Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer
Partisan Review 42.2 (1975), 197-214 (75.11)
Laura Adams (1975)
Originally published in Partisan Review 42.2 (1975), pp. 197-214. Reprinted by permission of Laura Adams and Partisan Review.
Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer From Partisan Review, 42, No. 2 (1975), 197-214. Reprinted by permission of Laura Adams and Partisan Review.
Adams: Since the late 1950’s you’ve had a vision of God and the Devil at war for possession of the universe, a vision that has been the metaphysical and moral center of your work. Has that vision changed appreciably over the years?
Mailer: I don’t know the answer. When you deal with cosmology, the question becomes on one hand enormous-do God and the Devil war in the galaxies?-yet is intimate on the other. Since we all have our own idea of God and the Devil, it’s hard for the idea not to change, even fluctuate. I’d say that over the last ten or fifteen years I’ve kept going back and forth in my mind over a notion that’s hard to formulate, and I don’t know that I should try-it’s the sort of thing that sounds silly unless you can write a book about it-but for the purpose of this answer, just let me say that if there is a war continuing between God and the Devil for humankind, for the future of humankind, then this war is much more complex than a simple confrontation. We have to ask ourselves what the role of technology is in all this, and I’ve had years when I’ve believed technology is an instrument of the Devil, other years in which I’ve seen God in a Faustian contract with technology. Technology is perhaps some third force, some element that’s come into our universe from other universes. Now all this is so endlessly and chronically paranoid, that it’s hopeless, I think, to try to talk about it in the form of an interview. I think you can dramatize these notions in a major novel, but only a major novel. You would wreck a minor novel by introducing such ideas. Therefore to talk about it in an interview is hopeless. It leads to people saying you have a windmill for a brain. Still I can see by the look in your eye that you’re hardly ready to give up.
Adams: Isn’t it an obsession, a form of paranoia, or even atavistic to think that there are cosmic forces manipulating us for their own ends?
Mailer: Well, I’ve never felt we are the simple creatures of these forces. On the contrary, I think they are fighting for our allegiance or even our unwitting cooperation. It isn’t only that man needs God, but recall us to the title of that old French movie, “God Needs Men.” (Of course you couldn’t use such a title today. You’d have to say “God Needs Persons.”) Here’s what I’m trying to say: To the degree I have any intense religious notion it’s that when we fail God we are not merely disappointing some mightily benign paterfamilias who’d hoped we might tum out well and didn’t. We are literally bleeding God, we’re leeching Him, depriving Him of His vision. You see, I start with the idea that the explanation for our situation on earth may be that we are part of a divine vision which is not, necessarily, all loving, but on the contrary is a vision which wishes to take us out across the stars-a vision of existence at war with other varieties of existence in the cosmos. Flying saucers may be, or may represent, at least, a certain unconscious human awareness that there is this possibility in the universe, that there are other forms of intelligence which have nothing to do with us. Nothing even to do with our divinities.
Adams: Do you know the Arthur C. Clarke novel, Childhood’s End?
Mailer: No.
Adams: In it the human race mutates into an essence, a form of energy, that unites with a kind of benevolent Oversoul which, interestingly, has used another race of benevolent beings in the form of devils to prepare the way for the human mutants. It appears that our fear of devils was based on a premonition that they would have something to do with the dissolution of our race. The unconscious awareness you spoke of reminded me of this. But isn’t this notion that, as D. J. expressed it in Why Are We in Vietnam?, “You never know what vision has been humping you through the night,” contradictory to the perception of good and evil in An American Dream? There it seemed that good and evil were for the most part clearly demarcated, known to Rojack. Deborah and Barney Kelly were evil; Cherry was good.
Mailer: That was his view of it.
Adams: His view of it? Mailer: That was all it was-Rojack’s view of it. To the degree a reader sympathizes with Rojack, that would be the reader’s view of it. To the degree a reader decides that Rojack is an absurd hero, he won’t go along with that view. But even assuming that Rojack’s view had something to do with my view of the characters, I was certainly attempting to make Deborah more complex on any spectrum of good and evil than Barney Kelly. Barney Kelly was supposed to be the focus of evil in the book. Adams: The Devil personified. Mailer: Well, the Devil approached, anyway. Whereas Deborah was someone who was, in quotes, “in thrall” to the Devil. But a woman of complexity, not altogether unacquainted with goodness. Adams: And Cherry? Mailer: I didn’t mean Cherry to be all good by any means. To the degree that she’s better than she ought to be, she’s too sentimental a character. A gangster’s moll is not the simplest kind of goodness we arrive at. But I wanted to indicate some characters had more purchase on good than others. Adams: Cherry seemed to have a hard kernel of goodness even though she was surrounded by corruption. Mailer: I think she’s finally an enigmatic character. In my opinion, she’s the weakest character in An American Dream. I think people who don’t like the book have their strongest argument starting with Cherry. To a great degree, I’m afraid she’s a sentimental conception. We don’t really know much about her. We’re asked to believe that this goodness exists in her but we don’t have any idea of the real play of good and evil in her. She’s a shadowy figure. Of course, my cop- out is that she’s seen through Rojack’s eyes. He’s in an incandescent state of huge paranoia and enormous awareness. He’s more heroic and more filled with dread than at any point in his life. So she seems like a lighthouse in the fog. What else does one do in such a state but fall madly in love for twenty-four hours and lose the love? It would have taken more wit than I possessed to have made her a character of dimension under these circumstances. Perhaps she did have to appear as a sentimental figure. Still I think there’s no getting around it, she’s the first weakness of the book.
