“I had to go to Yugoslavia for some reason,” Schiller said, “but on the way to Yugoslavia, I stop to see Norman in London.” This was not happenstance. Schiller had purposely flown via London instead of Frankfurt so that he could see Mailer, who was there acting in Milos Forman’s Ragtime. Five months earlier, in July 1980, NBC had signed an agreement with Schiller to produce and direct a television miniseries based on The Executioner’s Song and had insisted that he sign Tracy Keenan Wynn to write the script. Wynn had many film and television credits, and a few years earlier had won an Emmy for his adaptation of Ernest Gaines’s novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. “Take your four million dollars,” the executives told Schiller, “and go make your film.” Schiller had a problem, however.
Mailer had been his first choice to write the screenplay, but both CBS and ABC, where Schiller had good relationships, didn’t want Mailer because he had never had a script produced. Schiller then went to movie studios, and they accepted Mailer as the first draft writer (mainly because all screenplays are rewritten), but they didn’t think Schiller had the requisite experience to direct a feature film. “I realized then that, you know, no way was this deal ever going to be made with both of us together,” Schiller said. Next, he tried NBC where the new president of the entertainment division, Brandon Tartikoff, was revamping programming and taking chances. He liked the proposed miniseries. Nick Nolte was the first choice to play Gilmore, and Priscilla Presley as Nicole; (ultimately the roles went to Tommy Lee Jones and Rosanna Arquette). Schiller called Mailer and told him that he was going with Wynn and NBC. “You’ve written the book and won your Pulitzer, and now it’s time for me to tell the story my way.” Mailer didn’t argue, Schiller said.
At lunch with Mailer and Norris in London in December, Schiller knew Mailer would ask about Wynn’s script. Schiller said that it was a fine adaptation, but not exciting. Not much else was said, and Schiller left for Yugoslavia. In February 1981, Schiller received a script in the mail from Mailer, written on spec. Schiller liked it enough to send it to NBC. It seemed nearly the same as Wynn’s, but there were subtle changes, lines shuffled or dropped, and some additions. Schiller explained.
With every single character in Mailer’s version, the dialogue defines the character. I just couldn’t believe it. “I don’t give a shit about your pants”—that line defines Brenda right off the bat. In Mailer’s scene that was the first line. Tracy used the same thing, but it was the third line in his scene. By the time you got to that line, its power was dissipated.
NBC also liked the script. “It was just different,” an NBC vice president stated. “It had a different tone.” Schiller had already paid Wynn, and when NBC accepted Mailer’s version, he had to pay Mailer $250,000.
The question of who should get the screen credit was contested and went to the Writers Guild for arbitration. Mailer had not read Wynn’s script, and wrote a brief letter to the guild that attempted to prove it. His argument was that anyone who wrote a script based on the book would have to depict the same key events and characters. He explained it this way.
If two people are driving from San Luis Obispo to San Francisco following the coastal road, they’re likely to stop at the same roadhouses en route, they’re likely to sleep at the same inns and so forth and so forth and so forth. And that book had a clearly marked line of narrative, if ever a book did and, therefore, if you’re going to do a script with it, you’d be following the book. So we each were following the book very closely. The difference was that I felt that I knew the book in a way that no one else did.
The guild’s judgment was based on reading the two scripts with the writers’ names coded, Writer A and Writer B. Besides the subtleties of characterization, Mailer’s script also contained, according to Schiller, new scenes drawn from the original interviews and research, material not used in the book. His familiarity with this material was an obvious advantage, and the guild awarded him sole screenplay credit. Wynn accepted the ruling. Mailer, rankled by the rejection of his screenplay by Sergio Leone five years earlier, felt vindicated.
He was also working intermittently on Strawhead, his play about Marilyn Monroe. Ancient Evenings was still a long way from completion, but first he had to finish work on his new collection, divided into a dozen essays and prefaces (Pieces) and twenty interviews (Pontifications). His reflections on television, “Of a Small and Modest Malignancy,” his comic memoir of The Harvard Advocate, “Our Man at Harvard,” and his essay on Watergate, “A Harlot High and Low,” were the key writings. The interview section included a 1975 interview with Laura Adams on reincarnation and magic. This interview, one of Mailer’s most important, contains a long discussion of his belief in magic, something he was exploring in Ancient Evenings. The four-hundred-page collection, which he dedicated to his sister, appeared on June 21, 1982, not long after Abbott was sentenced. The timing did not help the book’s reception, which was quiet and mixed.
Pieces and Pontifications, Mailer’s fifth miscellany, is a product of the 1970s, when he “was much out of step.” Besides dropping the third person personal and shifting focus away from himself, he had withdrawn from politics to a great extent after the 1972 election. Lucid put his finger on Mailer’s malaise in the decade: he spent his first twenty years as a writer “envisioning and anticipating moments of climactic crisis,” in his personal life, in politics and culture, and sometimes all three, overlapping. “But always the crisis was about to happen. Always our situation was before. The 1970s represented after. The counter-culture was over. The war in Vietnam was over.” One world was dying and a new one had not yet been born.
He ends his review by noting that The Executioner’s Song was “the first child” of the new time, the first reimagining. While the film version (broadcast in November 1982) did not enjoy the huge popularity of the book, it was deemed a success by the critics and the television audience, garnering the highest rating for an NBC program in fifteen months. It was nominated for five Emmys, including one for Mailer’s adaptation. It won two, one for sound production and one for Tommy Lee Jones as best actor. The film led to a directorial career for Schiller and was a breakthrough for Jones. Mailer’s achievement whetted his desire to write more screenplays and to try his hand again as director.
THROUGH ALL THIS period, from the publication of Executioner’s Song, through his divorces and marriage to Norris, Abbott’s release and Adan’s death, work on Strawhead, Pieces and Pontifications, and the teleplay of Song, Mailer had slighted his patient literary spouse, the Egyptian novel, working on it only sporadically. But in the summer of 1982, Little, Brown was pressing him. As he wrote to a writer friend, the prospect of trying to write several hundred more pages of Ancient Evenings in a short period was “a perfect expression of my character: work ten years with great care on something, and then arrange matters so that I have to sprint at the end.” He worked all summer in Provincetown and Maine. Barbara and Al visited, and Susan came with his first grandchild, Valentina. Unlike previous summers, several of the children were either traveling or working and the house was not always full. In the fall he finally finished the novel, completing the last revision of the galleys in early December. He announced the end in a long letter to his old friend Richard Stratton. “I really need another year to get this behemoth into classic shape for the ages,” he said, but further delay was out of the question. He felt he had realized his goal of re-creating for the reader
some possible Egyptian society, full of its pagan, sacramental sophistication, a world without Moses or Jesus, but stacked with acquisitive and elegant society—quite a trick, I tell you—for eleven years I’ve been fumbling around in it, but now, going over it for this last time, I begin to recognize how much of me is in it and in ways too deep for even me to understand. My sister after reading it laughed and said, “You know, in a funny way, this is the best argument for karma I’ve ever come across.” How could [you] ever know all this stuff if you didn’t live then was what she said finally by implication.
Little, Brown set publication for April 4, 1983, to be followed by the novel’s appearance in England in late May.
Mailer’s letter to Stratton reached him in Portland, Maine, where he was awaiting trial on charges of drug smuggling. A raid by an American-Canadian drug enforcement team in March 1982, “Operation Rose,” led to the arrest of Stratton and fourteen others in Maine, Quebec, and Toronto. The drugs, smuggled in from Beirut, had a street value of $30 million, and Canadian authorities said the thirty-six-year-old Stratton was the boss of “the largest hashish and marijuana smuggling ring ever to be broken” in that country. Stratton denied the charges, stating that he was researching a book about the international drug trade. The end point for the drugs—2,500 pounds were seized—was Robert Rowbotham, a friend of Stratton’s whom Mailer had testified for at an earlier drug trial in Toronto. (Rowbotham was running his drug operation from prison). Stratton admitted receiving approximately $200,000 from Rowbotham, which he said was payment for a biography of the marijuana guru, nicknamed “Rosie.”
A few days after telling Stratton that he would be a character witness for him at his upcoming trial, Mailer got a call from Buzz Farbar, who had been working as a money courier for Stratton, to set up a lunch date. On December 9, Mailer met him at a Brooklyn restaurant, Armando’s, on Montague Street. He had no way of knowing that three weeks earlier Farbar had been arrested at gunpoint for paying $24,000 for a kilo of what he thought was cocaine from an undercover DEA agent, Martin McGuire. Within ten minutes of his arrest at his New York apartment, McGuire said to him, “We know your friend Mailer is involved.” The feds had “a serious hard-on” for Mailer, Stratton said. “After Mailer had testified at the Rowbotham trial, up in Canada,” Stratton recalled, “they broke into Norman’s place in Brooklyn and rifled through his stuff, found a couple of ounces of pot, and left it right in the middle of the bed as a kind of sign or warning. We’re watching you, Mailer.”
It was Farbar who, unwittingly, had made Mailer a DEA target. In 1981, he had organized a dinner party for “my heavy connections in Beirut,” as Stratton described them, and the Mailers. “Buzz was showing off,” Stratton said. As Stratton was to learn, the Lebanese were cooperating with American authorities, and his arrest, and later Farbar’s, resulted from information they had provided. The DEA busted Farbar, but they wanted Mailer, Stratton said.
It was a time when John DeLorean had been set up in that sting operation in Los Angeles. John Lennon had been busted. They were making drug cases against famous people to discredit them. It was propaganda in the war on drugs. They figured that Mailer’s scalp would’ve been great to have on somebody’s belt. He was already a government target for a lot of other reasons, because he was so vocally critical of the government. And people listened to Norman, particularly a generation of young people who were already fed up with the lies our government was telling us about Vietnam, pot, and what have you.
