Mailer Goes Egyptian
New York, 28 March 1983, 28-38 (83.13)
All of his usal rituals had been observed, the galleys re-corrected, the last two pages reset, and now there was nothing to do, Norman Mailer said, but wait for te publication of his novel Ancient Evenings, which he’d been working on for eleven years. Mailer was feeling very detached, he said, reading Rabbit Is Rich for the first time and going through unanswered mail, when he discovered the invitation from Francois Mitterrand to go to Paris and be part of an intellectual conference called “Culture and Development.” Although he doesn’t much like to travel and has too many debts to take time off from his work, Mailer agreed to go and was pleased that he did, partly because he was able to patch up a rift with William Styron that had gone on for more than twenty years. “We’re like two old Turks with matted beards,” Mailer said of their time in Paris together, wandering through the streets, stopping in at Hemingway’s bar at the Ritz. The friendship had been strained, to put it mildly, ever since Mailer attacked Styron in Advertisements for Myself. There had been an additional complication having to do with Mailer’s second wife, Adele. “We didn’t discuss any of it,” Mailer said. “It wouldn’t have changed anything that happened so many years ago. What would have been the point?” Brought together by Mitterrand’s invitation, it was as if, Mailer said, “Bill and I looked at one another and each decided, “Hey, he’s not so bad after all.’ As we get closer to the shadow, we begin to lose a great deal of fire in our limbs.” He was discussing this quietly at Alice Mason’s Valentine dinner when his dinner partner, Joan Mondale, turned to him, struggling to catch something he was saying in his, as he describes it, “black-market French.” “I said to Mitterrand, ‘Ils veulent gagner la guerre, on doit gagner.’ ” “What doese that mean, Norman?” Mrs. Mondale aasked. “It means that although the Russians want to win the war, we should win it,” Mailer said, and then he moved on to Mitterrand himself, “a stunning figure with a long face and a characteristically French nose, very much like Andre Gide in appearance, but his forehead is more powerful, high and prominent, almost like a phallus with the veins bulging in it, yet when he speaks his mouth is like a flower, his lips like delicate petals, opening and closing. He is extraordinary,” Mailer told Mrs. Mondale, “precisely because he thinks like a novelist.” For whatever reputation he has received as an original thinker to rival Andre Malraux, a novelist who has often reinvented the language, a journalist who redefined style in nonfiction, a prophet of all that is subterranean in the culture, a self-styled psychic outlaw whose “disasters, failures, and boo-boos,” as Mailer puts it, have made headlines for years, it has always been the novel, the one big novel, that has been Norman Mailer’s focus in life. “Without it, what would there have been to keep swimming for?” he asks. With the one big novel or without it, Mailer’s place as the literary man of his era is ensured. He has written definitively and provocatively on almost every large theme in contemporary life. he has been honored with two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, a membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and, most recently, by the publication of a lengthy biography—a book he refused to be interviewed for—which details his every outrage and accomplishment. To imagine American letters without Mailer would be like imagining America without California or New York. In Ancient Evenings, he has burrowed in, retreated, as he says, “into an act of pure fiction.” in an attempt to portray life 3,000 years ago. The novel is a vast departure for Mailer, a 709-page tapestry of the ninteenth and twentieth Egyptian dynasties. Ancient Evenings traces the peregrinations of one man, Menenhetet, through his three reincarnations—the character changes from charioteer to general to harem master to high priest. Much of the narrative is told by a six-year-old boy, a boy “with the consciousness of Marcel Proust, but Proust at age fifteen,” Mailer says. If Mailer is unlikely Homer, Ancient Evenings provides an exraoridinary—and often incomprehensible—panorama of the magic, mythology, and scatological practices of the Pharaohs, as well as mass rapes, sodomy, scenes of battle and of life at court, and a re-creation of the Egyptian Land of the Dead. Mailer’s immensely difficult work about ancient Egypt may not provide, as he once promised in Advertisements for Myself, a book that “Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendal, Tolstoy, Proust, and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way.” Twenty-four years later, Mailer says of Ancient Evenings, “This isn’t the big book I promised, but it is a big book. I think in a literary sense it’s the most innovative. I think this is far and away the most ambitious novel I’ve ever written.”
Mailer says he wrote Ancient Evenings "with the coach, my literary betters, over my shoulder, and maybe that wasn't wise." The publishing industry, in its present depressed state, is a difficult marketplace for a difficult book. Over the winter, paperback houses showed little interest in Ancient Evenings, and an auction fizzled when only one bid came in. But two months before publication, the bookstores had ordered 100,000 copies, so Mailer is not worried. "Look," he says, "either it's a very good book or it's not. If it's a very good book, well, fine. If it isn't, well, that will be disappointing, but I'm probably not going to know for a few years anyway. I think there will be people who will think it is a great book; I think there will be people who will say it's a preposterous work." Mailer says he is prepared for accusations about his "Pharaoh complex" and for the reviews that may invoke both Jack Abbott and Mailer's stabbing of his second wife, "It's almost impossible for anyone to review Norman's work without reviewing his life," says his wife, Norris. He is girded for the pronouncements of the Vassar grads who decry his primal urges and think his energy loathsome, the terminally smug members of the literary establishment who already say that Ancient Evenings is unreadable, and the academics who will devote thousands of words to analyzing his twenty-sixth book in light of his previous 25. For Mailer, the worst of these will be the critics who "will accuse me of journalism and will run around screaming I've done autobiographical work, because the protagonist ends up being 60 years old. You must realize, " Mailer says, "that when I started the book I wasn't even 50 yet. Sixty seemed to me a great distance away. It never occurred to me to consider myself remotely like him. He was ancient. He was 60."