Adams: But it’s a highly metaphorical novel. One of the mistakes many critics made in first reviewing it was to take it too literally. Isn’t Cherry seen metaphorically as love, the reward for courage? Mailer: Well, no. I don’t believe a metaphorical novel has any right to exist until it exists on its ground floor. You know I never start with my characters as symbols. I’m unhappy if I can’t see my characters. I mean, I not only have to know what they look like, and how tall they are, whether they’re good looking or plain, but I also like to have some idea of what they smell like. So I had a pretty good idea of Cherry physically, a very clear idea in fact, but I would have been happier if her character had emerged somewhat more. I think Deborah, for instance, is vastly more successful. Deborah is worthy of a book in herself. In fact, at one time I thought idly of doing a book on Deborah, and then chose not to. But how she drew coincidences to herself. One of the things about An American Dream that’s not often realized is my little theory, if you will, that as events become more dramatic so does the play of coincidence become more intense. You can reverse it. You can say that coincidence may fail to occur unless events are dramatic. I think there’s a reason for that. If you believe in Gods and Devils, and I choose the plural because not only is God on one side, Devil on the other but they certainly have armies, adjutants, aides, little demons, angels, well, when important events occur why wouldn’t they be concerned? Why wouldn’t they be present? Why not try to tip the scales? Why wouldn’t God and the Devil have their department of dirty tricks? You know, see them as some sort of sublime extension of the CIA. Adams: That is why I see the novel as so highly metaphorical. The kinds of experiences Rojack has, the vision of shooting arrows into Cherry’s womb while she’s singing in the night club, for example, seem to me to exist in a dream allegory but not at the literal level. Mailer: I would disagree. I’d had the experience of being in night clubs and thinking evil thoughts and really barbing them like darts and sending them to people and seeing them react. At the time I didn’t know whether I was profoundly drunk or, you know, was I all alone in the world? But I had to recognize that there was a psychic reality to it. It wasn’t just a fantasy. Since then, there’s been any amount, my God, there’s so much material now to indicate that this is not at all unreasonable. For one thing, we do have telepathic powers,
we talk about the human aura, about the ability to send hostile vibrations, everybody uses that phrase, but, you know, if you can send a hostile vibration, which is to say, a hostile wave, why not employ modem theories of light and say hate appears not only in the form of a wave but also as a particle? If you can do it with light, you can do it with hate. In other words, send a damn particle into someone. Why not assume you can sting someone with a thought so concentrated that they’ll turn around and rub the back of their neck? Now, I invite people who are reading this interview to try it from time to time. It helps if you’re drunk, of course. Adams: Is that what you’ve been doing to tape recorders all these years? Maller: Oh, I think there’s a good reason why tape recorders bomb out on me. Why not assume we have electrical powers-we know there are pictures taken of the human aura in Russia. What is it called, the Kirlian process? Did you ever notice when you’re in a real hurry to make a phone call, and you’ve got one of those button phones where you can dial quickly, that if you dial too quickly with too much desire, you never get your number? Adams: Yes. Maller: Then you have to stop and say, “Okay, I don’t really care if I get the number or not,” and dial more slowly. Then the phone becomes your servant again. It’s as if there’s an electrical resistance to your electrical intensity. Adams: I simply assumed the computer couldn’t handle the digits as fast as I could push them. Mailer: Well, I notice it with a dial phone, too. The phenomenon is not only in the speed with which you dial, but the intensity with which you want to get that call through. It’s almost as if there is something in the center of electricity that mocks us. I’ve felt this with all sorts of electrical phenomena. It’s possible I’m more charged, have more electricity about me. I don’t mean that as any agreeable or attractive condition, it’s bound to be disagreeable, but possibly I could have more effect upon electrical instruments than other people, a little more effect, 10 per cent more, whatever. At any rate, to go back to An American Dream, my point is that there wasn’t a single phenomenon in that book that I considered dream-like or fanciful or fantastical. To me, it was a realistic book, but a realistic book at that place where extraordinary things are happening. I believe the
experience of extraordinary people in extraordinary situations is not like our ordinary realistic experience at all. For example, one of the reasons I’ve never written about great prizefighters in a novel is that the experience they have in the ring is, I think, considerably different from what we believe it is. More intense, more mystical, more “spooky” if you will, than anything we see on the outside. Who wants to write about a fight the way sportswriters do, or even as fighters discuss it after the fight, “I was waiting to set him up with a good right. He dropped his guard and I popped him.” That’s the way they talk. Only, it isn’t their experience. Adams: I grant you that the characters in An American Dream perceive and experience reality altogether differently from us ordinary folks. Still, it seems to me that their literal reality has a metaphorical level as well, just as your literal realities