The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  At the annual dinner of the Village Independent Democrats the two speakers were to be men who had worked with Senator Eugene McCarthy and the late Senator Robert Kennedy. McCarthy, Kennedy: these were the magic names not only of the left, the protesting, the liberal, but also of those asserting an intellectual separateness and therefore content to lose. “I know a man who supported fourteen losing candidates,” a visitor from the Lexington Avenue Democrats said. Mailer was going to lose, but the Lexington visitor wasn’t prepared to admit Mailer as one of his losers. The ideas were good, but Mailer belonged to another area of American glamour.

  Benign now, still powerfully built rather than “unwillingly fat” (his own words), a little tired after a day spent on a campaign paper, blue eyes twinkling in a harassed, mobile face, Mailer was undeniably a presence among the Village Independent Democrats at their pre-dinner cocktails.

  “I’ve talked to Mr. Mailer,” a forty-year-old woman said. (Over severe, separating foundations, her neckline plunged and plunged.) “And he says I can follow him around in the press car and I want to go everywhere he goes.” Her escort, led by the hand, smiled neutrally.

  Banning, the campaign manager, listed the evening’s engagements. They were to end about midnight.

  The woman hesitated, then chose the dinner.

  Schwartzman, the nineteen-year-old student on the Mailer advance staff, said, “She probably said she was a freelance and writing a feature. You do get types like that. Now the agency girl, that’s more my type of writer. A little tall, but still.”

  The agency girl, blonde, tanned, cool in a flaming red sweater, had just joined the campaign. She too was writing a feature. In the car afterwards she got out her notebook.

  “Why haven’t you gone to Vietnam, Mr. Mailer?”

  “I don’t want to get killed.”

  “I was there for two years. I wasn’t killed.”

  “That is a horrible and obscene war. I would have done something. I would have got killed.”

  Banning leaned over the front seat to talk of campaign plans. Mailer sat forward, and the two men discussed walking tours and the wisdom of campaigning in certain East Side bars. Mailer didn’t want to campaign in bars. It would mean either doing a lot of drinking in one place or getting in the way of a voter who wanted a drink.

  The agency girl said, “Do you think you have enough of a political record, Mr. Mailer?”

  Mailer turned to her and smiled. “As a man who’s been married four times—take this down—I say to politicians never run on your past record.”

  While her pen worked, Banning talked about an article on the campaign in Life. “On Wednesday it was four pages. On Thursday it was two. On Friday it was one and a half.”

  Mailer said it was hard on the writer. “That’s why Life’s going broke.”

  “People say,” Banning said, “Life’s going broke because of what they’re paying you for your moon shot article.”

  Mailer smiled at the agency girl. “Perhaps they’re trying to rebuke me.”

  “Perhaps,” the girl said, “I should get you angry. Mr. Mailer, why do you talk so much?”

  It was the sort of newspaper feature the campaign was attracting.

  We were in the Lower East Side. A “surviving” area, Mailer called it affectionately: decaying red-brick houses, narrow shops with dirty windows, an occasional empty lot.

  “If you are Lithuanian,” a man said on the steps of the East Midtown Reform Democratic Club, “how come your name is Mailer?”

  “Lithuanian Jew,” Mailer insisted. “On both sides.”

  It was a small hall, panelled down one side and decorated with KLM posters, bunting and the Stars and Stripes. There were about forty people on folding metal chairs.

  “By the look of you,” Mailer said, “I can see you are not a soft Democratic Club. Let’s have the questions. I can see that the person who asks the first question is going to be in as much trouble as me.”

  The question was about the fifty-first state. “You think the Governor of New York would let you or anybody else get away from them?”

  “We all know what breaks up an unhappy marriage. It’s a smart Jewish lawyer. I submit that I am the smartest Jewish attorney in town.”

  The mood didn’t last. A woman asked about CCNY. She sat next to a tweed-jacketed man who might have been her husband; they both looked like teachers. “Why don’t you send them all to Harvard and give them all a really good education?” This was the Jewish backlash; she was speaking of the blacks and Puerto Ricans.