Norman Mailer does not easily settle into patriarchy; not for him the gentle image of the elderly writer surrounded by his books and children. Mailer says his patriarchal mood "doesn't have those wonderful bass chords you hear in symphonies--it becomes more like private concerns. For the first time in my life, I find that I don't spend over 50 percent of the day thinking about myself. It's all very well to be a patriarch, but my feeling is that it's an academic question. That is, if I have it in me to be the patriarch who finishes off the career with the white beard and the last three great books, we may never know. I might wind up working for George Plimpton on Atari, or maybe with The Norman Mailer Show. It could be like The Blue Angel. I might be out there scuffling." Mailer has certain phrases he uses frequently: "Once a philospher, twice a pervert"; "After all, Veronica, why not?" ("I stole that one from Saul Bellow"); "I'm an old club fighter--I get mad when you miss"; "The first time you hit me and I notice it, you're in trouble." He calls these his "all-purpose expressions, good for any situation in life." So, too, does Mailer have certain themes: his need to scuffle, the romance of his struggle, and, most of all, the feeling that for much of his life he has been consistently misunderstood. "Do not understand me too easily," he quoted Andre Gide in the first column he wrote in the Village Voice. Recently, he was talking about his early years. "I used to have this feeling of 'Why don't they understand? If only they would understand, they would see what they're doing to me." Studying engineering at Harvard, the sixteen-year-old Norman Mailer discovered Studs Lonigan and suddenly realized the power of the novel and what he would have to do with his life to get his point across; he completed fourteen short stories and a novella in one year. At 60, Mailer may feel more convinced that "the iron law in life is that everyone has a certain amount of luck," but the same abhorrence of misinterpretation is still there. No matter that a torrent of print has analyzed his every move; if Time misstates his age, as it did recently, Mailer fires off a curt letter of correction. If he feels he's been misquoted, he rails against the journalist, complains to the editor. "The existentialist" is determined that his record be kept straight. "During the day, while he is helpless, newspapermen and other assorted bravos of the media and the literary world would carve ugly pictures on the living tomb of his legend," he wrote in The Armies of the Night. "Of necessity, part of Mailer's remaining funds of sensitivity went right into the war of supporting his image and working for it." "You know what I don't undersatnd?" he said recently. "Why is it that everyone has to portray me as a fool and a buffoon? Why am I always made to look foolish? None of my essential irony ever comes through. Years ago, Lillian Ross did a profile on me, and when I read it, I called her up and said, 'Lillain, where's the twinkle? People don't understand that a great deal of the time I'm just kidding. For example, the drinking. I never really drank all that much. I used to love to go to parties when I was younger and hold a liquor bottle and swig from it. I was playing at being Norman Mailer. Nobody ever gets me right, damn it." It is Mailer's curse to live, as he says, "in an immensely reductive age," an age where certain facile assumptions about character, easy judgements, and write-offs are made, especially in the world Mailer travels in, what he calls "the intellectual guild." Making quick assumptions about Mailer's character has always been impossible--he is too much of a paradox to fall into easy categories. Even as a patriarch. Just when "our protagonist," as he called himself in The Armies of the Night, seemed to be slipping into his declining years gracefully, swamped in research on the Ramses IX period of Egypt, acting as bourgeois as a Tory, collecting the $30,000-a-month stipend from Little, Brown necessary to support his five ex-wives and nine children, his edges nicely mellowed by writing fiction again, up reared Jack Abbott, giving Mailer another chance to be misunderstood. He did little to resist.
To review the case briefly: Mailer and Jack Abbott had exchanged letters while Abbott was in prison; with Mailer's help, those letters were collected in book form as Abbott's acclaimed In The Belly of the Beast. Abbott's association with Mailer, it was originally believed, had resulted in his early release from jail, enabling him to arrive in New York, where he lived in a halfway house. On the day that the New York Times called Abbott "an exceptional man with an exceptional literary gift," he killed a young waiter and actor, Richard Adan. Although Mailer had learned that Abbott had been released from prison because he had cooporated with the authorities, he decided he would stick by him; in the process, he absorbed a great deal of the blame for Adan's murder. "The Jack Abbott case was the biggest strain we've had so far in our marriage," Norris Mailer says. "It was so terrible, you have no idea. It wasn't just Abbott Norman encouraged, it was all kinds of writers. And to read in a newsmagazine a letter saying that Norman should be tried as an accessory to the murder, or an editorial saying that they should be chained togehter--I don't think it's blown over yet." A year has passed since the New York Post ran the headline MAILER: I WOULD RISK FREEING KILLER!; the Mailers still get hate mail and some faily serious threats, but now Mailer takes a larger view. "During the business of Jack Abbott, much of the outrage at me was in efffect 'He has no acumen.' Acumen is the ability to read situations, to make judgments that are effective. Probably there is no virtue that those of us in the intellectual trades in New York aspire to more. I think the thing that infuriates people about me is that I keep violating their acument." The Abbott case was a special violation. "The feeling was that my judgment was so naive. The common thing that was said was that I had no right to help this man to get out, because I wasn't paying the price, society was. It is not a judgment that you can brush away. Part of the outrage was simple horror, part of the outrage was unfounded, part of the outrage was absolutely legitimate. The part of the outrage which I thought was comic--although deadly--was that people were saying, 'You see, there it is, Norman Mailer has no acumen. Not only does he not know how to behave, he doesn't know how other people behave, which is worse.' "People still come up to me on the street and say, 'What about Abbott? The last time it happened, I said, 'Hey, did you read the book?' and the man said, 'Yeah, yeah, he sure had his head together in the book--that's what I can't understand.' " This encounter seems definitive for Mailer. "Jack had such a command of the states of emotion that, in a way, it was my confidence that he would be all right on the outside too. Usually, anyone who understands anything that well is through witih it," Mailer says. "When he first started saying to me, 'Will you help me get out?' I thought about it and I though, 'Yeah, it's fair. He's helped me. I owe it to him.' " But he was surprised, Mailer says, when Abbott got out so fast. "I thought it would be a year or two, if at all. It was his bad luck that he got out so quickly." Although Abbott told Mailer's biographer, Hilary Mills, that "Norman and I are enemies, we're class enemies," Mailer still defends him. "We correspond still. I don't know, he has talent. I think it will be hard for him to become a writer, but if he can do it, it's the only thing that can save something out of it. Miller wrote After the Fall. This is 'After the Bomb Went Off.' " Abbott told Mills that Mailer "doesn't know this other world, but he always wants to do it in such a way that he pulls [us] into his world. In existential terms, Norman is a Phillistine."