nearly always tum into metaphorical ones linked to the central set of metaphors regarding the existence of God or the Devil. I’ve come to see them as metaphors for our moral directions, which in the absence of absolutes become existential, unknowable as good or evil. Mailer: My metaphors explain more phenomena to me than any theology I can adopt. I was an atheist for years because I couldn’t stomach the notion of the all-good, all-powerful God who calmly watched all sorts of suffering which by any extension of our human imagination could not be productive of anything, not even productive of future karma. In other words that whole waste of human possibilities of the most grinding, grim, dull sort. It seems to me that the only explanation is God is not all-powerful: He’s merely doing the best He can. Adams: But how literally does God exist? Mailer: I believe he exists literally. Adams: How? Mailer: It’s not for me to know how or where He exists. It’s reasonable to assume He exists in a great many ways, in places we can comprehend and a great many where we cannot. All I’m saying is that He does not have to be all-powerful. What is there that makes Him all-powerful? He was powerful enough to have created our solar system, perhaps. And if you ask what are His limits, that might be my guess. But this is babbling. It isn’t important where God’s limits are. What’s significant is the idea that God is not all-powerful, nor the Devil. Rather it is that we exist as some mediating level between
them. You see, this notion does restore a certain dignity to moral choice. Adams: Of course, it does. Maller: It becomes important whether you’re good or bad. Adams: In trying to know what is good or evil aren’t you in effect trying to take existentialism to its logical end, that is, to end existentialism? Maller: Not end it, seat it. Of all the philosophies, existentialism approaches experience with the greatest awe: it says we can’t categorize experience before we’ve experienced it. The only way we’re going to be able to discover what the truth about anything might be is to submit ourselves to the reality of the experience. At the same time, given its roots in atheistic philosophers like Sartre, existentialism has always tended toward the absurd. By way of Sartre, we are to act as if there were a purpose to things even though we know there is not. And that has become the general concept of existentialism in America. But it’s not mine. I’m an existentialist who believes there is a God and a Devil at war with one another. Like Sartre in his atheism, I offer a statement of absolute certainty equally founded on the inability to verify it. Atheism is as removed from logical positivism as theology. Still, I don’t give a goddamn if I can verify this or not. There has to be something out there beyond logical positivism. I want my brain to live. I want to adventure out on a few thoughts. The fact that I can never demonstrate them is not nearly so important to me as the fact that I may come up with an hypothesis so simple, so central, that I may be able to apply it in thousands of situations. If it begins to give me some inner coherence, if I begin to think that I know more as a result of this philosophy, why not? Adams: But isn’t what you’ve identified as existentialism, extended to its logical end, seeking to know what is finally unknowable? Mailer: That’s not my definition of existentialism. I’d say we find ourselves in an existential situation whenever we are in a situation where we cannot foretell the end. Some of these situations are grave. If you get into a skid on an icy road, at a speed that’s uncomfortably high, you don’t know if you’re going to be able to pull your car out of it without a smack-up. That’s an existential situation. When people talk about it afterward they think of that quality of time when it is slowing up. The first time people connect with marijuana,-not the
first or the twentieth time they smoke it, but the first time they connect with it-they’re in an existential situation. It’s not the universe they have been sitting on all the time. It’s slower, more sensuous, more meaningful, more natural, but filled with awe. The light tends to have a little of the hour of the wolf, a light close to lavender or purple, that light you get on certain kinds of evenings, or very early on certain kinds of dawns full of foreboding. But it’s-there are all kinds of situations. A woman losing her virginity is in an existential situation. Of course, part of the comedy of twentieth century technology is that it’s gotten to the point where a woman can lose her virginity without being in an existential situation for a moment. It’s all exactly the way she thought it was going to be, she’s been so well oriented. Adams: I think that assumes that her partner is not also a virgin. All right. Your basic existential situation is a situation anyone enters at any moment in time when the end result of his actions is unknown. But isn’t to a larger extent your aim in all the work that you’ve been doing to uncover what is essentially good or evil in our natures and God’s nature when that kind of thing is actually unknowable? What I was going to suggest earlier in talking about the demarcations of good and evil in An AmericanD ream is that you seem to have become increasingly obsessed since that time with your inability to know what is good and what evil. Mailer: You say I’m obsessed, but where would be the literary proof of that? What books would show that? Adams: Start with the case of Richard Nixon in Miami and the Siege of Chicagoa nd St. George and the Godfather:y our inability to know or to intuit whether Nixon is basically good or basically evil; to know, in Of a Fire on the Moon, whether our space program will carry God’s vision to the stars or the Devil’s; to know in Why Are We in Vietnam?w hether America has made a Faustian compact with the Devil or whether God is using us for evil ends; whether or not our national leaders and events win or lose us ground in this divine battle. It seems to me that you lead us to this question, with increasing desire to know the answer, in every work. Mailer: Well, it could be said that all I’m doing is leading people back to Kierkegaard. I’d remind you I’ve written this several times: Kierkegaard taught us, or tried to teach us, that at that moment we’re feeling most saintly, we may in fact be evil. And that moment when