The DEA had given Farbar a lie detector test and asked him if Mailer had invested in the hashish deal. He denied it. “We know you’ve been lying,” he was told. “You have a family on the one hand, and Mailer on the other. One will have to go.” Knowing that Mailer was innocent, Farbar agreed to wear a recorder at his lunch with him. As instructed, Farbar brought up Stratton’s hashish smuggling. Mailer indicated that he didn’t want to talk about it. Farbar persisted and an irritated Mailer told him to stop. “I’m possibly going to be testifying at Richard’s trial as a character witness, and I certainly don’t want to get into a situation where I’m going to be in jeopardy of perjury.” He went on to say that Stratton was a great friend, but he didn’t know much about his background; he knew him as a writer. Farbar kept pressing. “I’ve never had anything to do with the drug business,” Mailer said. “I don’t want to hear nothing about Richard, all right?” Farbar said that he had brought up the subject out of concern for Mailer. “I’ll worry about my own ass in my own way,” Mailer replied. When the DEA agents heard the recording, they said the conversation appeared to have been rehearsed, and Farbar was convicted and sentenced to six years for hashish smuggling, a harsh sentence for a first offender.
Dick and Doris Kearns Goodwin were old friends of Stratton’s, and they attended his trial. She and Mailer testified to his literary abilities. But he was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in federal prison. Stratton was on his way to the penitentiary, ready to do his time. But the federal drug prosecutors hadn’t given up on nailing Mailer. They pulled Stratton off the bus in New York and told him they were going to try him under the continuing criminal enterprise, or “Kingpin,” statute. He met the prosecutor, who, according to Stratton, said in effect, Give us Mailer, and you’ll walk. They were also interested in Hunter Thompson, a noted drug user, and a few other high-profile figures. “I refused to cooperate with the government. I figured, I did this, let me pay for it.” Mailer was not permitted by Judge Constance Baker Motley to testify at Stratton’s trial. She sentenced Stratton to an additional ten years with no possibility of parole, basing this extraordinarily long sentence on his refusal to cooperate. Stratton later wrote his own appeal, which argued that individuals can only be sentenced for their crimes, not for refusing to implicate others. The courts agreed with his appeal, and he was released after eight years. Farbar got out after forty-six months.
To the surprise of some of Mailer’s friends, he did not break with Farbar. “I figure some dealer was throwing my name around in an attempt to impress people,” Mailer said. “The feds must have heard it on somebody’s wiretap. You could smell their lust from here to Laos.” Asked if he was angry at Farbar, he said, “There was a squeeze on Buzz of a horrendous sort. He was trying to protect his family. If I had been in the same situation, what would I have done?” He visited Farbar and Stratton in prison, and wrote to them regularly.
He did not visit Abbott, but he continued to write to him for several years, and sent him books, as did Robert Silvers. Mailer encouraged Abbott to write, sending him some of William Burroughs’s novels. He put others in touch with Abbott, including his friend, Mashey Bernstein, who corresponded with Abbott about Judaism. The biggest obstacle you face, Mailer wrote Abbott, “is that the past draws you back like a magnet and you get so sorrowful and so enraged and so bilious, so incoherent with rage, and so vengeful and so mournful and so contrite and so proud and so much this and so much that that you can’t think straight.” His own troubles, Mailer said, “are on the other side. With rare exceptions, the past has lost its vividness for me, so I feel these days as if I’m writing with an empty gut.”
Fig Gwaltney, the army buddy at whose house he had met Norris, had died a year earlier. Mailer had promised his wife, Ecey, that he would come to Arkansas in March 1983, give a talk, and donate the honorarium to a scholarship in his memory. Fig was his oldest friend, and although they had not seen each other recently, Mailer remembered his loyalty. A few days after writing Ecey, he turned sixty. He said, “Fifty caused a long, continuous woe. Fifty had an awful sound to it. Worse than 60. Sixty feels all right. Forty felt great. Thirty felt lousy. Maybe I’ve just got something against odd numbers. Maybe at 70 I’ll go into a tailspin.” In fact, his next decade, while not free of difficulties, would be one of his happiest.
HE HAD BEEN paid handsomely for Ancient Evenings, but the money was gone and he was again in arrears to the IRS. In mid-January he flew to Boston to try to renegotiate his contract with Little, Brown. He had already received $1.4 million, and the contract called for an additional $2.5 million for the final two novels of the trilogy, but the executives were not eager to advance much of this sum until they knew the sales of Ancient Evenings. They were fearful, Mailer said, of losing three quarters of what had already been advanced. The contract also called for a short novel to be delivered in the fall of 1983. Having pushed back deadline after deadline for him over the past decade, Little, Brown was insistent that he meet this one. But before he could begin thinking seriously about this new novel, he had to go on a very demanding tour for the current one. Mailer had stated publicly that the Egyptian novel was his masterwork, and he intended to take every opportunity to hold forth on its merits.
His first big outing for the book was at the Lotos Club in New York on January 28, a luncheon meeting with six out-of-town book editors. Mailer was expansive on his research for the book, citing Budge’s edition of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of prayers belonging “to an infinitely remote and primeval time.” These prayers were painted and inscribed on the tomb walls and sarcophagi of the wealthy, written on papyri placed in their coffins, and also on the narrow linen bandages that swathed the remains. “Properly uttered,” Budge wrote, these prayers “enabled the deceased to overcome every foe and to attain the life of the perfected soul” in Aaru, the abode of the blessed. Those souls virtuous enough to traverse the Land of the Dead, the Duad, would enjoy unspeakable eternal happiness in the company of numerous gods and goddesses, and ride in the Boat of Ra pulling the sun through the heavens. There is no definitive version of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, or even complete agreement about the nature of the Duad and Aaru. The possibility of the soul expiring after the body, however, was accepted dogma. The Egyptian belief in a possible second death “had huge interest for me,” Mailer said, “because I’d really been writing about that in one way or another for a long time.” Gary Gilmore’s desire to protect his soul by sacrificing his body is one instance. Rojack’s similar fear in An American Dream is another. At the luncheon Mailer also mentioned Flinders Petrie, a pioneering Egyptologist, who in 1896 discovered a stele or monument stone, on which a pharaonic victory over a tribe from Israel is recorded, the first mention of that nation in an ancient Egyptian record. Moses’s revolt in Egypt is noted in passing in the novel. Using a dictionary compiled by Budge, Mailer began learning hieroglyphics, but found it too difficult. What fascinated him was its dialectical nature, how “words often reverse themselves in different contexts,” an existential language.
The editors asked if he had read Vidal’s novel Creation, about ancient Greece and Persia, and he said no. “Gore and I are always working in terribly different directions.” Vidal is a rationalist and an atheist, he said, and comparatively speaking, I am “a diabolist and mystic.” Mailer’s protagonist, Menenhetet I, is a magus who seeks the links between the high and the low, excelsior and excrement. As Robert Begiebing notes in his study of the novel, in Menenhetet’s Egypt, “there is no clear division between the sacred and the secular, no desacralization of the world.” For the Egyptians, “death is risky and adventurous,” he says, and “the debts and wastes of one’s life carry significance beyond earthly existence.” The appeal of such a belief system to Mailer was powerful. He had also avoided Vidal’s novel because he wanted to keep his rational side on short rations during the Egyptian excursion. “Gore is not the worst writer in the world,” Mailer told the editors. “He can even be delightful and he can be seductive.” His anger with Vidal appeared to be subsiding.
The editors also asked if he was making oblique statements about American imperialism or American class structure in the new novel. “I’ve spent my writing life trying to understand America,” he said, and this novel was an attempt “to try and get some idea of what life was like before anything we know,” before the Judeo-Christian tradition. Over and over during the book tour he was asked if he had allegorical or symbolic intentions linking ancient Egypt and contemporary America. “Piety and snobbery,” Mailer said, are the only traits that existed in both ancient Egypt and the modern world. Going to Egypt, he said, was “pure escapism.” More than one critic compared Ancient Evenings to Salammbô, Flaubert’s novel set in third century B.C. Carthage. Both are bloody, bawdy, and exotic, and both were published shortly after works of excruciating realism—Madame Bovary and The Executioner’s Song.
One of the earliest inspirations for the novel, he said, was André Schwarz-Bart’s novel The Last of the Just, which begins with the Crusades and ends in the Nazi death camps. He was impressed by how the novel moved swiftly through a dozen or more Jewish cultures. “I thought that I would take a character, start in Egypt, have him reborn in Greece, then Rome, then somewhere in the Middle Ages, and so forth,” following Schwarz-Bart’s example. But Mailer was unable to make the leap after he got enmeshed in the fascinating beliefs and practices of the ancient Egyptians. He was, for example, deeply attentive to the fact that a dung beetle had been deified as Khepera, the god who propelled the Boat of Ra out of the Duad in the morning, and pushed it below the horizon at night. For decades he had been fascinated with magic and had read widely in works such as Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Lynn Thorndike’s eight-volume History of Magic and Experimental Science, both of which he owned. Ancient Egypt, a culture saturated in magic for thousands of years, was the perfect place for him to explore his interests. He was fascinated, he said, by “the substitution of magic for technology” in Egyptian life. “As you start getting into it, the problems they solved with their magic were about as cock-eyed and absurd as the problems we solve with our technology.” When asked what Ancient Evenings was about, he often said, it’s “a novel about magic.”
He followed his sources with modest rigor. Professor David B. O’Connor, an Egyptologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that he enjoyed the novel because “Mailer had so well grasped the cultural and historical thrust of ancient Egypt,” despite a few errors. The largest of these, as Mailer readily admitted, the practice of telepathy, was never part of Egyptian belief. Several of his characters send and receive mental messages, and Mailer argued later that at some point in the distant past, before the Egyptians, humans had the power of telepathy. But in modern times, he speculated, “the amount of electromagnetic disturbance all our machines make, particularly our communication machines, has polluted whatever that ring is around the earth that transmits messages.” He based this belief, in part, on the fact that dogs never watch television. “I think,” he said (remembering the clairvoyant Tibo), “they live in so complete a telepathic framework that the set communicates nothing to them.” Such were the wrinkles in the mind of the novelist at sixty.