Norman Mailer has not always been a Phillistine, hostile to the culture of his own world. Although he now says that "it is always deer-hunting season where I'm concerned" and likens his position in the intellectual guild to that of "an extra added starter," there was a time in the 1950s when he was an accepted member of the guild--an editor of Dissent and a contributor to Partisan Review, friendly with Norman Podhoretz and Irving Howe. "I was a special part of that group," Mailer says. "If I had been a girl, I would have been like our cousin Suzy who is very fragile and gets dizzy spells and she realy has a very unhappy life, if only we could find a husband for her, because she plays the violin so beautifully....I was even friends with Phillip Roth for a while, perish the mark," Mailer says with a laugh. "When you're young and you have a certain amount of young arrogance," Mailer says, "you're above being accepted by the literary establishment. On the other hand, you want to be accepted. You remember at the end of Lenny, when Lenny Bruce says, 'All I really want is for America to love me?' I found that particularly moving. It's so true. Under all of it is the cry of the immigrant heart: 'I came here, I really love America, please endure me. I secretly worship you.' No matter how sophisticated you get, it's almost primitive in immigrants. You do want recognition. You can also see that if you take certain courses, you're not going to get it." A literary celebrity by age 25, when The Naked and the Dead was at the top of the best-seller lists, it took Mailer years to understand "the vacuity of a life without struggle," as Tennessee Williams wrote. Mailer calls the years after The Naked and the Dead, while he was working on The Deer Park, a time when "my self-pity was the worst." "I was just bewildered, " he says. He had written Barbary Shore, which had been savaged by the critics, moved to Mexico, got heavily involved with drugs, returned to New York, and published The Deer Park. He was not pleased with what he considered that book's middling success--a sale of only 50,000 copies. Mailer felt he was floundering: he was throwing enormous parties, occupying himself with, among other things, being one of the founders of the Village Voice. But if his life seemed chaotic, his radar was onto something, picking up "clues," as he would say, in the culture that led to The White Negro, which defined the notion of hip for the first time, and, at the end of the decade, Advertisements for Myself, in which he invented a new style of personal journalism that went unappreciated at the time. Mailer used Advertisements for Myself, as a forum to attack some of his fellows in the intellectual guild: Gore Vidal, James Jones, Jack Kerouac, Styron, Truman Capote. Whatever his motives, Mailer had created an entire new set of struggles, necessary to fuel him, since his primary struggle--achieving fame as a writer--was no longer a concern. In Advertisements for Myself he retreated into his ego. "I have been running for President these last ten years in the privacy of my mind," he wrote, and from then on, the psychic outlaw took off on a brilliant and original course, flinging himself into the world again and again, often with disastrous results. He does not regret this: "It takes a toll if you don't do anything, too. As many people die from excess of timidity as from bravery. Nobody ever measures that." The inevitable end of his acceptance, even as strange cousin Suzy, by the ingrown, polemics-ridden Partisan Review crowd, came, says Mailer, "when I stabbed Adele." Locked into a confrontational marriage with Adele Morales, Mailer, drunk and stoned at the end of a long party, took a penknife and stabbed his wife. That was in 1960. Adele was badly injured, but she refused to press charges: Mailer was taken to Bellevue for observation. "A week or two after I got out of the coop," Mailer says, "I remember that Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter took me to a party and everybody was shocked that they would take me there, but still they all closed ranks behind me." Twenty-two years later, the evening is still vivid to Mailer. "I walked into the room and the reactions were subtle as hell," he says. "Five degrees less warmth than I was accustomed to. Not fifteen degrees less--five. I guess that once you bring a violent man to a party, people are generally polite to him. "Looking back on it, the stabbing was not altogether the turning point. I mean, it was terribly shocking and things could never quite be the same. If any of us does something like that, people just don't look at them in quite the same way. I think ten years went by before people forgot about it. Once in a while they would get a reminder and they would say, 'Oh my God, yes.' I think the real separation came after Adele and I split up with Jeanne [Campbell] and I started going around together, because then I started traveling in another world. "Once in a while, I do long for a sense of community, and it just isn't there. I don't take pride in it. Sometimes I'm rueful about it. I am the odd man out. Look, you tack through your life. Particularly if you're heading upwind, you tack."