we think we’re most evil and finally corrupt, we may, in fact, in the eyes of God, be saintly at that moment. It’s a Dostoevskian, Kierkegaardian notion. Its first value is that it strips us of that fundamental arrogance of assuming that at any given moment any of us have enough centrality, have a seat from which we can expound our dogma, or measure our moral value. So we don’t have the right to say Richard Nixon is: A. good; B. evil. I might have my opinion of Richard Nixon, but I don’t have the right to say that man is evil, any more than I have a right to say he is good. Adams: Do you have a clear notion of the good? Mailer: No. But I have, if you will, I have and I submit to the force of this word, I have a fairly well-formed cloud of intuitions about the nature of the good, and, like a cloud, it has to a certain degree a structure, and yet the structure is capable of altering quickly, depending on the celestial winds blowing and the less celestial winds. A cloud changes shape quickly but it remains a cloud. It’s not just simply an unformed chaos. Adams: You’ve said that an evil person is someone who has a clear notion of the good and operates in opposition to it. Mailer: Therefore by my own definition I’m definitely not evil. Adams: All right, but are you wicked? Mailer: Unquestionably wicked, yes. Adams: By your own terms, which is not knowing what is good or evil in any situation, but upping the ante each time. Mailer: Upping the ante, yes. I’d say I may be one of the most wicked spirits in American life today. Maybe. America may be changing faster than I am. Adams: Is it fair to say that your existentialism is leading us to know the nature of good and evil? Mailer: It’s leading us to-well, let me take a detour. People who submit to logical positivism, and go on from there into philosophies as difficult as Wittgenstein’s, will answer if you ask, “Why go through these incredible disciplines in order to verify the fact that you’re able to verify the wing span of a gnat but not of an archangel?” They will answer, “Well, it isn’t what we are able to verify that is interesting, so much as that we go through a discipline which enables us to think cogently. We’re less likely to go in for sloppy thinking thereafter.” That’s the value of it. I’d say by going in for my variety of associational, metaphorical thinking (which is, of course, the exact
opposite) I may be able eventually to think speculatively without feeling philosophical vertigo. You see, it doesn’t take any more illogic to posit that there’s a god or devil than it takes to say there is none. The latter statement is absolutely as potent an act of faith. There’s a marvelous line in Jumpers, the play by Tom Stoppard, to that effect. I paraphrase: “Well, maybe atheism is that crutch people need to protect themselves against having to face the enormity of the existence of God.” You know, once you contemplate the notion that there is a God and this God may be embattled, the terror you feel is enormous. Adams: It’s a terror, but isn’t it also paranoia? Maller: No. The terror is not that some force is working on you to ruin you. It’s another kind of terror: It’s that nothing is nailed down. That we are out there-that our lives are truly existential. That we’re not going to end up well, not necessarily. You see, there’s always been this sort of passive confidence implicit in Christianity, the confidence that things are going to work out all right. One does have to die, that’s true, but if one keeps one’s nose reasonably clean, one is going to heaven. That gave security to everybody. The ship of state was built on that security. The ship of state was nailed down. It didn’t travel the stormy seas. Rather, it was carried by the strongest pallbearers of the nation. And what’s happened now is we’re entering an existential period in our history where nothing is nailed down. All the American faiths, one by one, are being exploded. We lived for too long in a paranoid dream world that believed communism was the secret of all evil on earth because it was the social embodiment of the Devil. Adams: That’s paranoid. Mailer: That’s paranoid. But I don’t believe the Devil is the secret of all evil on earth. I believe something more complicated than that. I think God might be the source of a considerable amount of evil. Because if God is embattled, He could fail to take care, much to His great woe, of people who are devoted to Him, in the same way that a general might have to surrender soldiers on a hill. And those soldiers could give up with great bitterness in their hearts. Adams: You’ve talked about evil in one sense as God’s shit, God’s excrement. Mailer: Where did I say that? Adams: It comes up in “The Metaphysics of the Belly.” A