  “You know you are just giving expression to your prejudice. Harvard’s my old college—”

  “That’s why I said it.”

  “Let’s assume that Harvard’s going down the drain—”

  “You’re putting words in her mouth!” the man shouted.

  “Our universities are to education what The New Yorker is to literature. A minor organ with a major function.” Laughter cleared the air. “Pardon this digression. No one should trust a speaker who strays from the point.” He addressed the man: “You recognize the unhappiness with which you speak?” It was a direct, gentle inquiry.

  “I do,” the man said. His response was like a reflex; his tone was confessional.

  A moment of stillness: the man and woman, for all their passion, and the respectable jauntiness of their “budget” clothes, were older than they had first appeared.

  It wasn’t a perfect solution, Mailer said, exploiting the moment. But it was better that the colleges should make some adjustments rather than be destroyed altogether. If the blacks hadn’t been betrayed so often, if opportunities had been given them, “you would have had blacks as mean and as ugly as any—” His mischievousness was like the other face of anger; he was deliberately destroying the mood.

  “You are asking the kids to pay for it!” the woman shouted.

  “Let him talk!”

  “The kids will have,” Mailer said, above the voices calling for order, “the exhilarating existential experience of going to school with black people.”

  That was the end. And, unexpectedly, there was applause, Mailer walking smartly down, arms held out wide, palms open, like a wrestler about to charge.

  The next halt, a fund-raising one, was at a place called the Electric Circus in the Village. It was a good name. In the stairways and corridors blue, red and mauve neon strips reflected on walls that might have been papered with aluminum foil; and at the end of this neon fantasy was a wide white hall, packed with the young. It was a paid-up Mailer crowd. But Mailer, solitary before the microphone, appeared irritated. “You are here to see me work, is that it?” The questions were too sympathetic. “When we win, which would give all of us great concern—” But there was little of that. It was as though, out of his security here, Mailer had committed himself to frowns and silences and was waiting to be provoked. “Now, listen. I’m much more conservative than most of you people here. I’ll work for and support your neighbourhood, but I don’t think I’ll approve of it.”

  After that, ten minutes at the League of Women Voters in the public library opposite the Museum of Modern Art. An anti-Rockefeller art-student demo going on outside that: a swift exchange of literature, campaign with campaign. And then a confusion of causes: Badillo, one of Mailer’s rivals, coming out of the library with his staff, Mailer going in with his, everybody with leaflets for everybody else.

  “Everywhere I go I see Badillo buttons. I feel Badillo’s staked you guys.”

  “Norman, Norman,” the Badillo supporter said. “That’s not a nice thing to say.”

  A meeting with the East Side Democrats was on the schedule. But only the wife of the campaign photographer was there, in a belted pink mackintosh. She had been waiting on the pavement a long time; the club room was locked. The busy campaign, unexpectedly isolated, reassembled; and then Banning told us to hurry over to the West Side Democrats; we were already very late for them.

  “Advance did a fine job,” someone in the second
car said.

  “I’ve been talking to taxi-drivers,” a foreign reporter said (he had joined us at the Electric Circus). “They may know about The Naked. But they don’t always know who the author is.”

  “I was talking to an old Jew in Brooklyn yesterday. I told him about Mailer. He said, ‘Isn’t he the guy stabbed his wife?’ Nine years, and he’s talking about it like he’d read it in the paper that morning.”

  “He probably gets his papers late.”

  They talked about the agency girl.

  “You think she’s for real, a writer?”

  “With looks like that she could be anything. But she’s a groupie. She’s only going for the big man.”

  We weren’t late for the West Side Democrats. A dingy first-floor hall overlooking Broadway, photographs of Robert Kennedy, old Eugene McCarthy stickers, the Stars and Stripes. A mixed crowd of about fifty, some Puerto Ricans, a couple of blacks. One of Mailer’s rivals was still talking.