Norman Mailer lives in Brooklyn Heighs, where he was reared. His mother, Fanny Mailer, lives a few blocks away, and although Mailer visits her often, "she's at that point now where much of her day is just spent looking out the window." Mailer takes a great deal of pleasure showing visitors how his neighborhood has changed--the high rise that has replaced the Italianate mansions, the paved road to the water that was once a footpath, the alterations at 20 Remsen Street, where he wrote The Naked and the Dead. "When I rented a room on the top floor," he says, "there was a mansard roof and ornamentation on the windows. Now it's all stripped." Each day he passes that building and the house down the street where he lived in a small apartment with his first wife, Beatric Silverman. "I don't think much about it. No metaphors. They're all used up. The problem with being a writer, " Mailer says, "is that you use up everything in your work and after a while you go dead inside. You have no inner life. I've just flattened out completely." The day is crisp, and Mailer wears a blue parka, khaki trousers and jogging shoes. He is recognized several times, and strangers beseech him for small favors. "Hey, Norman," says a man in a navy jacket whom Mailer has never met, "is your friend-in town? I sent him a letter. I need him to help me get a job." "Well, " says Mailer, "he was in the country, but he's back in the city now. I'm sure he'll receive it." Mailer sees "nothing peculiar" in these semin-intimate encounters. "The interesting thing that happens if you live in a neighborhood long enough is that you get to be a lot like a small-tow politician, able to confer minor favors on the local populace." The small-town-politician image is enhanced by the ease with which Mailer pulls out his wallet and shows off pictures of his nine children or, on another day, having just returned fro the dentist, where he had one more tooth extracted, takes it out of his shirt pocket to amuse his four-year-old, John Buffalo. Although this seems a different Norman Mailer fromthe one who drove Rip Torn to attack him with a hammer during the shooting of Maidstone, Mailer's daughters Danielle and Betsy insist that their father has alays been quite gentle. "The outrage is gone, no question," says Mailer. "There's a simple reason: nine kids, nine kids."
A few months before John Buffalo was born, the Mailers were in Paris. "There was Norris with a great big belly and we were talking about having a baby and this and that and all the kids when suddenly I turned to her and I said, 'You know, all I ever wanted was to be free and alone and in Paris,'" Mailer says. "So Norris said, 'Well, gee, honey, look. Let's suppose you were free and alone and in Paris. What would have happened? You would have run into some girl, and you would have started living together, and then she would have gotten pregnan, and then you've have been free and alone.' And I though, 'Well, I can't win that argument anymore.' "Inside every patriarch is a closet matriarch," Mailer says. He puts in two three-hour work shifts a day, four days a week, and one on Saturday, in a small, undecorated room down the block from his apartment. Mailer says he allows no one to take a look at his writing quarters. "It would be bad luck. Once I had a really fancy office with a lot of pictures on the walls and photographs. I couldn't write a decent page there. I just stared at the pictures all day." At one time, Mailer owned the entire building he lives in, and his writing studio was in the house. Different floors of the building were sold off, Mailer says, "as my debts got worse." The Mailers now occupy only the fourth floor. Mailer's expenses, his alimony to three ex-wives, the tuition for six children, run $325,000 a year, so the Mailers rarely travel and Norris buys her clothes from the $13,000 a year she earns as a painter. "Thank heavens Oscar de la Renta is a friend," Norris says. "He sells me his runway samples for something like $150 each. It makes me mad sometimes, all of Norman's responsibilities. Supporting his ex-wives. Somtimes I think, "What are they going to do if Norman drops dead?" "I can't complain, because I had it so easy for so long," Mailer says. "Thank God for my belief in Karma. It all gets very casual, believe it or not." The Mailer apartment has a large living room, which looks out to Wall Street and the Statue of Liberty; in it are an antique red velvet sofa and several Victorian chairs, nautical clocks that chime with ship's bells on the hour, and two walls that are lined with rosewood bookcases. Several of Norris's stylish paintings are on display, as are dozens of photographs of Mailer children, parents, friends--Pat Lawford, Dotson Rader, Jan Cushing Olympitis, Buzz Farbar, Amy and Milton Greene. Mailer's City of the Future, constructed by him out of Lego blocks, which adorned the cover of his collected criticism Cannibals & Christians, shares space at one end of the apartment with the dining-room table and its view of the water; at the other end are several small bedrooms and a kitchen, which looks up to an A-frame Mailer designed with a series of lofts to accommodate children. There is no clutter. "Norman is very neat," says Norris. "He drapes his clothes neatly over a chair, and when he takes his socks off he puts them in his shoes. Every few days I go through all the shoes and throw the socks in the laundry." Norris Mailer paints in her studio all day--until recently she shared space with Kurt Vonnegut's daughter Edie--but is back in the late afternoon. "When Norman comes in at eight, close to dinnertime, I know not to talk to him," Norris Mailer says. "I let him come down from what he's working on. Norman will usually eat a half of grapefruit and play a game of solitaire in order to relax, or he'll read the papers. I don't badger him at that time about all the things that might have happened to me that day." Mailer's daughters by Adele, Danielle and Betsy, both in their mid-twenties, come often for dinner. Betsy, who teaches at a nearby school, lives in a small studio on the third floor. Danielle, a layout artist, lives in Manhattan. "Those two girls are the center of the family," Mailer says. "But of all my nine children the one who reminds me of myself the most is Buffy, John Buffalo, especially at this age. Like me, he's both stubborn and proud." Suppertime, Brooklyn Heights: Norris has made pot roast. Danielle and Betsy help in the kitchen. Norris's son Matthew, is doing homework. Dinner is served. "What is it?" John Buffalo asks. "Pot roast," says his mother. "Yecch," says John Buffalo. "You love pot roast," his mother says. "I hate pot roast," John Buffalo says. After some debate, Mailer says, "You'll eat pot roast or you'll go to your room." John Buffalo flings himself under his father's chair and starts to wail. "Go to your room, John Buffalo. Now." There is a tense moment, then quiet descends. "Fierce pride," says Mailer. "He'll stay in his room all night to show us we can' win." Although the