colleague of mine once remarked that it’s but a step from scatology to eschatology and I’ve often thought of this remark with regard to your work. Now I’m interested in the relationship between excrement and eternity. If God’s shit is evil, but shit is associated with the Devil, doesn’t this imply that God creates evil? Mailer: There are references in my work to the idea that shit and the Devil have an umbilical relation, but it’s not my idea after all. Luther had a few notions about it. Adams: As did Jonathan Swift. Mailer: It’s an idea that goes-it starts with the most primitive peoples. It goes all the way. There’s a reason for it. Shit is what we reject, at least to the degree that the shit felt it deserved a better end for itself. In other words, a lot of our shit has nutrients in it, worth in it. It’s just the body couldn’t take it, and so passed it out. Some of the best of the food goes out with the shit as well as some of the worst. That’s what I said in “The Metaphysics of the Belly.” All right. To the degree that we can loosen our imagination to assume this stuff might have a soul, after all we’re beginning to discover now that plants have feelings and souls, so it may be that food, even though in a peculiar relation to life, not as alive as a plant, let’s say, or as an animal, but still alive to a degree, has a mood, has a spirit, has something. If food feels it has been violated, suppose it can die with a curse. Of course, the Devil loves to be around and pick up those who die with a curse. Malcolm Muggeridge once had Sister Theresa of Calcutta on a television show with him. Muggeridge, who is by any measure a devoutly religious man, had just written a book about Sister Theresa and obviously revered her. He told me what she used to do in Calcutta. Her order of nuns would take people who were dying on the street and move them into her convent where they’d die anyway a few days later-they didn’t begin to have medicine to take care of them or anything like that-but her notion was, and Muggeridge was moved by this, and I agree that it is a moving idea, was that she didn’t want them to die with absolutely nothing. She wanted them to be able to come in and get a little attention before they died so they wouldn’t go out with complete bitterness in their hearts. Now that is a religious woman. The recognition that one not die with a curse is fundamental to any inquiry into what could be the possible nature of God and the Devil. If God is embattled, and can’t give fair justice to all, then what of those who do not achieve what they saw as their own
fulfillment and thereby become spiritual material for the Devil, if not in this life then in another? We haven’t said one word about karma, but my first idea these days is that any attempt to speak of these things makes no sense unless you take into account the peculiar calculus of karma. We may have to recognize that we’re not only acting for this life but for other lives. Our past lives and our future lives. Paying dues, receiving awards. Reducing the cost of future dues, for example, by certain acts of abnegation that make no sense to us or our friends, yet ready to dare, on the other hand, sometimes desperate activities because we are desperate. The condition in which we live is hurting our karma. Adams: Karma is a word you’ve used increasingly in the last few years. It’s a term that you did not use in “The Metaphysics of the Belly” or “The Political Economy of Time,” but which you could have in describing the nature of the soul. Is this something new in your metaphysics or is it a term for something that you’ve already described, like the way in which the soul exists, in “The Political Economy of Time”? Mailer: I had come across the word in books but never paid any attention. In about 1953, I think it was in Marshall, Illinois, I went out to visit Jim Jones in his colony and he was talking about karma and I said, “What’s all that?” So he gave me the standard explanation which is that we are not only reincarnated, but the way in which we are, is the reflection, the judgment, the truth, of how we lived our previous life. If you exist in a simple form of karma with no interference by Gods or Devils, a natural flux of karma, then to the degree you lived a life that was artful, your reincarnation was artful. To the degree you lived a life that destroyed the time of others and dredged up all the swamp muds, so you are a creature of the swamp in your next life. The beauty of this may be that there is now good purpose to the swamp. (This isn’t Jones’ talk any longer, just a more general explanation of karma.) At any rate, Jones went on about it and I said, “You believe in that?” Because I was an atheist and a socialist in those days. He said, “Oh, sure. That’s the only thing that makes sense.” Well, the line rang in my head for years. “The only thing that makes sense.” I thought about it over and over and in the last three or four years I began to think, “Yes, that does make sense. Jones was right. ”
Adams: Let’s move from metaphysics into your views of your work. In Advertisementsf or Myself you stated that you were “imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time. ” In terms of that ambition to alter the consciousness of our time, how would you evaluate the relative effectiveness of the various forms of your work for that purpose: the novel, the novel-history, the novel-biography, film, politics, the Fifth Estate? Maller: I’m not the sort to look back. So long as you keep working it doesn’t make much sense to rank your own performance. None of my work may have influence for all I know. How can you measure it? Some of the ideas I had on how to make movies, for instance, might seem important in 15 or 20 years-maybe they’ll make a few movies that way. The ideas I had when Breslin and I were trying to take New York in the mayorality-some of those ideas have come in. More will. People may yet say, “Oh, those guys-that was an interesting campaign, intellectually speaking. ” It may even prove a fruitful campaign. Or I might have influence through some of the ideas I had in things nobody ever read. If we go off into the most religious and extravagant kind of existentialism, the ideas in “The Metaphysics of the Belly” may have the most future interest to people. I would say one place I have not had influence, up to this point at any rate, is in the novel. Obviously my novels have been conservative in terms of form- Adams: Not Why Are We in Vietnam? Mailer: No, Why Are We in Vietnam?h as nuggets. There are formal ideas buried in Why Are We in Vietnam?