  “… I tell you one thing we can do real fast to get better crime control …” This was Congressman Scheuer, spending half a million dollars to come last in the primary, below Mailer.

  Mailer entered, his hair frizzing out now. The TV lights blazed on him. Heads turned; hands were shaken.

  “… get police out of all station-house and routine jobs … all non–crime control functions …”

  The applause wasn’t for the Congressman. It was for Mailer, withdrawing after his false entry. Presently, through the mêlée, the Congressman walked out, smiling, a private figure.

  But they were a dull audience, and because they were dull, Mailer tried. Irony, to begin with. CCNY was being taken over, he said, by the same Communist plot Mayor Wagner had talked about some years ago. The audience remained vacant. “That was a joke.” He told an Irish joke in an Irish accent. Silence. “Now that I’ve lost this club”—The laugh came; the audience relaxed. Mailer talked for twenty minutes; it was the best speech of the evening.

  IN THE MORNING there was a story in the New York Times.

  “CAMPAIGN” BY MAILER UPSTAGES

  THE ONCE FESTIVAL IN “VILLAGE”

  … First, however, the audience at the last in the current Electric Ear series of multimedia affairs at the East Village rock hall witnessed a psychodrama of another variety, “The Campaign,” starring Norman Mailer … While TV cameras captured the bizarre scene, Mr. Mailer urged statehood …

  And at the Overseas Press Club they were gloomy. Neither the Times nor the Post nor the News had sent a man to the press conference that morning, when Mailer and his running mate—Jimmy Breslin, a popular columnist, a heavy, dark-haired Irishman of menacing and explosive appearance—were to present a paper on housing. Banning had brought a boxful of copies; he found only about fifteen takers, radio and TV people, who always served the campaign well, some foreign reporters, and the agency girl, now in green. The TV cameras and the lights played on her for a little. She remained cool. Out of a cross face Mailer smiled.

  A reporter asked for a statement on the “integrity” of the New York press.

  “The simple statement,” Breslin said, “is that no one’s here. They’ll begin to listen when they hear shotguns on Park Avenue.”

  “Electric Circus,” Mailer said afterwards, looking at the Times, which Banning had folded over to show the story. “I didn’t like the name. I didn’t like the building.”

  “It was a horrible building,” Banning said.

  “How much did we get out of it?”

  “A couple of hundred bucks.”

  “Not worth it.”

  “I was talking to an AP man,” Banning said, explaining the poor attendance at the conference. “They had a list up in the office. ‘These stories we will cover this morning.’ And another list. ‘These stories we will not cover this morning.’ We’ll call another press conference tomorrow at the same time. That’s the way to test them.”

  I was beginning to recognize Banning’s style in drama. It might have been his diplomatic training; he had served for some time in the American Foreign Service. Or it might have been his later work in broadcasting. (“I couldn’t tell you even today,” he said after the campaign, “whether politics or show business is my first love.”)

  About thirty reporters came the next day. The agency girl wore cream. The Times sent a man; so did the Post. There had been a lot on the TV networks the previous evening—the interviews, so casual, given an extra, separate reality when slotted into the news programmes on the small screen—but Mailer was still complaining.

  “We have to bludgeon our way into a newspaper office to get a small piece. They are trying to make our campaign ridiculous and up to a point they have succeeded. We have made mistakes on the way; we have played into their hands.”

  Tempers were shorter; there were fewer jokes. Mailer looked tired and aggressive; it was his face that suggested defeat. But he might have been acting: his face was so mobile, his moods so quick.

  Two hours later, at his Wall Street rally, standing below the statue of Washington on the steps of the Old Treasury Building, he was a different man. Hands now in trouser-pockets below the buttoned jacket, now in jacket pockets, he appeared to strut, like a boxer in the new respectability of a suit, confident of his public spread out in rows on the wide steps, filling the famous narrow street below. The sound system was bad. All the words were lost, including Breslin’s threat about the shotguns on Park Avenue. But the scene was dramatically right.

