire to be reborn, I think it means a great deal to God. If you will, it’s like reaching into a litter to select a pup, and there’s one who catches our eye because he wants us. He is the one we choose to take home. Using that crude analogy, I would say it’s important to be ready. After all, that is the one situation we can’t simulate, can’t preempt.

  AFTER A MONTH of nagging by Norris and the family, he agreed to bypass surgery, and it was scheduled for September 8, 2005. The decision to have the operation, he said, made him “automatically five years older” because his ongoing efforts “to stave off old age” were now moot.

  John Buffalo was around for most of the summer and he and his father finished work on The Big Empty, and turned in the manuscript to Nation Books for publication in February 2006. John challenged his father in some of their exchanges, gently but firmly, and this gave the book some narrative tension as they worked their way through issues of dissent, politics, and the psychology of boxing and poker.

  Before the surgery, he had written three fourths of The Castle in the Forest, enough, he said, for it to be published if he died. In the month before the operation, he wrote about a hundred pages of notes outlining the so-called emergency ending. If he didn’t make it through surgery, he hoped his notes could be appended to what he had completed. He wanted the novel to end shortly after the death of Hitler’s father in 1903, with some additional material on Russia and the dislocations there during World War I. He had already written about the 1896 coronation of Czar Nicholas II at some length, which moved the narrative away from the Hitler family for several chapters. This was done in preparation for Rasputin becoming a major figure in the next volume of what he hoped would be a series of three novels. He said that Rasputin had considerable presence and was loved by many for his healing powers. Indeed, Rasputin is the perfect Mailer character: charismatic and drunken, soulful and carnal, a demonic-saintly figure who moved easily from Gypsy debauch to the czar’s court.

  Mailer had been taking two nitro tablets a day, and his recognition that he could not keep increasing the dosage was one more reason to agree to the operation. But he still had reservations. “Having my blood pumped out of me and sloshing around in a machine, running through loops of plastic is an unhappy prospect,” he said. The plastic, he believed, might be the reason that Tom Wolfe and Larry McMurtry had become depressed after bypass surgery. Told that surgery depression passes after a time, he said, “Yes, but when you’re 83 you don’t want to lose six months; it’s not worth it.”

  Mailer’s quadruple bypass operation was successful and the doctor reported that he had the heart of a forty-year-old. After two weeks in the ICU, he was moved to a rehabilitation facility on Cape Cod. From there he was able to talk by telephone. Speaking in a hoarse, excited voice, he said that a tremendous number of new ideas had come to him, especially about spiritual matters. “I’d like to talk about them now,” he said, “but talking gets me too excited. I’d only be scraping the rim of the can.” The experience had brought him closer to Norris, he said, and he was troubled by how much she worried about him. Two days later, he said that he had gotten into too many bad habits. “I feel like Scrooge, all my previous life revealed in a flash, along with a desire to change.” In October, he went home. His favorite journey used to be the sight of the Brooklyn Bridge after dinner in Manhattan, but now it was “the sight of Provincetown as one rides up over the last rise and there is the Pilgrim Monument in all its subtle presence.” The vista always gave him a lift. Still short of breath, he had to blow into some sort of plastic device—which he loathed—to test his wind. He was counting on the salt air to strengthen his breathing and energize his psyche.

  He told friends visiting him in mid-October that while recovering in the hospital, he got into conversations with the staff, especially the nurse
s. He liked one Irish-American nurse in particular because she didn’t keep telling him he was looking better. She said that his recovery was “on the slow side.” He told her that he had been married to Norris for thirty years, and the nurse replied that it was probably high time for a “treaty” with his wife, or as she explained it, an agreement to avoid certain sore subjects and so making life less antagonistic. “When we fight,” he said, “it gets personal right away.” Norris liked the idea of not discussing certain matters. For example, if he would not make any comments about women’s lib, then she would not challenge his literary judgments. At some point they “signed” such a pact. As he was discussing the treaty with friends, he said, “Look at me, proud, semi-helpless, and opinionated.” And then he laughed. His self-depictions were often sardonic.

  While he was still in rehab, he learned that the National Book Foundation would award him the 2005 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters on November 16. He said it was coming at the appropriate time, that is, after Bellow, Roth, and Updike, who in his mind were less controversial. His acceptance speech would be the first thing he would write after he had recovered. For the rest of the year, he intended to rest and read, and did not expect to get back to The Castle in the Forest until the new year.

  Recovery was slow. He spent a lot of time on the deck napping and watching the pigeons and gulls maneuver over the low tide flats. He read a piece in The Atlantic by Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French writer and public intellectual, who had spent a year traveling around the United States, following the footsteps of Tocqueville. Shortly before he returned to France, Lévy visited Provincetown and interviewed Mailer. In the profile, he made several errors, the most important of which was calling Mailer “the most secular of American novelists.” When this and other errors were pointed out to Mailer, he was unfazed. It wasn’t important, he said, and “Lévy did catch something about me: that I have my mind on eternity.” The old Mailer would have snapped out a letter to the editor pointing out his long-standing theological interests, a friend said. Mailer waved it off. “I’m thinking of eternity,” he repeated.