“There’s no use in making it”: NM to FM, IBM, 2-28-40.
A week later he wrote home: NM to FM, IBM, 3-7-40.
For the last paper of the year: Frederick Christian, “The Talent and the Torment,” Cosmopolitan, August 1963, 66. See also Weinberg’s version, MBM, 45.
“as a finality”: The 1943 Harvard Album, 12–13.
“We are frankly determined”: Richard Norton Smith, The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 138–39.
“The forces of violence”: Ibid., 138.
“We were going through the barbed-wire”: AFM, 391.
Swing bands were the rage: Richard Norton Smith, The Harvard Century, 138.
A member of the class of 1942: John T. Bethell, Harvard Observed: An Illustrated History of the University in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 130.
In a May 1940 poll: Conducted by the Christian Science Monitor, in Richard Norton Smith, The Harvard Century, 141.
A good part of student reluctance: Richard Norton Smith, The Harvard Century, 138–39.
The leader of Harvard’s noninterventionists: Kathleen Schaeper, Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, and the Creation of an American Elite, rev. ed. (NY: Berghahn, 2007), 126.
Mailer heard him lecture: Begiebing, CNM, 313.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: Our Harvard: Reflections on College Life by Twenty-two Distinguished Graduates, ed. Jeffrey L. Lant (NY: Taplinger, 1982), 112.
He even wrote an essay: The 1943 Harvard Album, 30–37.
“crap”: MBM, 42.
During his sophomore year: NM to Jeffrey Meyers, 1-17-85.
Victorian ark: Henrik Ibsen made a similar comment, not located.
An active communist: Davis’s obituary, NYT, 7-17-98.
“I can’t tell you how my back”: SA, 11–12.
“made the biggest dent”: HJ.
Sy Breslow said that Mailer: MBM, 48.
Along the way with his friend: Ibid., 49–50.
“I weighed 135 pounds”: NM to Edward McAlice, 3-7-95.
“accepted Lawrence’s thesis”: NM to Jeffrey Meyers, 1-17-85.
Harold Marantz: HJ.
Portrait of Jennie: (NY: Knopf, 1940); it was made into a 1948 film by David O. Selznick.
and he was awarded a $150 scholarship: NM was notified that he would receive a Lillie A. Ridgway scholarship in a 12-18-40 letter from the Harvard Committee on Scholarships (HRC).
The Advocate informed Mailer: NM to FM, IBM, 3-2-41.
“I simply can’t stand”: NM to FM, IBM, 3-9-41.
“they’re a bunch of snobs”: NM to FM, IBM, 3-16-41.
“supernova of eccentricity”: Andrew McLaren, “Bowden Broadwater, 1920–2005,” St. Bernard’s Newsletter, Summer 2006, 1. NM said, “Bowden had more style than anyone I’d ever met. He dominated the Advocate, his personality. . . . I remember when I read Brideshead Revisited, I kept clucking as I read it. It wasn’t that Bowden looked in any way like Sebastian Flyte or that we were close friends. On the contrary, we were on opposite sides. There were two factions.” Begiebing, CNM, 313.
A week later Mailer was invited: Undated invitation from Advocate secretary, Holmes H. Welch, mid-March 1941 (HRC).
Goethals as Martha Gets-Horned: MLT, 52.
only a playbill survives: HRC.
Mailer’s first review: Harvard Crimson, 4-21-41, 2.
“It’s all happening too easy”: NM to FM, IBM, 4-13-41.
“Please tell your friend”: NM to Millicent Brower, 5-11-41.
major story on Harvard in Life: “Harvard: America’s Great University Now Leads World.”
“The nice Jewish boy”: AON, 152.
On May 7, he was informed: John Holabird to NM, 5-7-41.
sketch parodying Hemingway: HRC.
recent Life article: “The Hemingways in Sun Valley: The Novelist Takes a Wife,” Life, 1-6-41, 49–57.
He always had great admiration: See PP, 149–50; SA, 167, 260–64.
That night he met Roy E. Larsen: NM to FM, IBM, 5-14-41. Given the fact that NM feuded with Henry Luce’s Time magazine for decades, it is no small irony that Larsen, one of the magazine’s cofounders, helped launch his career. Larsen was impressed by NAD, but after that said he gave up reading NM’s works altogether (Frederick Christian, “The Talent and the Torment,” Cosmopolitan, 64).
First, Professor Davis wrote to him: Fan pasted all of these communications into her scrapbook (HRC).
It was followed a few days later: Crockett wrote: “Norman, the enclosed letter arrived at the Advocate house yesterday along with one to Marvin. It seems like a good market for your novel. Have a good summer. So long, Jack Crockett.”