  A stranger coming on Wall Street at that moment with a knowledge of America gained only from films would have found in the scene a familiar glamour. He would have seen the man up there as every type of American myth-figure: boxer, sheriff, bad man, mobster, even politician. It was the setting: the famous street in the famous city, the buildings, the flags, the rhetoric and history in the Washington statue. And it was also Mailer: his sense of the city, perhaps, his sense of occasion.

  But when I talked to Mailer a week after the election I found that his own memories of the Wall Street rally were vague; the details of the campaign, of particular scenes and particular words, had blurred.

  “You don’t operate as a writer. You don’t see what people are wearing. You are aware of people only as eyes, a type of response. It’s more like being an actor.”

  THE DAY AFTER the Wall Street rally, after many more meetings, speeches, ceremonies, questions and answers and statements, Mailer said, “I’ve become duller. Steady, serious, duller. I’ve become a politician.”

  He was in shirtsleeves in headquarters. The grimy windows were pushed open; the afternoon was thundery. He had just given a twenty-minute “in depth” TV interview; and it was part of the wastefulness of campaigning: that excellent interview, and the events of the week, would make about five minutes on the network’s Saturday news.

  He had discovered, he said, that politics was hard work. Sleep was the thing he dreamt about and he understood now how sleep could be the politician’s sex. “Someone should do a Freudian analysis of this thing, being a politician. It’s all a matter of orality. It’s the most oral people who get along. My tongue feels like a hippopotamus’s. It’s all a matter of tongue and lips. It’s so strange for me, so different from my practice as a writer. I used to feel that if I talked about something I had lost it. I would go out to do an article. When I came back and my wife asked me what I thought about it, I wouldn’t talk. That’s why I feel I couldn’t do a book about this.”

  “What do you think about him?” Schwartzman asked me afterwards.

  It was a question Mailer sometimes asked his staff after a meeting; it was a question the staff often asked reporters they had got to know. It was the burden of glamour: Mailer’s staff required him never to fail, even in a short exchange with a reporter.

  “FRIDAY’S a fun day,” Banning said. “He’s going to the races at Aqueduct.”

  “Fun?” I said. “You mean no campaigning?”

  “There are going to be seventy thousand people there.”
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  The special express trains funnelled them in from Manhattan and Brooklyn; and from the platform, level with the floor of the coaches, they poured down the covered ramp to the stand, spoiling the symmetry of the arrangement only when they broke out into the sunlight—the wide car-parks glinting like the open sea—to get to the two-dollar gates. First on the covered ramp (leading to the five-dollar gates) and then in the sunlight, Mailer and his party stood, facing the rush: Breslin, the columnist, more popular than Mailer here, Mailer in light check trousers and a blazer, smiling shyly, Mailer’s wife, small, an actress, in a sober olive outfit, now part of the campaign.

  The crowd swirled past them. But, like pebbles on a smooth beach, the campaign party was a disturbance, and disturbance built up around them: swift handshakes, an exchange, a little crowd, enough for the cameras, and even a little sound off-camera. “I’ve been thinking about this guy. I wanted to see him. He’s in favour of dual-admission.” “You haven’t got a ghost of a chance, ya bum!” Then the party, going through the five-dollar gates, were taken up the escalators to the concourse, where they were soon untraceable.

  I fell in with a young man, equally lost, from Liberation News Service. He was hairy and hippyish and aggrieved. He had had to fight his way into the campaign car that morning and he hadn’t even had an interview with Mailer. He showed me a transcript he had made of his conversation with Banning.

  “BANNING: Look, we need coverage from you New Left nuts like a hole in the head … You got to get votes from a lot of strange places to win in this town … He needs support from the left like he needs a shit haemorrhage.”

  “Mailer isn’t offering an alternative to American politics,” the man from Liberation News said, as we walked through the crowd, looking for the campaign. “He’s offering only a distorted version of the old style.”

  The bright green centre of the track was patterned with flowers; in the distance the jets rose one after the other from the permanent kerosene haze over Kennedy Airport.