Mailer's seem ubiquitous in the fashion press, Mailer says they "try to keep going out down to about three nights a week. The look on the kid's face is getting to us." Going to dinner parties is "sort of the last of my very small gifts to have been developed. It's sort of like finding a new sport, the kind of sport you could never play when you were young. I find now there is almost a certain pleasure in a half-difficult dinner partner, to see if you can warm her up. If I have one quarrel it's that a great dinner has to have a faint touch of the sinister about it, and people are as kind to one another in the social community as they are in a small town. No one dares to start something with someone, because there is no telling where it will end." But not always. Last spring, Mailer was "struck by something that occurred at a dinner." That night, Gloria Vanderbilt was on his left, Barbara Walters on his right. In the afternoon, Barbara Walters had taped her first interview with Claus von Bulow, and as she related her impressions of him at the able, she did not notice that Gloria Vanderbilt's face had glazed over with distaste. "What do you think of the case, Gloria?" Barbara Walters asked pleasantly. "I don't want to discuss it," Gloria Vanderbilt said. "None of you know what you're talking about." She was angry, her teeth clenched. There was some attempt made by Walters to politely back and fill. "I said, I will not discuss it," Gloria Vanderbilt said. Dinner resumed. Later Mailer turned to her. "Don't you ever change your mind about anything?" he asked. Vanderbilt, who was acting as hostess of the table, excused herself before coffee. "I was struck by it," Mailer said, "because it was one of the few times I'd seen such a clear example of the clash between social prominence and media celebrity. Gloria loves cracking the whip over people. It was almost as if she was enjoying grinding Barbara down, asif she was saying to us, 'You're nothing but media....and trash.' "
Leon Edel describes a year in Henry James's life, a year in which "he dined out 140 times." "To have had the stamina to face so man evenings of talk--not all of it good talk by any means--so much stuffy Victorian formality, was some kind of test of endurance...Henry endured, he more than endured. He thrived on it." So, too, does Mailer. Social encounters are an arena for Mailer; they provide a great deal of the spontaneity that patriarchy has effaced from his life. And they are material: "Rich people interest me," he says. "How they live. I have a dinner party that goes on for 100 pages in the new book." The kindness of the community, as Mailer puts it, is important too. Norman Mailer is the resident genius of the social world, as generous with his opinions and conversation as Hemingway was in his day. Often, Mailer takes refuge in the bosom of the well mannered. On the night 60 Minutes devoted a segment to Mailer and Abbott, Mailer was at a dinner at the home of television producer Mark Goodson. He had arrived after seven. "How did I come out? I didn't want to see it," Mailer said to friends who were there, knowing they would shield hilm from harsh verities. On the circuit, he can be continually surprised, as he was when he ran into Frank Sinatra at a recent dinner at William Paley's. "I said to him, 'It's nice to meet you, Mr. Sinatra. I've hated you for 40 years because I've always thought you could always get any girl that you ever wanted.' I think a novelist just has to get out," Mailer says. "There's many a night when we come home and I say, 'Oh, what are we doing? This is ridiculous. What a boring evening.' But if you stay home, it can be boring, too."
They are a familiar sight in 10021, Norman and Norris arriving at a dinner party, Norris tall, elegant, her Pre-Raphaelite features set off by stunning red hair. Norman in his black velvet dinner jacket, shorter, rounder, grayer, taking obvious pride in being with her. Mailer loves to repeat the story of being so taken with her beauty the first time they met "that I had to leave the room." "When Norman met Norris," says Mailer's oldest friend, Mickey Knox, an actor who lives in Rome, "it was as if he had finally met his Marilyn Monroe." Mailer had married a variety of women: Beatrice Silverman, a New York intellectual; Adele Morales, a Spanish-Peruvian artist; Lady Jeanne Campbell, the granddaugther of the English press lord Beaverbrook; Beverly Bentley, an actress, Carol Stevens, another actress, with whom he had a daugther, Maggie, before they married. None of them was quite right. "There was a seven-year period in my life, "Mailer says "where each time I took a woman to bed I was dead drunk. I'm not proud of that." "Each of Norman's previous wives had elements of what he was always searching for," says Mickey Knox. "But it was only when Norman met Norris that he found the one woman who had everything: beauty, grace, intelligence, talent, and a very strong will. Barbara Norris, as she was called before she changed her name to Norris Church for her modeling career, had never even been on a plane until she met Mailer. They have the same birthday, but would not seem to have had much else in common. As an art teacher from Russellville, Arkansas, the daugther of a beautician and a man who drove heavy farming equipment, Norris's world was too special and isolated for her to have been intimidated by Mailer's. She had grown up wearing mouton coats and being a football sweetheart; she'd married young, had Matthew, then divorced her husband, Larry Norris, " a strange and private person," sometime after he'd come home from Vietnam. "I wasn't insecure and anxious when I first got up here, because in all the parties we went to I didn't know anybody or who they were. In that way, Southerners and New Yorkers are very similar. They both think their worlds are complete. So if I would meet people at parties, to me they were just friends of Norman's and I was glad they liked me. Also, Norman made a point to bring me in. He still does. He'll say to me in the middle of a party, 'Norris, you're the most beautiful woman here.' "
The story of their meeting has been told often; Mailer was visiting an old army friend, Francis Gwaltney, a writer who lived in Russellville, Norris had collaborated on a book with him. "I hear you're having a cocktail party for Norman Mailer," Norris said to his wife. "Well, I'm going to come." Norris showed up wearing "blue jeans and bear-trap sandals that made me about seven feet tall, " and "there was Norman sitting in the window, and when I walked in, there was a kind of halo around him, the way the light was coming in." They were introduced, and Norman just walked away from me. I thought, 'Maybe this guy has a problem with tall women.'" But she was invited to dinner, and after dinner, as they sat on the porch of a local professor's house, "Norman kept coming on to me, telling me how beautiful I was, and I said to him, 'Gee, I always went for a good line if it's presented well,' and Norman really presented it well."