“Probably nothing has happened”: AFM, 70.
Before he arrived, he had written 45,000 words: NM to FM, IBM, 5-17-41.
“How is the writing coming”: FM to NM, 6-25-41.
But this comes at the end: NM to FM, late July 1941.
much like Barney Kelly: Like Sherman Wexler, Kelly lives in a penthouse, has a spoiled daughter, and is powerful and corrupt. Unlike Wexler, he wants to murder his son-in-law, and almost does.
Going on the road: MLT, 55–56; MBM, 54.
He said the idea came from Dos Passos: HJ.
He told his friends: MBM, 54.
The completed novel went off to Amussen: NM to FM, IBM, late September 1941; Amussen wrote to NM, 9-26-09, to say he had read the last two parts of the novel with “keen interest.”
He wrote home: NM to FM, IBM, 10-?-41.
Amussen arranged to meet Mailer: Amussen to NM, 9-26-09.
Anne and Dave Kessler, whose support: NM said that Dave Kessler and his mother disagreed on who really paid for his Harvard education. “For him it was the money he did not take out of the Sunlight Oil Company and for her it was the hours she put in and the work that made it successful and profitable in a way that someone he hired would not make it profitable.”
They were followed by a letter from Burnett: Whit Burnett to NM, 10-21-41.
“shows brilliance”: Amussen to NM, late November 1941.
“the writing and psychology”: Burnett to NM, 1-28-42.
President Conant called a mass meeting: Richard Norton Smith, The Harvard Century, 150–51.
The campus was transformed: A majority of the class of 1944 graduated with NM in June 1943; his yearbook contains the photographs and activities of both classes.
“would feed the novel”: MBM, 60.
“I may as well confess”: AFM, 28.
“didn’t know his ass”: MBM, 66.
In a psychological profile of her: “Cova, and Her Case,” submitted to Dr. Henry A. Murray’s Psychology class, 12-14-42 (HRC). Cova was NM’s pseudonym for Silverman. He used the name again for a character in A Calculus to Heaven.
Barton invited Mailer: HJ.
“The Bodily Function Blues”: Complete lyrics published in MR (2008), 221–23.
“listener” or “monotone”: As described in “Music Teachers I Have Known and Loved,” submitted in English 3-A (HRC).
“triangle” of influence: “Interview: Norman Mailer,” Academy of Achievement.
“Modern American Literature”: Begiebing, CNM, 315.
Proust, Mann, and Joyce: MLT, 50.
eighteenth-century British poetry: MLT, 61.
Milton: See HG, passim.
especially the French: NM to Pierre Brodin, 10-16-63: “The French novel has always been more congenial to me than the English”; rpt., Présences: Contemporaines Écrivains Amérains D’Aujourd (Nouvelles Editions Debresse, 1964), 205.
“I’d like to be another Malraux”: AFM, 29.
“struck at once”: Frederick Christian, “The Talent and the Torment,” Cosmopolitan, 66. Morrison added that he wasn’t in complete sympathy “with all the uses to which he put his talent.”
Pete Barton, Mailer wrote home: NM to FM, IBM, 2-12-42.
“haunted degeneracy”: Bernard James McMahon Jr.,
“On the Shelf: the Harvard Advocate, May 1942,” Harvard Crimson, 5-25-42.
“Maybe Next Year”: AFM, 84.
corresponding with Whit Burnett: NM to Burnett, 2-11-42, 3-15-42; Burnett to NM, 2-18-42, 4-6-42.
time to drop condoms: Howard M. Spiro, “The Optimist: Saintliness and Sanity,” Science & Medicine, September/October, 1998, 2.
“incredibly self-disciplined”: MBM, 58.
“had suspended himself”: “Our Man at Harvard,” PAP, 1–5. On the table of contents page of a copy of the anniversary issue, NM wrote: “Being a little memorabilia compounded of the vices and pederasties of one T. John Crockett (stolen from the Advocate Sanctum in October, 1942).”
“smart-alecky”: MBM, 62.
The New Yorker was turned down: NM to FM, IBM, 4-12-42.
not selected in the MGM competition: Kenneth MacKenna to NM, 6-18-42.
nursed the Chevy: NM to FM, IBM, 5-3-42.
Boston State Hospital: NM to FM, IBM, 6-5-42.
assigned to the violent ward: Brock Brower, Other Loyalties, 120.
“very hard, very horrible”: NM to FM, IBM, 6-21-42. In 1975, NM remembered the catatonics he worked with and how they “would not make a gesture from one meal to the next” (FIG, 46).
“The Darndest Thing”: Not located.
soda fountain job: NM to FM, IBM, 6-23-42.