The earliest excerpt (published in The Paris Review, four months before the novel was released) is also the one he read to audiences for decades. It comes from the first book (of seven) in the novel, “The Book of One Man Dead,” and is a description of the embalming of Menenhetet’s great-grandson Menenhetet II (called Meni), who died in a drunken brawl at the age of twenty-one. All the sensuous particularities of the embalming process, including the removal of the inner organs, which are sealed in canopic jars and accompany the Remains, the Sekhu, on their final journey, are rendered by Meni himself, the embalmee.
Somewhere in those first few days they made an incision in the side of my belly with a sharp flint knife—I know how sharp for even with the few senses my Remains could still employ, a sense of sharpness went through me like a plow breaking ground, but sharper, as if I were a snake cut in two by a chariot wheel, and then began the most detailed searching. It is hard to describe, for it did not hurt but I was ready in those hours to think of the inside of my torso as common to a forest in a grove, and one by one trees were removed, their roots disturbing veins of rock, their leaves murmuring. I had dreams of cities floating down the Nile like floating islands. Yet when the work was done, I felt larger, as if my senses now lived in a larger space.
The embalming tent was “no bloody abattoir,” Meni recalls, but a “herb kitchen” where his body cavity is cleansed and soothed.
Over time, Meni’s senses become confused; he hears odors, smells colors—synesthesia—and then his consciousness dims as his Sekhu, held down by weights, renders up its moisture in a bath of natron, a salt mixture found in the dry lake beds of Egypt. After seventy days, “I became hard as the wood of a hull, then hard as the rock of the earth, and felt the last of me depart to join my Ka, my Ba, and my fearsome Khaibit.” His aural faculty, the last to go, finally departs, and his Sekhu changes into something rich and strange, “like one of those spiraled chambers of the sea that is thrown up on the beach, yet contain the roar of waters when you hold them to your ear.” Entombed, his Sekhu becomes “part of the universe of the dumb.” The remaining six parts of his being, borrowed mainly from Budge, are: Ka (double); Ba (essential personality); Ren (secret name); Sekhem (soul or vital energy); Khu (guardian angel); and Khaibit (shadow). Mailer introduced these “lights and forces” of the Soul at the beginning of the novel to show the complexity of Egyptian belief, using the terms in the conversations of his major characters, sophisticated and wealthy Egyptians versed in magic and religion—two sides of the same coin for them.
Those of his friends and family who heard him read the embalming scene more than a few times became familiar with the characteristics he would repeat. His secretary, Judith McNally, who typed large portions of the novel and is thanked in the acknowledgments, knew Egyptian myth and lore nearly as well as her boss. An adherent of Wicca, Judith had a black cat named Khaibit.
Experts have not found fault with Mailer’s religious explications nor his vivid retelling of the foundational myth—the story of Osiris and Isis. Told in the gloom of the tomb by the Ka of Menenhetet to the Ka of Meni in the novel’s second book, “The Book of the Gods,” it derives in uncertain percentages from various accounts of this magnificent story of the Egyptian gods in their primal years. “In this telling,” reviewer Benjamin DeMott said, the myth “is made utterly new.” Mailer combines episodes from different sources, adds flourishes of his own, and allows Meni to ask his great-grandfather questions that clarify, heighten interest, and provide breathing spaces. The interaction of teller and tale adds immeasurably to the richness of the telling, allowing the reader to share the thrill of discovery felt by Meni.
DURING THE YEARS he spent writing Ancient Evenings, 1972–82, Mailer gave several important print interviews, but he also turned down many and was chary about talking about his novel in progress. But in the months before and after the novel appeared, his reticence ended. He gave more than fifty interviews in 1983. The media campaign for the novel exceeded those for all his earlier books, but he told one interviewer that too much visibility is worse than too little. Authors who have good sales “get very little personal publicity. We don’t read much about Saul Bellow, John Updike.” He admitted that he had lost the battle with those who carved nasty messages on the sarcophagus of his legend. “So I’ve just said the hell with it.” He often likened his clip file to the tail of a dinosaur. Collectively, the reviews for Ancient Evenings were worse than those received by any of his books since the 1950s. In The New York Times Book Review, DeMott called the novel “a disaster.” Several reviewers—notably Vance Bourjaily, Richard Poirier, Barry Leeds, Christopher Ricks, Anthony Burgess, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, and his former Harvard professor Robert Gorham Davis—reviewed Ancient Evenings positively but, with the exception of Ricks, seasoned their admiration with reservations and puzzlements. The words “audacious,” “paradoxical,” “demanding,” and “risky” recur in these reviews, as well as a general lack of enthusiasm for the novel’s many anal, fecal, and incestuous events, and the swarm of olfactory clues that accompany them—Ancient Evenings rivals An American Dream in this regard. Menenhetet supping on a paste made from bat dung to learn its healing powers is noted by many reviewers; it emerges as the touchstone of Mailer’s outré preoccupations. To fully understand the deadly contest of Ahab and the White Whale, one must labor through the cetology chapters of Moby-Dick; to completely grasp the meanings of Menenhetet’s and Meni’s harrowing journeys in the afterlife, one must be immersed in its abominations.
Those reviewers who liked parts of the novel almost always point to the retelling of the Osiris-Isis myth, which Mailer believed could be published as a separate narrative. The Battle of Kadesh, another favorite, could also stand alone. The defeat of the Hittites and their mercenaries by the invading army of Ramses II takes up all of “The Book of the Charioteer,” a 150-page tour de force that is the narrative heart of the novel. The barge trip down the Nile to Memphis in northern Egypt, composed, no doubt, with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at hand, is also cited as one of the novel’s most splendidly imagined passages. But it is the chariot battle that stands out.
Commentators often point to the complicated way the story is narrated. It is not told by an anonymous narrator as in The Executioner’s Song, but by the Ka of Meni, who, while conversing with his great-grandfather’s Ka in the Great Pyramid, remembers a night fifteen years earlier, a night of dusk-to-dawn storytelling. Menenhetet, however, is the chief storyteller, and most of that ancient evening (and most of the novel) is given to his recounting of his extraordinarily long life, or lives—he has lived four—as they recline in the pharaoh’s sumptuous garden lit by thousands of captured fireflies. Meni is clairvoyant and when Menenhetet pauses in his tale, or holds something back, Meni knows it, and also knows what others are thinking as well. His mother and great-grandfather share this ability. It is the voice of Menenhetet, however, that we hear most, relayed to us by Meni. As Poirier noted, Mailer had “a felt need to justify in some way the telling of story,” and resorted to this awkward provenance. The overlay of voices is strained and confusing—Mailer said later that “the transitions of the narrator’s voice were the hardest” challenge he faced—but he was wed from the outset to his nested voices.
Menenhetet is sixty when he tells his stories in the pharaoh’s garden, the same age as Mailer when the novel was published. He denied, repeatedly and unconvincingly, that he was writing about himself in any important way. When his sister told him that it was his most autobiographical novel but couldn’t decide whether he was Menenhetet or Ramses, “he said with uncustomary modesty, ‘More like Ramses IX.’ ” He did not deny, however, that his protagonist’s many careers—charioteer, harem master, high priest, tomb robber, brothel keeper, papyrus merchant, speculator in necropolis sites, wealthy noble, and pharmacist-magus—were of special interest. They were. For example, the research of Menenhetet into bat dung aligns with Mailer’s homeopathic explorations in “The Metaphysics of the Belly,” his long self-interview from 1962.
In the last three brief chapters we learn that Menenhetet’s attempts to gain a fifth life have failed. After his Sekhu is buried in his great-grandson’s tomb, their Kas proceed into the Duad. They observe with horror the punishments of those with impure hearts, many of which recall the sufferings of lost souls in Dante’s Inferno—boiling lakes, for example. After his great-grandfather’s Ka, unbidden, merges with his, Meni feels hope. He begins to ascend the “ladder of lights” (as described in the Book of the Dead) “where one might gaze like Osiris upon the portents of all that is ahead.” He receives a message that “purity and goodness were worth less to Osiris than strength” (a restatement of Rojack’s belief that “God is not love but courage”), and Meni has an abundance of it, it seems, for he is welcomed into the Boat of Ra. But then he feels a great pain coming, followed by “the scream of the earth exploding.” The knowledge comes to him that his destiny is to “enter the power of the word,” and to be born again as a storyteller. Ra’s Boat, “washed by the swells of time,” sails away and the novel ends as “past and future come together.”
Mailer intended that “The Boat of Ra,” the second novel of his planned trilogy, would begin with the explosion that concludes Ancient Evenings. In “The Last Night,” his 1963 short story, a lone spaceship is propelled out beyond the sun’s gravity by a series of planned nuclear detonations that destroy the earth, sending “a scream of anguish, jubilation, desperation, terror, ecstasy” across the heavens. Aboard are eighty humans and some animals seeking a new home in distant galaxies. Most of the novel, beginning with this story, would take place aboard the ship. Meni will be aboard, reincarnated in one of the survivors of earth, which has been ravaged by corruption, plagues, and wars. Humans may have been “mismated with earth,” and “the beauty that first gave speech to our tongues commands us to go out and find another world,” one where the power of the word will have primacy. Mailer’s short story ends with “a glimpse of the spaceship, a silver minnow of light, streaming into the oceans of mystery, and the darkness beyond.” A decade later in the mid-1990s, he and Norris would collaborate on several versions of a screenplay based on this story, the last attempt to salvage something of the unwritten trilogy.
The final novel of the three, “Of Modern Times,” would introduce a last reincarnation of Menenhetet-Meni, now known as “Norman Mailer.” After the account of his conception and early years (taken from “The Book of the First-Born”), he would grow into the writer who would write Ancient Evenings, thus completing the circle. Mailer saw that it would be a vainglorious mistake to lay this out when the first novel was published, to reveal that Menenhetet was a fictional forebear or that Meni would fulfill “the power of the word” aboard the spaceship. He also didn’t know if he could pull it off, and as we now know, he could not.
Poirier was astute in ending his review by stating that what undergirded Ancient Evenings was “the desire, once and for all, to claim some ultimate spiritual and cultural status for the teller of tales, the Writer.” Poirier calls it “his most audacious book.” Ricks also found it to be a terrifically risky book, but endorsed Mailer’s gamble by quoting a passage from T. S. Eliot about another risk taker, Harry Crosby, the sun-worshipping American writer and editor who died in a murder-suicide pact in 1929: “Of course one can ‘go too far’ and except in directions in which we can go too far there is no interest in going at all; and only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out just how far one can go.”
