Letter to Francis Irby Gwaltney (20 December 1963)
A craft-rich letter to Fig: on the danger of writing out of anger, on serial-writing as 'ten-second chess' that forces the bold choice, and on how a year of deadline work has turned him from a multiple-draft novelist into one whose first draft becomes the body of the book. Also: Bev's pregnancy and Kennedy's death souring The Presidential Papers.
One of the most craft-revealing letters in the collection. To Fig Gwaltney, Mailer reflects on the difficulty of writing well out of anger (which “tunes up one’s whole body physically so you tend to lose the cool sense of each moment”), and on the Esquire serial as “ten-second chess” — you must “take the bold choice each time” because the subtler choices “may prove too subtle and fail to come to life in the speed with which you have to write.” A year of deadline work, he says, has changed him from a “second, third, or even fourth draft novelist” into one whose first draft becomes “the basic body on which the final result was clothed.” He closes on Bev’s mid-March due date and on how Kennedy’s death has thrown The Presidential Papers “off balance.”