-1 suppose I trusted metaphor in that novel to a degree I’ve never trusted it before. I worked on the assumption that if I had a metaphor where I might, for example, mix electro-magnetism and pine sap in a tree, that there was something there. Something scientific yet to be discovered. But I don’t know if I’m interested in the question. Where do you think my influence will be? Adams: I think it will be in works like The Armies of the Night, Maidstone,a nd Why Are We in Vietnam?w hich pushed back the existing limits of genre, form, and language, and ultimately, perhaps, it will be your style which will have the most influence. I think that you’ve abandoned the novel in recent years, even though you still
consider the novel the highest form of art, of communication, because you see that it’s out of the center of history, and that what you’ve done since Armies is to try to move into the center of history and stay there, to try to impose form on things that are moving so fast and appear so chaotic that you not only are present at the making of history, but you’re making it over. Mailer: Well, certainly in Armies I was trying to, I was trying to bring a consciousness to America about the war in Vietnam through personifying one reasonably complicated middle-aged man caught up in the peace movement and not altogether willingly.I think the effect of the book was to make resistance to the war in Vietnam a little more human to people who were still supporting the war. So, yes, I think the book did have a political effect. Maybe it tended to strengthen the side opposed to the war in Vietnam. OK, but, you know, that’s not going to mean much in 30 or 40 years. Adams: Not the subject but the form you impose on the subject, the style. That is what I am saying is the significant thing, although you have been criticized of late for this very thing. Critics say that you have an interlocking system of metaphors that you impose on all of your work; that everything you write about now is seen in terms of this metaphysical war of God and the Devil for possession of mankind and that instead of allowing your style to arise from your subject you impose your style on the subject. Mailer: I think that is their profound resentment that I have a philosophy which is coherent, and they don’t. I think that is what they hate. If I were a Catholic, if I were Graham Greene, and a devout and somewhat troubled Catholic, and everything I wrote revolved around Catholicism, nobody would argue for a minute. They would say, “He is a Catholic,” so why can’t they say of me, “He is an existentialist”? I mean, I don’t know Graham Greene, but I would like to think it is possible my ideas are as deeply imbedded in me as his faith is in him. Is that wholly inconceivable? Adams: That’s a rhetorical question. But doesn’t there need to be a dialectic going on between your vision and the subjects to which you attach it, namely the major political events of the 1960’s and 70’s? Mailer: But I don’t write about everything in politics for just that reason. Not everything appeals to me equally. I spent last summer down in Washington going to the Senate hearings. I thought maybe I
would do something for Atlantic on Watergate-we had a loose working agreement that I might do something. At the end of the summer I called Bob Manning and said, “I don’t know if there’s anything I can bring to it that would be mine.” You see, I don’t want to get into situations where I start dominating material, just for the sake of dominating it-which is, of course, what I’m accused of doing. I only move toward material which makes me feel I have something to bring to it. I did this last book on graffiti* because I looked at pictures of subway graffiti Larry Schiller showed me that Jon Naar had taken and thought, “Something is going on there that’s interesting.” Interesting to me, obviously. So I wanted to write an essay on it and did. But what I’m getting at is I don’t think the history of our time is any more apt for me than any other history. Adams: I see what you are doing in light of some lines from “The Political Economy of Time” in which you said, “Form is the record of every intent of the soul or spirit, its desire to reveal the shape, which is to say the mystery of the time it contains in itself.” It seems to me that you have a vision and that you perceive certain events of national importance in terms of your vision, choosing the ones that have most significance to you, but writing about them in those terms rather than being the relatively passive observer most other working journalists are. Mailer: That could be true. But, if so, a price is paid for the philosophy. There’s always the loss of a sensuous perception of the event if one is thinking in categories as one perceives the event. That can happen if one has a coherent philosophy. On the other hand, you could say that you end up writing best about those historic events which have a magnetic relation to your own ideas and tend to write less well about situations where that doesn’t occur. I think, for example, Miami and the Siege of Chicago is probably a better book than St. George and the Godfather. For a number of reasons including the fact that the conventions themselves were more exciting, but also because there was a polarity in ‘68 more congenial to me than in ‘72. Still, I didn’t warp it, I didn’t go around violating what I saw, did I? Adams: It’s not a criticism but an observation: you act upon opposed forces, becoming the opposing force yourself if necessary, in *The Faith of Graffiti:N ew York:P raeger, 1974.