“the work is congenial”: NM to FM, IBM, 7-29-42.
cast of Othello: Dramatic Society invitation to NM, 8-8-42.
liked Bea very much: NM to FM, 8-31-42.
“Fear, for Norman”: Robert F. Lucid, “Boston State Hospital: The Summer of 1942,” MR (2007), 32.
“fear ladder”: NAD, 176.
It took him fifteen days: The dates of composition, August 31–September 14, 1942, are given on the last page of the 113-page manuscript, which NM typed (HRC).
he submitted the play: NM to FM, IBM, 9-29-42.
suite with Harold Katz: NM to FM, IBM, 9-25-42.
Harvard draft advisor: NM to FM, IBM, 9-28-42, 9-29-42.
“Man Chasm,” was “a dark horse”: Harvard Crimson, 2-25-43.
“All that men”: Man’s Fate (NY: Modern Library, 1961), 190.
Southern Mortuary: To view the corpses at the Southern Mortuary morgue on Albany Street, NM and Bea had to walk down a set of stairs guarded by a pair of sphinxes, a descent that offers the possibility that the seed of AE was sown that day. Andrew Ryan, “Old Morgue Finds New Life as Clinic for Homeless,” www.boston.com/new/local/articles/2008/05/31/08/old_morgue_finds_new_life_as/clinic_for_homeless.
safe in Dunster: NM to FM, IBM, 11-29-42.
“He remembered the burnt body”: AFM, 59.
“Yes, sometimes you want”: AFM, 70.
A Calculus at Heaven was the best: Amussen to NM, 3-23-42.
Mailer reported to Millie Brower: NM to Millicent Brower, 4-10-43.
“You say, Mother”: NM to FM, IBM, 4-10-43.
Uncle Dave came up: NM to FM, IBM, 4-18-43.
“Lord knows you’ve waited”: NM to FM, IBM, 4-25-43.
a new work, another novel: NM to FM, IBM, 4-18-43.
“but what importance do my masks”: Undated postcard to FM, IBM, late April 1943.
Cape Cod, Provincetown: According to NM, he had never heard of Provincetown until Bea told him it was an interesting place.
Winston Churchill: Churchill finally received his honorary LLD at a special convocation, 9-6-43, after which he gave a radio address where he praised those opposing Nazism, “a generation that terror could not conquer and brutal violence could not enslave” (John Bethel, Harvard Observed, 154–56).
THREE: THE ARMY
In addition to the sources identified below, the following were drawn on: NM’s Harvard Journal (HJ, at HRC); JML’s “Mailer Log”; JML’s unpublished interviews with NM and BW. NM’s letters are located at the HRC.
“unearthly” beauty: Tim McCarthy, “Norman Mailer Gets Moral,” Life in Provincetown, 8-14-03, 10.
“the feel of 1790”: Joseph P. Kahn, “Our Town,” Boston Globe Magazine, 6-22-03, 19.
inn on Standish Street: Christopher Busa, “An Interview with Norman Mailer,” Provincetown Arts (1999), 24. NM told Busa that he came by train with Bea in July of 1942 and stayed three days but, in fact, they arrived by ferry from Boston on 6-9-43 and stayed for a week. He sent postcards to his parents describing Provincetown, but not mentioning Bea, on June 9 and 11, 1943. Busa’s interview contains NM’s longest and richest evocation of Provincetown outside of his fictional depictions.
he told George Goethals: Raymond Karl Suess II, “Tom Sawyer, Horatio Alger and Sammy Glick: A Biography of Young Mailer,” St. Louis University dissertation, 1973, 83.
request that Stanley Rinehart: Amussen to NM, 7-9-43.
“I was a little frightened”: Introduction to A Transit to Narcissus: A Facsimile of the Original Typescript (NY: Howard Fertig, 1978), viii.
“I was as lonely”: Ibid.
Edwin Seaver wrote: Seaver to NM, 8-27-43. Seaver’s comments on NM’s “remarkable performance for one so young” can be found in his memoir, So Far, So Good: Recollections of a Life in Publishing (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1986), 146.
Cross-Section: Ed., Edwin Seaver (NY: L. B. Fischer, 1944).
lawyer named Riorden: Perhaps the most intriguing character in the novel, Riorden has the polished manners and Jesuitical subtlety later seen in General Cummings in NAD and Barney Kelly in AAD.
“was a devastating”: LNM, 34.
“ponderosities”: Introduction, A Transit to Narcissus, ix.
ski trip: NM to FM, IBM, 12-20-43.
“Yeah, and suddenly I felt”: Bea’s version is that NM “needed an anchor on the home front” (MBM, 75).
