1978
Another year given to the Egyptian novel, with one notable publication: A Transit to Narcissus, a facsimile of the novel Mailer wrote in 1943, before The Naked and the Dead. His third son, John Buffalo, is born to Norris Church in April, and Judith McNally becomes his assistant. By December, news of his divorce from Beverly Bentley and his forthcoming Executioner's Song are both in the papers.
Spring — an old novel and a new son
29 March — Howard Fertig published A Transit to Narcissus (78.2), an 820-page facsimile of the typescript of the novel Mailer wrote in 1943, before The Naked and the Dead — his earliest sustained fiction, thirty-five years in the drawer. (The chronology dates the publication to January; Lennon’s register gives 29 March.) His introduction had run in advance in the Times Book Review (77.10).
16 April — Mailer’s ninth and last child and third son, John Buffalo Mailer, is born to Norris Church. Around this time Judith McNally becomes Mailer’s assistant — a role she will hold until her death in 2006.
June — Harvard again
Mailer returned for his 35th Harvard reunion, introduced as “the folk hero of our class and the nation” (78.3).
December — divorce, and the Gilmore book on the horizon
The papers carried his divorce from Beverly Bentley (78.4, 78.5) — “If I am a prisoner of wedlock, I’m a recidivist,” he said — and the news that he was finishing The Executioner’s Song (79.14), “as long as Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and about a quarter as good. If it’s a quarter as good, it’s good enough.” He also sparred with Susan Brownmiller at the New York Public Library (78.6).
Related pages
- 1977 | 1979
- A Transit to Narcissus (78.2)
- John Buffalo Mailer | Judith McNally | Norris Church Mailer
- A Transit to Narcissus (77.10) | The Executioner's Song (79.14)