order, it seems to me, to create a synthesis, an altered form, not simply to control these forces but to move us toward that alteration of consciousness we spoke of earlier. Mailer: Maybe the question is how to verify the observer. What are my passions, prejudices, and particularly my infirmities? It’s terribly important who the observer is. That’s why I always try to put myself into these works of journalism so the reader can have his sense of me. It’s important to be able to decide whether I’m perceiving well or where I’m perceiving badly. Whereas, if I attempt to present to readers what I consider the end-product of objective truth, it’s likely to be nothing more than the harshly digested conclusions I came up with in my somewhat unbalanced soul. (What else is most journalism?) Whereas I believe the fun in reading comes from observing the observer. After all I did have that happy streak with The Armies of the Night. There was fun in that book, but the fun was to observe the observer. An ideal example of the technique. It doesn’t always work that well. Still, there’s a lovely remark of Trotsky’s I go back to over and over again. He said sometimes the only way you can tell the truth is by a comparison of the lies. If you’re listening to two liars telling tales, you may never be able to find out who is lying the most. But you can come closer to a sense of reality by the relations between those mysteries. You see, we may never know, for instance, what the truth of one human is, or another, but we can know a lot about the relations between them. We may be confused by two terribly complicated people but we are able to say with greater certainty, “They hate each other,” or “Isn’t it extraordinary how they love each other?” because we can feel the relation between the mysteries. So, by the same token, when I write, I try to do that. I try to set up a relation between mysteries where I am that relation as the writing voice. Adams: This is why I think, although you probably won’t agree with me, that the kind of work you’ve been doing outside of the novel per se, which would exclude the novel-history and the novel- biography, is more significant in terms of your own ambitions than the novel. Mailer: No. Maybe not for the future. You know there was an unhappy newspaper story which had just enough truth to be awful, that I was getting a million dollars for a novel, do you know about that?
Adams: The Little, Brown contract? Mailer: Yes. Well, you know, everybody said, “Isn’t that shameful. Ridiculous the way publishers are agreeing to the prices. ” So forth. No one takes into account that Little, Brown is one publishing firm that has been around for many years. The contract is for a novel large in scope. The writing is going to take anywhere from five to seven years and I’m to deliver anything from five to seven hundred thousand words which may end as one novel or can break down to two, three, four, or five novels. We don’t know at this point. What Little, Brown is doing, which I think is exceptional and splendid for a publisher to do, is they’re giving me a chance to try to write that big book I’ve been braying about to America for the last fifteen years. And I’m going to find out. I can promise you that I’ve rarely been as scared in my literary life. Finally I will have no excuse. I’ll either be able to do something that’s large and good, it should be, you know, given all this hoopla, be halfway as good as Remembrance of Things Past if it’s going to be any good at all. In other words, we’ve set the bar high. Adams: I hope it’s not as dull as Remembrance of Things Past. Mailer: That isn’t too dull a book. I’d settle for it to be as good and as dull. At any rate, I’m so much involved in the problem of writing a novel now that I think about it all the time. Coming back to the novel after all these years, the difficulty is as fresh on me now as it was when I started writing. I mean when you get down to it, it is an extraordinary business to say you’re going to write a novel. You are creating a world. When you’ve been writing for as many years as I have, and know the responsibility of being a writer, the God-like assumption of writing a novel is almost impossible to surmount. How do you open the door? To become the prime mover of your own little world! Adams: I don’t think that for you it’s just writing a novel. It’s writing the big novel. Until recently, when I knew that you actually had the novel in progress, I was thinking of the novel that you promised us as a metaphor, and saw what you have been laying before us for the last twenty-five years as a novel. It’s art as process rather than a series of products. Mailer: I think you could take all my work up to now and say, if you want to extend the meaning of a novel, that all this makes up one book or is equal in its impact to one huge novel. I wouldn’t run
away from that. I would hope it’s true. I mean, suppose I get hit by a car tomorrow. Will people come along and say, “Well, he’s never written his novel, but he sure did write a novel of sorts.” No, I don’t argue with that Adams: I think that you have been staking your reputation on this big book and that you’ve considered that the work you’ve been doing since Annies is less significant, is easier. “Journalism is chores,” you’ve said, but isn’t it really in terms of altering the consciousness of our time more significant than even maybe the big novel might be? Mailer: It could be, but you can’t measure that You can’t also say that the sum of my ambitions is that one sentence, effecting a revolution in the consciousness of our time. You can’t measure these things. Finnegans Wake has apparently had little influence on the consciousness of our time, but we don’t know. Its influences are subterranean. Besides, we don’t know what its influence is going to be a hundred years from now. Adams: But it hasn’t been widely read. Maller: Suppose a hundred years from now people are talking in three or four or five languages at once. The fact that this book Finnegans Wake exists is going to be incredible then because it is going to accelerate the consciousness of that time, and yet one man will have done the work a century earlier. Then the book will come into its own. Maybe he forged the first link in something that is going to be tremendously important. The fact that the link is there will serve as a crystalizing force for speaking in tongues. This is an extreme example of what I am trying to say, but we can never be certain of how well we are succeeding in a mission once we’ve assigned ourselves that mission. All we can ever know is whether we have worked as hard as we can. Adams: Some of the forms you’ve created, like the novel-history and the novel-biography, seem to have more effect on those who are reading and experiencing them than the novel. Maller: There’s no question that there’s more immediate impact Adams: More widespread, too. Mailer: It’s a fashion, an intellectual fashion for a year or two. Maybe it affects people’s minds to a degree and then something comes along which is the opposite of what I’ve done and changes their minds back. So that, in effect, I’m out there pushing the waves in one direction and other people are pushing the waves in another