But, says Norris, "after that first dinner I thought,'What a nice man. That's it.' I never thought he would write to me." He did. "The only book I'd ever read of Norman's was Marilyn. And the only reason I read that was because I forgot to send the card back to the Book-of-the-Month Club saying I didn't want the book, it was too expensive. The Russellville library didn't have any of Norman's books. Finally, I found a torn-up copy of The Naked and the Dead at a secondhand-book store. But just after I met Norman for the first time, a huge box arrived. He sent me a crate with all his books i it, every single one. In hardcover, I made this terrible mistake, which was I sat down and read them all at once. It was a really dumb thing to do. I was just overwhelmed." Soon after, Barbara Norris arrived in New York and moved into Fanny Mailer's building. The two became close friends, but "Norman's mother never intruded in our romance." Norris says, "except that she would tell me that she never liked any of Norman's other wives." Mailer's domestic situation was complicated. He was still legally married to Beverly Bentley and also involved with Carol Stevens. "I never pressured him," says Norris. "I had my own apartment--that was a help. I was modeling. I didn't have to." "When Norman met Norris," says Mickey Knox, "that was it. A lot of his past craziness just disappeared." It isn't unusual in the middle of dinner to see Norman Mailer turn his attention momentarily away from his dinner partner to search out Norris, even if it creates a social frisson. "Someone took us to Claus von Bulow's," Mailer says, "and von Bulow put Norris next to him, and me two tables away. What he didn't realize was that he was directly in my line of vision, so as he flirted with Norris I fixed him with an intense stare. The next night, we were at Bill Paley's and the same thing happened except that Paley is much smarter. He placed me so that my back was to him and to Norris and I couldn't see a damn thing that was going on. "Norris has had an immense effect on me, a softening," Mailer says. He once told an interviewer, "You definitely don't want to be loved for your literary fame. Literary fame has very little to do with your daily habits. I mean, finally, you're an animal who goes around, and, finally, you know, has to be liked or disliked as an animal first."
The beautiful young girl just out of princeton is awed to be seated next to Norman Mailer at dinner and isn't quite sure how to make conversation with him, so in full innocence she asks whether he's read a recent interview with William Styron in the Times Book Review. Mailer says that he missed it--"I don't read much of anything when I'm working"--but he begins to reminisce and gives her something quite marvelous to take away. "When Bill and I were young, fiction was everything. The novel, the big novel, the driving force. We all wanted to be Hemingway; he was the clear influence." Mailer pauses and his voice becomes sad. "I don't think the same thing can be said anymore. I don't think my work has inspired any writer, not the way Hemingway inspired me." Mailer believes that he might be an anachronism, a throw-back to a time "when I was at Harvard and the publication of a new novel was an exciting event that everyone anticipated." He says the young men and women he might have inspired had he been born twenty years earlier now want to be screenwriters or reporters. They are children, of TV, a generation whose friendships "break up over movies. I haven't heard two people getting angry at each other because one likes one writer and one another in ten years," Mailer says. He says he is one of the last men who grew up believing "that the most exciting thing I could do with my life is write novels," a passion he shared with other men of his era, Saul Bellow, James Jones, John Cheever, Truman Capote, and a few younger ones, such as John Updike and Phillip Roth. So the promise to cause "a revolution in the consciousness of our times" that Mailer made in Advertisements for Myself is a promise that he will not back away from; he likens his quest to his infant son's scampering across a room in search of an ineffable goal, "perhaps China." " I think it can be dangerous for young writers to be modest when they're young," he says. "I've known a number of truly talented writers who did less than they could have done because they weren't vain and unpleasant enough about their talent. You have to take it seriously. "As this well-weathered veteran, my feeling now is much more that it's silly to start deciding what your major achievement is, because after you're been running for enough years you just don't feel like that. A man who's been practicing denistry for 40 years doesn't say to himself. 'Today I've done the finest extraction I've ever performed.' All he would say is 'This was a pretty good extraction.' "
With age has come the realization that he must be "professional, rather than Faustian," and that no matter what he does "history is even more treacherous and generous and quirky than one's own news, so it's absurd to try to decide what your place in literarture is or even if you have a place." Mailer feels his place will be determined by "what happens in the world. I think the world is sickening and we're going into terrible times, and to the degree to which my prophecies bear fruit--of course. I'm caught in the unhappy position of hoping that I'm wrong; that is, I hope plastic is not as bad as I think it is, or TV, or modern architecture--to the degree I'm wrong about these things my work will have less importance, it will be more of a curiosity." The test will come, says Mailer, in "the secondary work. That is what is so important for a writer's reputation. Does the secondary work last or doesn't it? To the degree that my work becomes prophetic, my reputation will be fortified--it will disappear if I'm not." That same test will make "Saul Bellow's virtues and the virtues of a writer like Updike appear larger. They are writing about substantial matters that tend to change less from generation to generation. Updike is almost not concerned with history; he is always looking for those elements in history that are constant. Saul Bellow sees the world deteriorating, but he really fulminates against it from a position of more or less fixed values. Bellow, I would guess, feels that European culture is perhaps the finest achievement of mankind and it is this that we're destroying. I agree with him. Two thousand years of European history, that's the family heirloom. But for all of the richness of Bellow's work, this is where I find him lacking intellectually; Bellow has no concept of why it is happening. He is just finky about it. He thinks it's awful and that people are stupid, they're degenerating. He just doesn't see the vast engines of destruction. He doesn't understand that totalitarianism is a matter of automatic buttons on TV sets. It's not just a matter of Hitler and the camps of extermination. I thnk Saul Bellow may be marooned too much in the idea of 'Is this good for the Jews?' I think that can destroy a good mind more than anything."