Upon publication the novel jumped onto the bestseller list and stayed there for seventeen weeks before dropping off in mid-August. Without having read it, a Swedish publisher paid $100,000 for rights. It went for $120,000 in England. Other foreign editions brought in another half million. The paperback—sold to Warner for $501,000—did even better, reaching number two on the bestseller list the following spring. When income from foreign and subsidiary rights—over $750,000—is added to U.S. sales, the novel “earned out,” recouped its hefty advance.
Mailer’s pride was injured enough by the negative reviews for him to strike back at the novel’s detractors. He assembled negative excerpts from reviews of four of his novel’s major detractors and added to them ripe snippets from rotten reviews of four classic works: Moby-Dick, Anna Karenina, Les Fleurs Du Mal, and Leaves of Grass. Printed on poster board under the headline HIDEOUS REVIEWS, the assemblage was distributed to major bookstores as a counter display. A sampling: Captain Ahab is “a monstrous bore”; Tolstoy’s masterpiece is “sentimental rubbish”; Baudelaire’s poems are “filth and horror”; Leaves of Grass is “a mass of stupid filth.” For Ancient Evenings, he selected Benjamin DeMott’s pronouncement that the novel is a “disaster,” followed by James Wolcott’s “a muddle of incest and strange oaths . . . reducing everything to lewd, godly, bestial grunts”; Rhoda Koenig’s condemnation of “the vanity that permeates the entire work”; and Eliot Fremont-Smith’s summary: “holistic poop.”
The novel’s flaws—a tortured point of view, massive digressions, and the curtailed depiction of Menenhetet’s later lives—are balanced by its strengths, most notably the heroic ethos of the early reign of Ramses II and the story of Isis regenerating Osiris, which prefigures Ramses’ victory at Kadesh. Obscured by the narrative clutter is any clear sense of what critic Robert Begiebing, the novel’s finest interpreter, says is Mailer’s chief theme and “the deepest structural principle” of the novel: “the tragic conflict between vitality and entropy.” Ramses II does not share his victory at Kadesh with his generals, builds monument after monument to his personal glory (Ramses is Ozymandias to the Greeks), and treats his comrade-at-arms, Menenhetet, shamefully. Evil begets evil. “Ramses II,” Begiebing says in summation, “fails to maintain his earlier power as an Osirian king of fertility and civilization whose lands, people, and political systems all depend on him for continuous productivity and harmony.” Except for the brief final chapters, the novel ends bleakly. But Ancient Evenings was only the first phase of the dialectic for Mailer; Purgatorio precedes Paradiso. It seems likely that he planned to demonstrate counterpoint and resolution in the next two novels. We do know, however, that the “The Boat of Ra” would begin at the lowest point of entropy—the destruction of the planet—after which a saving remnant would re-create human life on a new planet. The final novel, “Of Modern Times,” we can speculate, would depict a return to Osirian harmony and vitality.
A year after the novel appeared, Philip Bufithis sent Mailer an essay he had published praising aspects and parts of the novel, especially the opening where Mailer displays a consciousness “not met with in any other fiction. The reader is pulled into the Ka’s strange cares and yearnings as it painfully orients itself to the shock of its nonmortal existence and meets the grim, awesome Ka of Menenhetet.” Bufithis takes reviewers to task for deciding that Ancient Evenings is a study of decadence, instead of recognizing that Mailer is “inveighing against American parochialism” by writing what might be “the most olfactory novel ever written.” It was “his way of assailing America’s ongoing obsession with sanitizing nature out of more and more areas of life.” But he finds fault with the lack of “richness, radiance, and imagination” in many of Mailer’s metaphors, and sees other weaknesses, the most important of which is characterization: “Its people are insufficiently people. They are not felt presences. Their emotions, therefore, seem empty. Graphic and frequent, for example, as the novel’s sexual episodes are, they remain tepid.”
Given Mailer’s belief in the primacy of character over plot in fiction, the essay, coming from Bob Lucid’s former graduate student, must have been painful to read. He wrote back to Bufithis right away, and said that his criticism “is, I fear, all too good. I confess it’s close to my own evaluation of the book when I feel depressed at all. I failed to ignite in every corner of the conception.” Mailer’s candor about a work that he described on publication as “the best book I’ve ever written” may seem extraordinary, but he was keeping faith with the pledge he made forty years earlier in his Harvard journal to probe for and admit to his sins and failures. His views shifted somewhat, however, especially after reading Begiebing’s laudatory essay on the novel, published in 1989. He wrote to him to say that it was “the best thing I’ve read so far on that weighty tome and I was pleased at the thoroughness and insight, and—dare I say it?—the understanding you brought to it.” In later years, when asked to name his best books, as he did on several occasions, Ancient Evenings was usually on the list, along with The Naked and the Dead, An American Dream, The Armies of the Night, The Executioner’s Song, and Harlot’s Ghost.
HOWEVER HAMPERED BY the first person point of view in Ancient Evenings, Mailer was not ready to abandon it. He used the same perspective—minus the telepathy exercised by Meni—in his next novel, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, a murder mystery set in contemporary Provincetown. It is narrated by Tim Madden, a thirty-eight-year-old bartender with literary ambitions who spent three years in prison for selling cocaine. As Mailer explained after completing the novel, the first person was amenable because a good novel, he said, “can come out of the simplicity of an interesting, intelligent voice, full of unexpected turns and agreeable perceptions.” Madden’s colloquial American is welcome after the orotund locutions of Menenhetet. Conversant with literary and philosophical topics, Madden is well traveled on both sides of the tracks. He attends séances, collects coincidences, and is sensitive to the stark beauty of the Provincetown Spit, which he describes as “the fine filigree tip of the Cape [that] curls around itself like the toe of a medieval slipper.” All of his senses are unsheathed, especially his olfactory abilities, which come close to matching those of Menenhetet. His vision is sharp enough to distinguish among the dozen shades of dun in the winter woods of the Cape; and his ears subtle enough to discern “the rustle along the beach that comes with the turning of the tide.” He lives on the water side of Commercial Street in the quiet East End of town (near, therefore, to 627 Commercial Street, the three-story brick house Mailer rented from 1970 to 1972 and purchased in the early 1980s). The house is owned by Madden’s wealthy wife, Patty Lareine, who on the “drear” November morning on which the novel opens, has been gone for twenty-four days. She has left him for a tall, powerful black man, a sexual athlete named Bolo.
Provincetown has a summer crowd of tourists, artists, college kids, a large LGBT contingent, and assorted eccentrics. It’s a party town, but it also has some real history, and its colonial roots are impeccable since the Pilgrims spent three miserable weeks on the dunes near Race Point before settling in Plymouth. They made landfall on November 11, 1620, the Mailers’ wedding day 360 years later. He liked to give lectures on the town’s history to visiting friends, sometimes while standing before the observation window at the top of the Pilgrim Monument, a 252-foot stone tower that resembles the one at the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence. Dotson Rader recalled hearing such a lecture a few years before Mailer died.
He climbed, I mean he literally pulled himself up the steps, and we stood on this platform that overlooks the cape. I was very excited listening to a spiel that he had given probably five hundred times to other people that had been up there. He was very proud of Provincetown. And he was going on about this thing, and he was making this point. He was making this very strong, almost angry, point, a very emphatic point that Provincetown was the first place they landed. That the whole Pilgrim story was wrong, and that somehow Provincetown had been robbed of its true place in American history. And I thought listening to him, “Norman always had gripes, but this really hits home to him.” It’s the first time, after all the time I knew Norman, that it suddenly occurred to me that Brooklyn wasn’t really home to him emotionally anymore. Home to him was Provincetown.
The oldest art colony in the United States, Provincetown also has white gabled houses and dune shacks, a dozen fine fish-and-chowder restaurants, and a huge harbor running the length of the town. There is also a sizable community of Portuguese fishermen, many of whom Mailer had known for years and drank with in local watering holes. In the fall, as the weather changed, people stayed indoors, as Madden explains,
with everyone gone, the town revealed its other presence. Now the population did not boil up daily from thirty thousand to sixty, but settled down to its honest sentiment, three thousand souls, and on empty weekday afternoons you might have said the true number of inhabitants must be thirty men and women, all hiding. There could be no other town like it. If you were sensitive to crowds, you might expire in summer from human propinquity. On the other hand, if you were unable to endure loneliness, the vessel of your person could fill with dread during the long winter.
All that remains are some year-rounders, including a clutch of burnt-out cases. One of these is Madden, who drinks alone every night at the bar of a local restaurant, the Widow’s Walk. Christopher Ricks compares him to the hero-villains of Jacobean tragedy who have been “in complicity with evil. Like them he has wit and humour and courage, and a little grain of conscience keeps him sour.” Distraught but not despairing, he sips bourbon, writes in his notebook, and recalls how twenty years earlier, “held in the grip of an imperative larger than myself,” he tried to climb the side of the monument. Near the top, he froze and had to be rescued by the fire department. The effort buoyed his spirit, however, and he slept better afterward. “The importance of the journey must be estimated by my dread of doing it,” he concludes. Risk taking is the engine of Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which Mailer often referred to as an “entertainment.”
Locked into what he calls “the dungeon of my massive self-absorption,” Madden stumbles through day 24. In the early evening he returns to the Widow’s Walk. There, while brooding over his decamped blond wife, he meets another blonde, Laurel Oakwode, and her escort, a bisexual lawyer named Lonnie Pangborn, in town to look at real estate. They drink, Oakwode and Madden flirt, and all three leave together. The next morning, Madden finds himself with a ferocious hangover, a splintered memory of seeing his wife the night before, another of Oakwode, an erection premised on it, and a new, crusty, tattoo on his arm—a heart enclosing “Laurel.” The telephone rings and Police Chief Alvin Luther Regency, a macho Vietnam veteran who collects guns and knives, tells him to clean up the passenger seat of his car. Madden finds it covered with blood. At a meeting with Regency—who describes himself as half enforcer, half maniac—the chief suggests that he check his marijuana cache buried in a burrow in the woods of nearby Truro. He does and is terrified to find a plastic bag containing the severed head of a woman, a blonde. Unable to look at the face, he reburies it. The next time he checks, it is gone. When he checks again, there are two blond heads.