direction. If you transcend that, if you end up with an absolutely remarkable work which may not have that much impact in the beginning, it’s still possible that you will at least have nailed down your points in such a way that people can’t keep using the same arguments. I mean, the most disappointing reaction I find in my career is that the criticisms made about me today are so close to the criticisms made ten years ago. It’s as if I never reached certain people at all. Adams: Can you be more specific? Mailer: Oh, well, the attacks on my ego. I mean, you’d think if a man has been carrying on about his ego for ten years that finally they’d say, “All right, he’s got an ego and his ego gives me a pain in the ass. But let’s see what he’s doing.” Can you read a review about me these days that doesn’t start with those predictable first 150 words about my character, my nature? Did it ever occur to them that I have less nature by now than they do? That I’m just a serious, hardworking, somewhat dumb professional? Adams: There are those to whom you’re a living legend. Mailer: There are days when I say to myself that I have to be the second most unpopular man in America. Richard Nixon first and I’m second. Who’s more unpopular than me, really, leaving good Richard out of this? Adams: You can’t ask a midwestemer that. Mailer: It’s true I have no existence in the midwest. Nine out of ten people in the midwest never heard my name. That’s certainly true. Adams: That’s right, unfortunately. I’ve been spreading the word but it hasn’t reached quite enough of the population. Perhaps you have a less well-defined identity than we imagined; perhaps you have more in common with Marilyn Monroe than Ernest Hemingway, which is why you can view yourself as a literary character and have used so many personas. Mailer: I think Hemingway also had a gamut of identities. It was just that coming from the midwest, he was considerably more focused in his attempt to build one identity. That is, he didn’t try to go from A to Z like Monroe or myself, he kept it pretty much, let’s say, between J and K on the one side and P and Q on the other. He worked that middle. But I certainly think Hemingway was forging his identity every day of his life, more than myself as a matter of fact. I
226 Conversationsw ith Norman Mailer don’t think there’s anything so awful about that. It’s not comfortable, but I think most artists have this problem. Or let’s say at the least, there are two kinds of artists, those who begin without a sense of identity and those have it from the start. Many young writers right now have a sense of identity. That’s the first thing you notice about them, George V. Higgins, Richard Price, any number of good young writers of genre coming up now. James T. Farrell years ago was a perfect example of someone who started with a sense of identity. And then there are the writers who start with other kinds of talents and are always forging their identity. Adams: You’ve said a number of times that your public personality bears little or no resemblance to your sense of your own identity. Isn’t that the sign of a weak rather than a strong ego? Maller: That’s a midwestem notion, weakness and strength in the ego. Ego, it seems to me, is many things, but the first is the ability to bear various kinds of pain and discomfort in order to carry out your project, whatever that is at a given moment. In other words, ego is the ability to bring oneself to focus for the situation. Now, ego is therefore not the same thing as predictable character at all. Adams: It isn’t one’s sense of oneself? Maller: I’d say rather than a sense of oneself, ego is awareness of one’s will. Knowing at a given moment what you want to do. At least the kind of ego I’m talking about is that. I once said at the beginning of the piece on the first Ali-Frazier fight that ego is the ability to move with certainty into matters about which we know very little. Now, if you accept that, there’s no reason to assume that you have to have a sense of self. What you need is a sense of your will. Monroe had a huge ego considering how void she felt of identity. Adams: To return to your new novel for a moment, if you can write it as you now conceive of it will you consider it your greatest achievement? Mailer: Well, I’m at the beginning of it and nothing’s more dangerous than to talk about what I think it’s going to be. Still, it wouldn’t be much fun to write an enormously long book that isn’t very good, that just is fairly readable and slightly less good than the other stuff I’ve done. Of course, says the practical voice, the publisher might do better with that than if I do something really good. But if I can bring it off roughly the way I conceive of it, I think I’ll have something pretty good, pretty interesting. Then after that-I don’t
look beyond. There might be all sorts of things to do. I’m going to be a lot older. The shock right now is that I probably know what I’m going to be doing next year. In previous years I never did. That was fun, not to know what one’s future was. Adams: Isn’t the plot of time that Little, Brown has bought you what you’ve been looking for so that you don’t have to do two or three months’ work and get a big chunk of money so that you can get back to the novel? Mailer: That’s what I wanted the contract for. I kept making these big chunks of money for quick books, but they would take enough out of me so that I didn’t gain time. I kept thinking I might, but never did. Now I can work at a steadier rate, and less on a collision course. The question is, however, have I kept enough of myself intact to do this book? We’re going to find out. That’s existential.