Berta Kaslow: Kaslow to NM, 12-14-43.
“occasions [in] me a great deal”: NM to Seaver, 1-11-44.
Mailer responded: NM to Martha Keller, Chief Clerk, Local Board 317, Brooklyn, 1-19-44.
“Fanny,” she said, “just didn’t want”: MBM, 75.
“Neither Barbara nor I”: NM to FM, 10-29-44.
IQ test: NM to FM, IBM, 4-1-44.
“potentially very important writer”: Kaslow to NM, 4-4-44.
salute before they had sex: MBM, 75.
burned out: Marcus, CNM, 97.
“THE war novel”: Levitas, CNM, 3.
instead of keeping a journal: NM to FM, IBM, 4-12-44.
lexicon of military slang: NM to FM, IBM, 4-30-44.
“Mailer never felt more”: AON, 58–59.
“He wasn’t that good”: MLT, 76. Details of NM’s basic training are drawn from MLT, 74–78, and JML interview with Clifford Maskovsky, 2-5-10.
“When it came to taking care”: AFM, 91.
The New York Times Book Review: Marjorie Farber reviewed A Calculus at Heaven in the NYT, 5-28-44; Thomas Lyle Collins reviewed it for the Herald Tribune on the same day. Anticipating the consistently sharp division of opinion on all but a few of NM’s books, the reviewers disagreed: Farber said “the writer’s imagination . . . fails him,” while Collins says the novella is “a remarkable achievement for so young a writer.”
“with my lip buttoned”: AFM, 91.
first extended piece: NM to Bea, 5-26-44.
tableaux of sodden GIs: NAD, 93-104.
patch of observation: NM to Bea, 6-6-44.
“one of the best novelists”: NM to FM, BW, 7-9-44.
“stinker”: NM to Bea, 6-6-44.
“a twenty volume Transit”: NM to Bea, 4-15-45.
He scheduled the reunion: NM to Bea, 7-13-44.
“my first reaction was of disappointment”: NM to Bea, 6-8-44.
“a feeling for the culture”: AFM, 28.
The Young Lions: (NY: Random House, 1948). NM later admitted that “the European war would have been too much for me. I realized that when I read The Young Lions and saw how much more Shaw knew about Europe than I did.” Interview with Eric James Schroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There, ed. Sch
roeder (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 91.
“considerable merits”: AFM, 28.
Shaw landed at Normandy: JML interview with Irwin Shaw, June 1983.
“I can understand that”: NM to Bea, 8-22-44.
Mailer is often described: The most solemn asseveration of NM as an urban writer is Martin Green’s essay “Norman Mailer and the City of New York: Faustian Radicalism,” a chapter in his Cities of Light and Sons of the Morning (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 58–89. It contains a double-page photo of NM leaning on an uncertain rest superimposed over the New York skyline.
“The most dramatic moments”: Diana Trilling, “The Moral Radicalism of Norman Mailer,” Claremont Essays (NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), 184.
“That sad deep sweet beauteous”: WVN, 205.
He told his ever anxious mother: NM to FM, IBM, 9-10-44.
The Führer: NM lists Heider’s study in the bibliography of CIF.
reading Oswald Spengler’s: NM to BW, 10-24-44.
“mind is peculiarly violable”: Trilling, “The Moral Radicalism of Norman Mailer,” 184. Trilling was the first critic to point to D. H. Lawrence as NM’s “predecessor in the line of literary minds dedicated to the renovation of society by means of a revolution in the individual consciousness” (179).
the past as an organism: The Decline of the West, Vol. I, Form and Actuality (NY: Knopf, 1926), 45. In 1975, NM wrote that he was “overpowered” in his youth by Spengler’s idea that “history is an organism, and reveals a sense of style, a divine stroke of the pen to every era” (FIG, 221).
“a ridge or peak as symbol”: NM to Bea, 10-5-44.
cast his first vote: NM to FM, 11-4-44.
“Without you”: NM to Bea, late December 1944.
112th Cavalry: The unit’s history is drawn largely from We Ain’t No Heroes: The 112th Cavalry in World War II, ed. Glenn T. Johnston and compiled by Heather Dalton, Craig Johnston, Glenn Johnston, Alex Mc-Quade, Alayna Payne, Chelsea Payne, and Elisabeth Schmiedel (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2005). NM was one of several veterans of the unit interviewed for the project. The other major source is The War in the Pacific: Triumph in the Philippines by Robert Ross-Smith (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1993).
“the aristocracy of the outfit”: William McDonald, “An Evening with Norman Mailer,” Lone Star Review (Dallas Times Herald), 4-?-81, 1, 3.
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