Of all the great themes Mailer has written about, the one he has avoided is the one closest to him, his childhood. "I'm saving it," he says. "My last book. You have to save something for the end. And if I never get to write that book, think how annoyed everybody will be. "I am not a typical Jew," Mailer says, although like most Jewish intellectuals his age he spent his childhood "rejecting Jewishness at a great rate." But he was typical in that he had a strong mother, to whom he gives a great deal of credit. "There have been two writers, Truman Capote and myself, who have had a very special development--we were both famous very early. Capote is wrecked now, but he didn't have a good Jewish mother, and that's half of it." Mailer's biographer sketched his parents in stereotypical terms: Fanny Mailer, primevil force, who doted on her son; Barney Mailer, a weak, scholarly luftmensch. "There were no shadings to it," Mailer says. "And there was an assumption that I make pilgrimages to my mother in order to keep my sanity. It's not like that at all." In fact, he says, "my father was an elegent, impoverished figure out of Chekhov." He was "a dapper gentleman in a bewildering world, a man of such sentimentality that phrases like 'the passing parade' would always bring tears to his eyes. He was marvelously involved in himself. So involved that when he would write me a letter in college it would be fourteen pages long, but the first ten would be concerned with the curious sentiments he felt in himself starting to write a letter to his son. He was always analyzing his own emotions at all times. He played a shell game. What he talked about never had anything to do with what he was really feeling." Mailer's voice, with its undertone of Oxbridge, is a direct legacy from Barney Mailer's South African accent, as is what he calls "that baroque element in my style, the sidewinder in me. That all comes from my father in some funny way." Barney Mailer's family moved from Lithuania to South Africa when he was boy; he trained as an accountant, served in the British army, arrived in America for a visit, and fell in love. The Mailers were married for life, "but they couldn't pass a bowl of soup to one another without spilling it," their son says. "My mother was fierce, she's loyal, but if I didn't mind her, I would have argued with her every day of my life. She's got a mind that could send you climbing up the wall. She is absolutely literal. She doesn't have a teaspoon of metaphysics in her, not a gnat's wing of mysticism." An incident occurred when Mailer was thirteen: "I was to be bar mitzvahed at the best temply my parents could aspire to, which was hardly a number-one temple, even for Brooklyn, CongregationSharei Zedek. I had a marvelous old Hebrew schoolteacher. He was a Marxist. Looking back on it, he was probably a Communist--I didn't know at the time. We were immensely poor, although my family was nothing if they didn't have middle-class pretensions. A relative had to come through with the gift so I was able to have the bar mitzvah party; it was all pretty desperate stuff. So nobody ever paid attention to the speech I was giving. It was taken for granted that I would give one of those pious, wonderful speeches that boys of thirteen give. But my Hebrew teacher smuggled in a terffic line. I stood up and I said, 'May I follow in the footsteps of great Jews like Moses, Maimonides, and Karl Marx.' There were all my wealthy relatives in their fur boas, and I saw this sort of shift in the animals, and the rabbi looked very pale. Well, I didn't know. I'd heard of Moses; the other two were somewhat strange to me. Years later, when I asked my mother about the incident, she gave me one of her odd little smiles, which means she's not going to tell me anything, but I knew what it was. She didn't care what the guy ended up doing--if he was famous and Jewish, that was good enough for her."
Fanny Mailer's determination kept the family going when "we were dead broke," Mailer says. After his father lost his job, it was his mother who took over, running an oil-delivery business. "My mother had a way of driving my father," Mailer says. "He'd go out looking for work and when he came home we'd throw our arms around him--I was about six and my sister two--and my mother would say, 'Ask Daddy if he a job today.' He would shake his head sadly night after night." Her redemption came later. "When I published The Naked and the Dead, " Mailer says, "my mother hit the stratospheres of motherly pride and hasn't come down since. The joke I always make to her face is that if I took a tommy gun and shot up hundreds of people in a shopping mall, she would say, "They must have said something truly awful to him.'"