The situation at this juncture is compelling, worthy of novels by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, which he read before beginning Tough Guys. Madden has many questions: Did he have sex with Oakwode? Did Pangborn, who has gone missing, kill Laurel after watching them have sex? Did Regency, who somehow knew the burrow’s location, kill Laurel or both women? The darkest possibility is that Madden himself is responsible. He can’t remember. As he sorts through the possibilities, he finds that his mind “is a book where pages are missing—no, worse, two books, each with its own gaps.” One part of him wants to solve the crime, one doesn’t.
The first person point of view works smoothly for the novel’s first hundred pages, as Madden provides backstory—a tissue of coincidences—and ponders the identity of the decapitator(s). But from that point on Mailer runs into the same problem he encountered in The Deer Park: first person narrators can’t be everywhere at once—unless they possess the clairvoyance of Meni. Because Madden was not present at many key events, Mailer was forced to use long conversations between him and several of the principal characters to get answers to his questions, along with detailed descriptions of their sexual activities. “The book is interested,” Mailer said, in “the spectrum of male behavior,” and hetero-, homo-, and bisexuality are explored more thoroughly in Tough Guys than anywhere else in his work. In an interview in 1983 Mailer said that his plots never came easy. “I have to work them out bit by bit, and eke them out.” In this novel, the plot is the weakest element. The last third, he admitted, “drifts heavily and ponderously from revelation to revelation.”
There was no time for meaningful revision. “I had been trying to start all year and I hadn’t been able to get near it,” he said. “And it was as if suddenly my mind cleared. It was one of those joke situations where they give Popeye the can of spinach. It took 61 days.” With the exception of a day off to bring Michael to Harvard for his freshman year, he worked from eleven to nine every day through the late summer of 1983. During this time, his relationship with Little, Brown began to fray, and before he was done with the novel, he had severed his ties, quite amiably, with the firm he had been with for fifteen years and seven books. As he explained in one of his regular letters to Jack Abbott, Little, Brown had suggested that he find a new publisher. The arrangement “was too rich for their blood,” he said, “and in more ways than one.” Scott Meredith said that Mailer felt that having a New York–based publisher (Little, Brown was in Boston) was desirable.
In early August, Mailer signed a four-novel deal with Random House, reported in the New York Times to be $4 million. His new editor, Jason Epstein, said, “I don’t know where that figure came from, certainly not from us,” and called it “Mailer’s agent’s advertisement for himself.” But he acknowledged that Mailer could make over $3 million, all told, from the four novels—nonfiction books would require separate negotiations. The key provision of the contract, continued from Little, Brown, called for a $30,000 monthly advance against royalties. Mailer would collect it from Random House, his last publisher, for twenty-four years. When annual income from other projects—essays and screenplays, readings and lectures—was added, he would finally be able to pay his debts and support his family, although he carried sizable mortgages on his homes to the end of his life. “Money,” Madden says, “was the game other people played that I tried to avoid by having just enough not to play it.” The same was true for Mailer.
A few months later, Little, Brown told Mailer that they were not happy with the manuscript of Tough Guys. Meredith put a good face on it by issuing a statement: “We told Little, Brown we would count it a great courtesy if they would release the book so that it could be published with great fanfare instead of a swan song.” Mailer said later, “I was shocked that they didn’t like it,” and surprised that they did not recognize its sales potential. Random House agreed to make the four-book deal a five-book deal, and the shift of publishers was complete. His new publisher advertised the book extensively, and published a first edition of 150,000 copies. The paperback edition went through at least fifteen printings.
Loyal to his clients, Meredith lent them money (at 8 percent) when they were in need. According to Jack Scovil, who worked for Meredith for decades, Mailer borrowed regularly and ran up large balances. “If you knew Scott,” Scovil recalled, “and his love of money, and his hatred of letting any dime slip past his grasp, the fact that he had lent somebody $120,000, even Norman Mailer, I’m sure gave him many sleepless nights. But it all came back eventually.” The two men were unfailingly loyal to each other. “They admired and respected each other,” Scovil said, “and their intellectual talents. Scott was not an educated man. But nevertheless he was a very bright man, and one could even say brilliant in many aspects of his life. And he could parley with Norman quite well.” Mailer said Meredith had “a supple brain.”
At the time the Meredith agency had an impressive client list: P. G. Wodehouse, Margaret Truman, Garry Wills, Mickey Spillane, Spiro Agnew, Carl Sagan, and JFK’s mistress Judith Campbell Exner (she received an $800,000 advance), to name a few. Mailer, Scovil explained, “was the prime client of the agency. There’s no question about that, no question in Scott’s mind. Norman was the number one client for, I think, both personal reasons but also for very pragmatic reasons as well. He was a name figure. He drew all kinds of people to the agency, simply by being there.” The relationship had begun in 1963, when Mailer called Meredith on the phone.
“I hear you’re the guy who gets the money,” said Mailer.
“That’s what I hear too,” said Meredith.
“Well, I need money,” Mailer replied.
Meredith negotiated the lucrative deal for An American Dream, got Mailer out of a financial hole, and became his agent for the next thirty years. “Before Norman, Scott was a scruffy kind of agent,” Scovil said, who “was looked down on by the literary establishment.” After Mailer came aboard, Meredith picked up many major clients. Mailer “legitimized the agency in the eyes of the outside world,” Scovil said, although he was never the agency’s biggest moneymaker.
Part salesman, part banker and part counselor, Meredith bailed them out of jail and listened to their marital problems, but he did not spend much time reading their work. He left that to his able associates, Scovil and Russell Galen, who, after Meredith’s death in 1993, started their own agency. They wrote detailed reports for Scott’s meetings with Mailer. “To the best of my knowledge,” Scovil said,
Scott Meredith never read a word that Norman wrote. And I don’t think Norman ever knew that, of course. The reason for the reports was to enable Scott to have his meeting, his dinner, there were always “dinner meetings” after a manuscript was delivered. I don’t think Norman was actually expecting any criticism in the sense of “should I change this,” or “should I change that,” I don’t think there was any question of that. But he did want to know what Scott’s reaction was and Scott’s reaction was based on how we were telling him to react. For the most part, if I remember correctly, the reports were quite lavish and laudatory.
Various people complained to Mailer about Meredith over the years, but their strong bond persisted. Tough Guys Don’t Dance is dedicated to him.
Reviews of the novel were somewhat better than for Ancient Evenings, and it reached number four on the bestseller list, his third book in five years to make it. Singled out for praise in even some of the unfavorable reviews was Madden’s father, Dougy, another in the long line of male mentor figures in Mailer’s fiction. Madden senior arrives in Provincetown the morning after his son has retrieved the heads from the Truro burrow. In his prime, a large, strong man (six foot three, 280 pounds), he is now weak from chemotherapy and, disgusted with the nausea that accompanies the treatment, has decided to give it up. Bourbon is his new medicine. Tim Madden is half Irish, one quarter Jewish, and one quarter Protestant, a “sensitive Irishman.” But his father is a “pure ethnic,” Mailer said, “I wanted him to be a real Irishman marked by that special kind of probity that they can possess, along with powerful, murderous emotions.”
During another gray P-town day, father and son pass the bottle and discuss cancer, courage, and the disposal of body parts. Statistics, Dougy says, indicate that people in mental institutions get cancer at a much lower rate than the general population. “I figure it this way,” he says, passing on one of Mailer’s favorite dualisms, “cancer is the cure for schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is the cure for cancer.” But he discovers another cure: dirty jobs. The more horrible, the better. Dougy secures baling wire to an anchor, ties it to spikes he has driven through the eye sockets of the two heads he retrieved from the woods, and plummets them some fathoms down. Later, he gives sea burials to the bodies of the two women, as well as others, among them Regency, who is killed after he has a mental breakdown and a stroke. “Crazy people in serious places had to be executed,” Madden says. A short time later, Dougy reaps the homeopathic benefit of his grisly work when his cancer goes into remission. “Maybe I was in the wrong occupation all this time,” he tells his son.
The mayhem is hugger-mugger, very much as in Jacobean revenge tragedy, and motives are moot. Greed, blood, and terror engulf everyone, save the Maddens. Everyone is guilty to some degree. The last chapter of the novel tries and fails to explain how so many people could have disappeared without repercussions of any sort. What makes Tough Guys Don’t Dance worth reading is not the tangled plot nor the missing links between motivation and deed, but Mailer’s horrid crew of miscreants, who are as lovingly and convincingly drawn as any in his novels. The other quality that lifts the novel above its flaws is the tense, melancholy mood created by Tim Madden. The objective correlative for the damp, drizzly November in his soul is the half-deserted, haunted town at the edge of America, the place Mailer loved more than any other.
ABOUT SIX WEEKS before his concentrated effort on Tough Guys, Mailer completed an adaptation of Henry Miller’s trilogy Sexus, Nexus, Plexus, known as The Rosy Crucifixion. The opportunity to write his third screenplay came from a young editor at The Village Voice, Rudy Langlais. He wanted to use Miller’s masterwork as the basis for “the first classy X-rated Hollywood film.” After he read Genius and Lust, he knew that Mailer was the screenwriter he wanted. Langlais pitched Mailer the story of Miller’s profound love for his second wife, June Edith Smith (Mona in the novel), and her affair with Anastasia, who lived with them for a time: “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl to girl, boy gets girl back.” Mailer was enthusiastic and went to work. Langlais, a novice in the film world, began the search for funding, and eventually gained the support of the head of Twentieth Century-Fox films, Joe Wizan. Mailer was paid $250,000.
After he finished the screenplay, he sent it to Langlais, who found that Mailer had followed the story line they had agreed on, but had added a framing character: “Old Henry,” Miller as an eighty-year-old codger, who breaks into the action to make observations about himself as a younger man, played by a second actor. Mailer’s desire for narrative provenance was again in play. Langlais felt that “Old Henry” was unnecessary, and with some trepidation began a cut-and-paste operation. He took the edited version to Mailer’s Brooklyn apartment when he was done, but Mailer didn’t want to read it. He wanted to drink, and they proceeded to put away several bottles of Frenesi, the white wine Mailer was currently favoring, as they discussed the affairs of the universe. Langlais left as the sun was coming up. Later that day, Mailer called him up, and said: “How dare you, how dare you . . . be right!”
Before this occurred, however, the studio executives insisted that Mailer come to Los Angeles to close the deal. Langlais picked him up at the airport, and while driving him to the hotel told him how much he had enjoyed The Fight, especially the description of Mailer climbing from one seventh floor balcony to another at his hotel in Kinshasa. When they walked into Mailer’s room on the fifteenth floor of the Century Plaza Hotel, a stunned Langlais watched as he climbed to the railing of the balcony, and said, “I know what you’re thinking: ‘There goes my movie deal.’ ” Relief and laughter followed when Mailer climbed down.
The next day—April Fool’s Day 1983—they met with Wizan and a squadron of VPs eager to meet Mailer, who came in feinting and jabbing. The executives were pleased. As they were leaving, one of them said he was so happy that a film would be made about Arthur Miller and his wife, Marilyn Monroe. Henry Miller was unknown to them, and they obviously had not read The Rosy Crucifixion. Like so many film projects, it slowly collapsed over the next year. It remains on the shelf at the studio. Langlais remained a good friend and later brokered another screenplay deal for him with Universal Studios—“Havana,” the story of Meyer Lansky running racetracks and casinos for Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1940s and 1950s. It also remains unproduced.
MAILER OFTEN SENT the manuscripts of friends to Meredith. He also used him to funnel money to people. Sometime in the mid-1980s, Mailer asked him to send money to a new mistress, Carole Mallory, a former cover model for major magazines like New York and Cosmopolitan who also had small roles in a few films in the 1970s, including Take This Job and Shove It. A large poster (which she gave Mailer) for this film, depicting a curvaceous Mallory in a bikini bottom and torn, scanty T-shirt, rivaled sales of Farrah Fawcett’s famous swimsuit poster. Jack Scovil, who handled the transfer of funds, said that he was “surprised that Norman would get involved with someone like that,” referring to Mallory’s reputation as a star seducer. In several interviews, numerous gossip column snippets, and a 2009 memoir, Mallory lists the men that she had “picked up,” including Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, Richard Gere, Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins, Peter Sellers—she said Brits were “more fun than the Americans”—and Dodi Fayed, the Egyptian playboy who died in the car crash with Princess Diana. Plus a few rock stars. She was also engaged to Picasso’s son Claude during the 1970s—he jilted her—and claims to have turned down propositions from Albert Finney and Jack Nicholson.
Buzz Farbar had introduced Mallory to Mailer at Elaine’s. A few weeks later, in January 1984, she read that he would be speaking at a showing of his films at the Thalia Theater in Manhattan. When the event was over, she slipped him a note asking to meet the following day at a coffee shop. She wanted to get his opinion of a memoir of her years with Claude Picasso. They met, he read some of the manuscript—a chapter describing her night with Beatty—and she left some lipstick on his face as well as her telephone number in Los Angeles. That summer, when he was in Los Angeles doing publicity for Tough Guys Don’t Dance, they had their first tryst at the Bel Air Hotel. Soon, she was seeing him when he was in L.A. and was in love. She loved his fame, his wit, his sexual equipment, his detailed writing advice. “I longed for an affair with a genius,” she said. During their time together, she said, “I noticed that he used words like oxymoron, swath, and sententious. Hearing him speak was an education.” She also loved the money he gave her. But at one point, her $200-a-week stipend ceased, as Scovil recalled.
Scott would never authorize giving Carole money unless Norman had authorized it. And there was a point where Norman wanted to cut her off and Carole had come up to the office and caused a great scene. She was crying and she was screaming and she was doing all kinds of things, saying all kinds of things, and that she deserved the money.
Another way of helping Mallory financially was to give her interviews, which he did on several occasions. Through him, she also met other writers and celebrities. Joseph Heller, Erica Jong, Isabella Rossellini, and Kurt Vonnegut are some of the interviewees she mentions in her memoir. One of her interviews with Mailer included Vidal, and was the cover feature in the May 1991 Esquire (he and Mailer had made up by this time), but Mailer said it was a weak piece, even after he had tweaked it. He edited her interviews with him before they were published, with the exception of the last two, which she refused, in the name of honesty, she said, to let him review or change. Mallory was unaware that some famous people insisted on the right to do this. She believed that it was “his way of hiding the truth.” By revising his comments, she said, “he controlled his image for history.” Norris eventually learned about Mallory, who was not timid about showing up at Mailer events, but the affair was fairly quiet until Mallory moved to New York.
Among Mailer’s close friends, the affair caused consternation, but he waved off every warning. The relationship was based on passion, according to Mailer’s lawyer, Ivan Fisher. “It was a huge part of his being. And a huge part of his passion was sex. And his relationship with Mallory was 100 percent sexual. Period. There wasn’t the teeniest, tiniest nanogram of anything other than sex involved there. If you are looking for an idea, read her book . . . Flash, yes. And you’ll know exactly what this affair was about. It wound up causing [Norris] enormous pain.” Flash is Mallory’s 1988 novel about an alcoholic, sexaholic, drug-abusing female flasher. “Mallory packs her story with down-and-dirty sexual details,” said one reviewer. Mailer gave it a blurb, as did Gloria Steinem. By the time the book was published, Norris realized that Mallory, unlike Mailer’s other mistresses, lacked discretion, but not determination. She wanted to become the seventh Mrs. Mailer. The protagonist of her novel is trying, after an affair with a French millionaire, to win a major role in a film via the casting couch. Her true passion, however, is for Sacha Sachtel, a sixty-year-old producer, the “King of Kink,” modeled on Mailer.
Gay Talese, who knew Mallory from Elaine’s, recalls being at a literary event in the late 1980s where he was approached by Norris. “Mailer was somewhere [else], I don’t know, but it was a big event, maybe something for PEN,” he recalled. “Anyway, she came to me and said, ‘I’m going to leave Norman.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ ‘Because he’s fucking around,’ she said. ‘He’s having affairs.’ I’m surprised because I thought it was still a relatively new marriage. She was quite gorgeous. I knew he was having affairs, but I said, ‘You know, you shouldn’t do that. With Mailer, it’s just a little adventure, none of them means anything.’ She was pretty pissed off.” She was not angry enough to leave him, however.
Barbara met Mallory through her brother. “He sicced her on me when I was working at Simon and Schuster,” she recalled. “I didn’t ask any questions, but I guessed he was trying to buy her off because she presented me with a couple of manuscripts which were just ghastly.” She realized that there was nothing she could do with Mallory’s work. “I wished I could because I figured this would be one way to help him—one of the manuscripts was about all the men she had slept with. Norman was not in it. I figured maybe he had asked her to keep him out of it.” When asked about her motives in 2006, Mailer said, “She was totally on the make.” Fisher’s interpretation notwithstanding, Mailer had more than one reason for continuing his relationship.
In a 1973 interview with Buzz Farbar, Mailer described the four stages of knowing a woman.
First, there’s living together. It’s often thought equal to marriage. Not by half. You can live with a woman and never begin to comprehend her at all, not until you get married to her. Once you do that, you’re in the next stage. The third, obviously, is children. Once again your woman is different. Say it’s analogous to a culture going through major transformations. The fourth stage is knowing a woman once you’re divorced. Then, indeed, you come to know something at last. So if it weren’t for the fact that there are children, there would be something agreeable about moving from marriage to marriage, just as there is something exciting about spending five years in England and five in France. But there are children, and that’s the vortex of all postmarital pain, which is always so surprisingly huge. Because finally the children come out of a vision in the marriage.
He does not mention the stage of a relationship that precedes living together: an affair. Besides Mallory, he was still seeing Carol Stevens, and whenever he visited Chicago, Eileen Fredrickson. He called her regularly. When he was on the West Coast, he rarely failed to spend time with Lois Wilson. They had a long correspondence. With these very different women, he never felt beleaguered and enjoyed friendship, sexual intimacy, dining out, and conversation. No strings. There were other affairs, but these were the most important.
One way to understand Mailer’s relationship with Carole Mallory is to see it as part of his lust for experience, which he once defined as “the church—if the word may be allowed—of one’s acquired knowledge.” Experience was holy. His sister remembers him telling her, in so many words, that “experience was more valuable when you felt that you could, you know, turn it into art. Otherwise, there wasn’t much point to it.” Women were of inexhaustible interest to him—mysterious, dangerous, of infinite variety. Mallory was unlike anyone he had known before. He was fascinated by her crassness and amazed by her promiscuity, which seemed to match his own. There was so much to learn. When he was asked by Cosmopolitan his opinion of a woman if “she sleeps with you too soon,” he replied: “No woman has ever slept with me too soon. I don’t pretend I’m typical, but I’ve always found promiscuous women interesting. I suspect I would have been promiscuous if I’d been a woman. I certainly have been as a man. So I don’t make judgments. The faster a woman would sleep with me, the more I liked her.”
Mallory says that she was in love with him and not merely interested in what he could do for her. Perhaps she was. She knew him but superficially, however. Convinced that he was an alcoholic, she took him to one of her AA meetings. He went out of curiosity. He invited her to see a gay porn movie, and she took this as evidence that he was bisexual. Mailer once took Norris to such a film at the Adonis Theater in Manhattan, a well-known gay porn outlet. When the woman selling tickets said to Norris, “Honey, do you know what kind of shows we have here?” Norris, said, “Yes, ma’am, I certainly do.” Dotson Rader was in the balcony when the Mailers came in, and was astounded to see them. He recalled his conversation with Mailer about gay sex.