Ancient Evenings began as the saga of the Mailer family, specifically "back in Russia with my grandfather as I imagined him." Mailer studied Hebrew for a year and was set up to write about life in the ghetto when he came upon the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer. "I thought, 'Oh, Lord, there is absolutely no need for this book,' " Meanwhile, the rumors had already started--Mailer, it was said, would be writing about a Jewish family in the time of the pyramids, the Mailer family. "That was all factoidal and to an advanced degree," Mailer says. Inspired by Andre Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the lust, Mailer's plan had been to telescope centuries of history, "I'd reach a chapter of H.G. Wells on ancient Egypt, and I was kind of taken with it, and my idea was I would start in Egypt and then go on to the Greeks and the Romans and acquire all that classical culture and have a marvelous time, taking it right to the present. I know that sounds unhinged." Mailer buried himself in research, read 100 books, inhaled The Book of the Dead, a classic work of Egyptology, and "didn't come up for air for a year." But when he finally did, he understood he would have to forget his plan to telescope history, that it would be Egypt and only Egypt that would concern him, however long it took. It had taken eleven years. During those years Mailer completed three other books, including The Executioner's Song. "I must say there was one bit of amusement that gave pleasure to many a day," Mailer says. "I thought, 'My literary betters are really going to have a tough time showing how I'm a journalist on this one.' " For centuries, the behemouth of ancient Egypt has attracted, and often confounded, great writers from Shakespeare to Lawrence Durrell. Flaubert's Egyptian diaries were a classic of the form, but his attempt to fictionalize his travels in Salammbo was so disastrous that his friend Louis Bouilhet, after reading his manuscript, advised him, "Burn it." The inscrutable gods of the Nile did not deter Mailer. He was determined "to try to recapture the past in a certain way that hasn't been done, not even by historical novelists. I wanted everyone to lose the sense that they were reading about the past; I wanted it to be as palpable as our own present." Mailer visited Egypt only once, in 1974. The trip was unsuccessful: The Israeli-Egyptian war was just over, and Cairo was a war zone, the Nile closed to barge traffic. Mailer's only route to the pyramids was by car. "We arrived at the Mena House, where Churchill used to stay, and I discovered that now it was goddamn motel they had redone with a huge swimming pool and people staying there who looked like rejects from the Mudd Club." Worse, climbing the pyramids was forbidden, so Mailer had "to bribe a guide. At 6 A.M., there we were, racing up these pyramids trying to beat the cops before they came and clubbed this poor guide to death. I always thought when I got up to the top of the pyramids I would have an epiphany, but just as I got to the top, heaving and panting, my vision blurred, there were the smoke plumes of the police coming through the desert, so we had to race down just as the cops got around the bend. "That was all of Egypt," Mailer says. "I thought, 'I've got to get out of here or I'll never write this book.' "
All his life, Norman Mailer has functioned best when he was convinced he was struggling: to pay his debts, to assuage his unconsious, as he puts it, or to solve a demanding problem of craft. Ancient Evenings was particularly hard for Mailer because during the writing of it he was afflicted with all three troubles--a desperate need for money, unrequited inspiration, and a technical problem. "I hever was certain I would finish Ancient Evenings until I did. It was so difficult, the most difficult book I ever tackled. The choices were so many. That's why I never take Tom Wolfe seriously when he talks about the New Journalism as a higher form that the novel, because finally in the New Journalism your plot is handed to you, and once it is, you can concentrate on the writing. Plot is what drives me up the wall. The choices your characters have, the wrong choices they can make. I've had that experience in The Deer Park and in Barbary Shore, and it frightened me for life." Some years ago, Mailer was interviewed by the editors of The Paris Review. " Whenever you get into real trouble, " he said, "the thing that can save you as a novelist is to have enough craft to be able to keep warm long enough to be rescued....Craft protects one from facing those endlessly expanding realities of deterioration and responsbility." "Deterioration in what sense?" the interviewer asked him. "The terror, let's say, of being reborn as something much less noble or something much more ignoble. I think this sort of terror depresses us profoundly." A few years later, Mailer would be working on his eleventh book, The Armies of the Night, but still he had to dwell in the abyss, to act as he had in his early years, "enormously paranoid...as if the apocalypse was coming in a year or two." Mailer says his apocalyptic attitude might have something to do with his early fame. "Being a professional writer and being successful are the same to me. If you arrive at age 30 or 35 or 40, you can say, 'Before success' and 'After success,' but the only book I wrote before I became successful was The Naked and the Dead, and I would have been in trouble even if it hadn't been successful, because I put everything I knew about life into that book. I had to start over for the next. As a farmer, I would have been dreadful. I would have just scourged the fields. Each book was an attempt to throw a brickbat into the face of the enemy, whoever the enemy was. "It's only been in recent years that I've begun to think of pacing myself and having a literary career," he says. "I've been thinking a lot about John Updike in the past few months because his history is the exact opposite of mine. If ever there was a career where a man knew he had a fine talent and he had to protect it and work at it carefully, his is it. I think one of the reasons for his vast popularity now is because he's a lonely example of someone who had a fine talent and nurtured it. In this time of immense distraction, anyone who can truly exercise craft is to be admired." But Updike fastidious example does not make Norman Mailer feel he has "lived the wrong life, that I should have stayed married to one woman. That would be like saying I should have been a Wasp. Updike's life is just another life; he might as well have been a French writer as far as I'm concerned. I don't say to myself that Garcia Marquez lived a more sensible life than I did because he stayed close to the people. He had a people to stay close to. I don't."
It is late in Brooklyn Heights, and everyone is tried; Norman Mailer is just back from Paris and Mitterrand's conference, Norris Mailer has spent the day moving out of her studio, John Buffalo is fighting sleep, Danielle and Betsy load the dishwasher. For Mailer, the day has brought an unpleasant advance notice of Ancient Evenings in Kirkus Reviews, a book-trade publication, Norris is worried about being able to afford a new work space, and Danielle and Betsy complain about finding decent men to go out with. Mailer is hovering around the kitchen, taking various photographs off the walls, reminiscing about certain special times, when his glance falls upon a collage he made years ago. His assemblage features a photograph of Hemingway, bearded and gray, as round as a stevedore, posed beneath a moose head with an enormous antler span. Just under the moose, Mailer glued a picture of himself, age 25, a skinny kid with a frizzy pomppadour and ears out to Brooklyn, snapped at the very moment in 1948 he had come back from Paris, a celebrity-to-be, his accolades, criticism, awards, brawls, drinking, drugs, wives, children, excess, and immense discipline all ahead of him. "Look at that picture," Mailer says. "God, how thin I was. Isn't it strange, I've grown into Hemingway's body. I think he was 60 in that photograph, too. How strange, how damn strange."
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Citation
Brenner, Marie. “Mailer Goes Egyptian.” New York, 28 March 1983, 28-38. Reprinted by permission of Marie Brenner. (83.13)