When I was very, very young and in New York I knew people like Parker Tyler and Glenway Wescott, Ginsberg and Auden. They were all gay guys older than me. . . . One of the things I was continuously warned about, by Tennessee and others, was homophobia. Norman was on the list. I was warned that he was homophobic. I knew Norman quite well and I never had a sense of that, quite the opposite. I feel he was fascinated, intrigued, by homosexuals and homosexuality. He would go into the very specific, raunchy details, and to me very embarrassing details, about exactly what physically you did as a gay person. And he wanted the moist specifics about the encounter. Sometimes I provided them, sometimes I would get my back up and say this is too much.
As Mailer explained more than once, when he had two motives, good and bad, for doing something, he felt a surge of energy. He attributed this to God and the Devil, or their minions, who, for their own reasons, agreed on the desirability of the action. He was not singled out for these nudges; he believed that all humans received them, often unknowingly. Later on, he would feel guilt or even self-loathing, but this did not negate his choice, not entirely. Much depended on the results, the fruits, of the action. He told Mike Lennon that he learned something about venality from Mallory and used it in the creation of Chloe, the sexy waitress in the opening chapters of Harlot’s Ghost. “But,” as he told Farbar, “the idea that people can be promiscuous without exploiting their own sensitivity is impossible.” Promiscuity is a trade-off, and while you might gain knowledge, you also “take in waste from the other person’s system.” He continued, saying, “You pay for every last thing you get out of life.”
Years ago, Calder Willingham told me a story about a situation where he tried every trick to make a woman leave him. Finally she began going with another man. Then he discovered he was jealous. He told this story on himself with great humor, and looked at me and said, “Norman, you can’t cheat life.” He said this in his inimitable Georgia accent. It’s not a remark one hasn’t heard before. But there’s such a thing as hearing a maxim at just the right moment for oneself. Then it goes all the way in. So that remark stayed with me. Whenever I’m trying to work out some sort of moral balance for myself, I find the thought useful.
Mailer found some kind of moral balance in regard to Mallory, enough to continue with her for almost eight years. Like Faust, he was greedy for knowledge and ready to trade punishment to gain it. “The more prohibited the act, the greater the lure for Mailer,” according to Rader. “He wanted to know everything.”
IN EARLY 1984 Mailer went alone to Russia on a Parade assignment, traveling there for two weeks in mid-March. He went first to Lithuania, and traveled by train from Kaunas to Vilnius, not far from the towns where his parents were born almost a century earlier. From there he traveled to Leningrad and Moscow. Everywhere he went, he saw the vestiges of World War II’s destruction. Buildings were crumbling, the people looked battered. “It’s a sad place,” he wrote in the Parade piece, “A Country, Not a Scenario.” “I felt as if I were back on the Lower East Side of New York 100 years ago. I could have been watching my grandparents walking by.”
Schiller, who was in Russia filming Peter the Great, opened some doors for Mailer in Moscow. Mailer wanted to be relatively anonymous, so Schiller got him a room in the massive Rossiya Hotel, near Red Square. His tiny room had a sink and toilet but no bath or shower. Hot water was unreliable. The toilet paper was cut-up newspaper. With the aid of a bottle of vodka, Mailer persisted for three days, but when he could no longer endure the bad food, sandpaper towels, and rocklike soap, he called Schiller. “Get me out of here.” Schiller got him into the majestic National Hotel, overlooking the Kremlin. Built in 1903, the hotel hosted Russian royalty as well as famous artists. What impressed Mailer was that its guests had included Trotsky, Lenin, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Russian secret police. In his year of study under Malaquais, Mailer had learned of the critical role played by Dzerzhinsky’s organization, the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB. He would later write about Dzerzhinsky, an “evil artist” of counterespionage. Schiller got him booked into Room 107, where Lenin had stayed.
Mailer spent most of his time discovering the capital on his own, but Schiller introduced him to Vladimir Posner, the son of a Russian spy and a spokesperson for the Soviet Union in the 1980s. He also met Genrikh Borovik, a former KGB agent and journalist, who spent many years in the United States as head of Russian news agencies and wrote a book on Soviet double agent Kim Philby. Through them, Mailer met a number of Soviet intelligence figures who explained the structure and operation of the country’s competing spy agencies. The Parade essay contains his initial observations on the KGB and the surveillance of citizens. Russia was much less of a police state than he expected, and he walked around Moscow unimpeded for several hours every day for a week. He met dissidents and questioned them about the reign of terror under the previous regimes. Glasnost, the open and frank discussion of the past, was about to commence under Mikhail Gorbachev, who became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985. In June, he returned to Russia, this time with Norris, and they spent three weeks touring.
In a letter to Abbott after they returned, Mailer said that he was “lying around and thinking, wondering whether a new book is starting in me.” That summer in Provincetown he did no writing. He gave interviews for Tough Guys Don’t Dance, spent time with his children, swam, relaxed, and spent a month deciding what he would write next. He told a reporter that he had narrowed the field to three possibilities. “The Boat of Ra,” promised to Random House, was the first. Learning enough science to make the intergalactic voyage of a spaceship credible worried him, however. He felt that an understanding of astrophysics, a fast-changing and complex field, would be essential, but giving some realistic notion of traveling at the speed of light would be a challenge.
The second novel he was considering was “The Castle in the Forest.” It opens in 1945 when a U.S. Army unit arrives at a German castle used as a concentration camp. “The leading characters,” according to Scott Meredith, “are an American Jewish doctor and a German doctor who confront each other and clash over contending philosophies.” In 1954, Mailer had made a false start on this novel, which he then called “The City of God.” The third possibility was a CIA novel. The Russian trips and the end to the Cold War influenced his decision, as did his 1973 essay on Watergate, “A Harlot High and Low.” His continuing obsession with the assassination of JFK played a part, as well as his own opposed identities: family man and philanderer, Left-conservative, activist and observer, rationalist and transcendentalist, to name the most important. All these coalesced in his decision to embark on a huge circumambient novel of the Cold War and the bifurcated lives of spies. His title, Harlot’s Ghost, came later.
In July, he appeared at the tenth anniversary celebration of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, a Buddhist-inspired educational center. He was invited by Allen Ginsberg, one of the founders, to appear with William Burroughs. A few months earlier Mailer had sent a contribution to a Festschrift for the poet’s sixtieth birthday.
Years ago I wrote a poem about Allen which went something like—I quote from memory—
Sometimes I think, “That ugly kike,
That four-eyed faggot,
Is the bravest man in America.”
Well, over the years, Allen’s gotten considerably better looking and has doubtless earned that most curious position of being a major and near to elder statesman in homosexual ranks and his poetry, bless it, goes on forever.
Mailer and Ginsberg had become close when both of them were on the antiwar ramparts, but their friendship had begun tentatively. “Ginsberg and I met in a strange way,” Mailer said. “Like scientists who are each working on the same problem—far apart in every other way.” But now, he continued, “I have a lot of respect for him. He is truly one of the few honorable men I have known in the literary world.” He also respected Burroughs, whom he called “the shyest man in the world.” They did not have a close relationship, however. After Burroughs’s death in 1997, Mailer said that he had spent perhaps the equivalent of six evenings with Burroughs, all told. At Naropa, the three men took part in a discussion titled “American Soul? What Is It?” Mailer had warm memories of the session: “We had the damnedest time out in Colorado,” he said. “Being on with Burroughs is like being with W. C. Fields. He is one of the funniest men alive. He can say, ‘It is eighty degrees today in Kansas,’ and the audience is wiped out.” He added that he still admired Naked Lunch.
Shortly after returning from Colorado, he went to a meeting of the American chapter of PEN, the international association of writers. He had served on the organization’s executive board from 1968 to 1973. On July 25, he was elected president for a two-year term, and would preside over the 1986 International Congress in New York. “I always wanted to be president of something,” Mailer said. For the next eighteen months, he would help plan the world congress, mostly by raising the money to underwrite it.
THE PEN PRESIDENCY forced Mailer to shelve his writing projects so that he could preside over committee meetings, twist the arms of potential givers, give speeches, and deal with media. One reason he accepted the job was that “men like myself in small towns who’ve been reprobates all their lives go into church work” when they reach sixty. After several years of monkish work, Mailer looked forward to the interactions that went along with the presidency.
Just as he was beginning his PEN presidency he was elected to the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, a group of 250 distinguished creators in literature, music, art, and architecture. He was installed on December 7, taking the seat of Tennessee Williams, who had recently died. He said he was glad to have Williams’s seat and hoped some of his talent would rub off. Coming on the heels of his election as PEN president, the honor was recognition of his status as “one of the giants—if at times a wounded giant—of our age,” as Arthur Schlesinger said in the official academy citation. He began it by noting that Mailer had “a career of living dangerously.” There would be more risk taking over the remaining twenty-three years of his life. Now, however, Mailer was on the brink of becoming a senior citizen. His knees were sore, his breath getting short. He said that during his first trip to Russia, while crossing Red Square, he saw that everyone was passing him, yet he was walking as fast as he could.
His oldest children—Susan, Danielle, Betsy, and Kate—had all finished college, Michael was a sophomore and Stephen was in prep school; Maggie and Matt were in high school, and John Buffalo, the youngest, was in first grade. For the first time in twenty years, there were no babies crawling around the floor of 142 Columbia Heights—except when the grandchildren from Chile were visiting. Susan and Marco had their second child, Alejandro, in 1985. Norris now had more time and was doing a lot of painting, including several commissioned portraits. She had several shows, including her first in Little Rock. She introduced Mailer to Hillary and Bill Clinton—now governor of Arkansas—and they got a private tour of the governor’s mansion. Dotson Rader and Pat Kennedy Lawford flew in for Norris’s show and like everyone else were impressed when the Clintons attended the reception at the gallery. Lawford and Mailer saw Clinton as a potential presidential candidate. Hillary also impressed him. Later, he said, “That might be the brightest woman I ever met.”
Through the spring of 1985, he worked on fundraising for the January 1986 PEN congress. Over two hundred distinguished writers from eighty-five countries were invited, plus eight hundred writers from the United States. Paying for the expenses of the foreign writers was the largest item on the budget. Mailer came up with the idea for a series of readings to be held in the fall of 1985, two writers a week at a Broadway theater that was dark on Sunday evenings. A series ticket would sell for $1,000, and if 1,000 people subscribed, the gross would be $1 million. Even after expenses, the budget for the congress would be covered. Selecting and pairing the writers, all from the United States, would require diplomatic skills of a high order. Mailer began writing letters and making calls.
There was no way not to include Gore Vidal, whose literary reputation was at its peak. His masterful novel Lincoln, the second volume of a heptalogy covering American history from the founding of the republic through the 1950s, was a bestseller for the latter half of 1984. Mailer had not seen Vidal since their fight at Lally Weymouth’s party seven years earlier and knew that inviting him would require a sensitive rapprochement. Instead of making direct contact, he asked Mickey Knox to speak with him during one of Vidal’s visits to Rome from his home in Rapallo. Find out, he told Knox, “whether his hatred for me is still essentially one of his first passions.” Mailer now shared an editor, Jason Epstein, with Vidal, and Mailer thought Epstein “for his own self-interest, if nothing other, would like the feud to end.” He asked him to float the idea to Vidal about appearing at one of the fundraisers. A month later, Mailer wrote to Vidal. “Our feud, whatever its roots for each of us, has become a luxury,” he said. “It’s possible in years to come that we’ll both have to be manning the same sinking boat at the same time. Apart from that, I’d still like to make up. An element in me, absolutely immune to weather and tides, runs independently fond of you.” Mailer gave him the roster of eleven writers who had already agreed to appear: Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, John Updike, I. B. Singer, John Irving, William F. Buckley, Tom Wolfe, Arthur Miller, and himself. He offered Vidal a solo night, or a joint appearance. Vidal accepted.
Next he turned to the notoriously prickly Saul Bellow. Mailer’s sharp criticisms of his work had not been forgotten, as he had learned the last time he had seen him in 1975. Bob Cromie was interviewing them, back to back, on his Chicago radio show and raved to Mailer about Bellow’s new novel, Humboldt’s Gift. Mailer recalled how he had tried to compliment the immaculately dressed Bellow when he bumped into him in the hallway. “Well, Saul,” he said, “I hear you’ve written a terrific novel.” Bellow looked up and down at the rumpled Mailer, paused two beats, and said, “Well, Norman, why not?” Then he strode off, Mailer said, “looking like an Italian count.” Mailer wrote to Bellow about the purposes of the upcoming congress, and offered him a solo evening if he preferred. Bellow wrote back to say that the invitation, and the urging of Vonnegut, had made him decide, reluctantly, to give a reading, even though he was “not strong on civility.” Mailer was pleased, as he wrote back to Bellow, but because of theater costs he could no longer give him an evening to himself. Four more writers had been added—Woody Allen, Alice Walker, Vidal, and Eudora Welty—and “I shudder to think of the matchmaking maneuvers that will ensue, but rush to offer you, esteemed colleague, your private pick of stablemate” from the list of fifteen.
Mailer gave Vidal the same perk of choosing his partner. Vidal had told him that he didn’t think the audience would like what he had to say. Mailer replied, “Fine. Be lugubrious, be scalding and appalling, be larger than Jeremiah.” He also gave him a choice of dates, and Vidal selected November 17, and for a partner, Mailer. The “PEN Celebrations” would take place on eight Sunday evenings from September 22 to December 15, 1985. Bellow and Welty would open, Allen and Updike would close, and Mailer and Vidal would appear in the middle. The sixteen writers were, arguably, the most impressive assemblage of literary talent ever gathered in the United States. Mailer did not pull it off singlehandedly; many others were involved—Sontag, Styron, Talese, and Vonnegut, in particular—but Mailer did have good enough relations with most of the roster, save Arthur Miller (still unhappy with him about Marilyn), Welty, and Walker (neither of whom he knew), to get everyone he wanted. He said that the pressure to raise $500,000 over the next year left him feeling “brusque and jagged.”
He had continued writing to Abbott and encouraged several people to write to him, including Malaquais. Abbott didn’t like Mailer’s recent books and wrote him a ten-page letter, which ended, “Do you want to end our friendship?” It was clearly falling apart, as was Abbott’s relationship with Malaquais. In Mailer’s reply he said that Abbott, like Malaquais, didn’t like to lose an argument. “I would just as soon lose a discussion as win it,” Mailer said, because
it’s the ones you lose that teach you more, and change your ideas, and I don’t like living with the same idea too long because it gives me the feeling I’m inhabiting a subway. Anyway, I did my best to ponder it more and more, and finally could come to only one conclusion: guys who hate to lose arguments as much as you and Jean Malaquais must have some deep, unconscious conviction that their karma will be permanently altered if they do. Jack, if anyone wants to end our friendship it’s you. That’s your right. You can end it anytime you want. But don’t put the onus on me.
It must be added that few individuals who argued with Mailer felt that he welcomed rejoinders. Sometimes he did; sometimes he sought them, but he could also be immodestly self-assured and dismissive. Endlessly curious, he was also terribly opinionated. Susan, his eldest, commented on this trait a few years after he died.
If I had a problem and needed to talk to Dad about anything personal he was always ready to listen and on many occasions surprised me with his insights. But if we happened to discuss say, politics, religion or psychoanalysis, it was tough because he easily got impatient. I don’t think he was really interested in what I had to say; he wanted to talk and be heard. Many times I didn’t agree with him, but he expressed himself with such force my voice usually got lost along the way. Once in a while I’d surprise him with a fast rejoinder or a smart-ass remark, but usually our conversations turned into lengthy monologues. He had the same attitude with all my siblings. I’d watch him with his friends, with Norris; same thing. So I lost interest and I’m very sorry about this. If you ask me what I regret, I’d say the lost opportunities are close to the top of my list.
If Mailer could hear these words, he might respond by saying he came on strong with his children and friends to keep the dialectic supple, to encourage a strong response. “It’s through opposition that creative possibilities rise,” he maintained. A tension between being open-minded and being overbearing was characteristic of Mailer from his mid- to late thirties and on. He knew it, and explained it in a letter to a writer friend, Peter Arthurs.
We’re all divided between the moralists in ourselves and the novelist. The moralist is full of platitudes and mother’s milk, always telling others how to live. The novelist, who always has an eye like a pair of tweezers, never fails to pick up a detail. The novelist is amoral, witty, private, and there to be followed in each of us. What I mean is if one relaxes the moral, authoritative side of one’s nature and gets over the idea that one has to say something with one’s novel, and merely allows one’s characters to take their turns, and is, indeed, even surprised by the turns these characters take, as if they do in some fashion have life of their own, then marvelous things can come out of it.
During 1985, Mailer’s correspondence burgeoned, as it usually did when he was not writing on deadline. He kept up with all his regular correspondents—Abbott, Stratton, Knox, Don Carpenter (west coast friend), Farbar (like Stratton, still incarcerated), and another writer, Bruce Dexter, as well as to people unknown to him who wrote with questions. To the editor of The American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell, who had inquired about his current reading, Mailer said that John Cheever’s collected stories was “the discovery” of the year, and that he regretted that he had never had a good discussion with him when he was alive—Cheever died in 1982. The other book he named was M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. He made no comment on it, but it clearly influenced the opening of Harlot’s Ghost, which he would soon begin. In his letter to Dexter, he repeated something that he had announced to friends more than once: “I am a phenomenon to myself.” He told Dexter that “no one to my knowledge has ever had the same apercu about me that you had.” Dexter had seen clearly that
I always was my own experiment, and that is such a simple way to live, and no one could ever comprehend it. I don’t even think it took great guts, just my intense scientific curiosity about one’s subject, myself and the bizarre phenomenon of myself. At any rate, those years are behind me now. I’m tempted to say alas. Once you lose the power to experiment on yourself, you lose half your ideas as well.
FAN MAILER, NOW in her nineties and failing, spent the summer of 1985 with her family. Barbara and Al were renting an apartment in Provincetown, and all of the children came to town as well. Fan spent most of her time in bed in the front bedroom overlooking Commercial Street. The local tour bus came by daily and Fan could hear the driver pointing out “the home of the famous writer Norman Mailer.” Norris recalled that she and all five of Mailer’s daughters, as well as Barbara, took turns sitting by her bed to keep her company. A woman named Eva, hired by the family, was almost always there. In late August, Fan and Eva were back in Brooklyn. When Barbara visited, she was disturbed when she saw that Fan was having difficulty swallowing. “The motor of the family,” as Mailer called her, was shutting down. On August 28, Susan’s birthday, Fan died. Eva called Provincetown. Mailer was out for a swim when the call came. Stephen recalled that he and Michael swam out to where their father was snorkeling to give him the news. “The three of us then, solemnly, walked back to the house with weighty, unspoken remorse.” Fan was buried in the family plot in Long Branch next to Barney. Born (probably) the same year, 1891, she outlived him by almost thirteen years.
In a letter to Stratton, Mailer told him how at the end his mother “could no longer see, she could barely walk, she was bent over from arthritis, the forefront of her memory was gone, so that conversations with her consisted of her asking you the time, like clockwork, every twelve and a half seconds.” But she was still feisty on occasion.
Once, maybe a month before the end, she was complaining to her companion, a Jamaican lady [Eva] who took care of her, about how miserable she felt, and said, “I just wish I was dead,” whereupon the Jamaican lady, who was probably fed up with her—she was not the world’s greatest fun to take care of—said to her, “Would you like me to help you?” At that point, my mother drew herself up as well as she could with her bent back, and glaring at the woman with her sightless eyes said, “Drop dead.” That was my mom.
The fall of the year was given over to fundraising and arrangements for the eight PEN Celebrations. Richard Snyder, the head of Simon & Schuster, Tina Brown, editor of Vanity Fair, Gay Talese, and “takeover baron” Saul Steinberg and his wife, Gayfryd, were some of the key people who worked with Mailer to secure contributions from publishers and philanthropists for the congress. Talese was instrumental in convincing Donald Trump to donate two hundred hotel rooms for visiting writers. Added to the income from the PEN Celebrations, the total from major givers was more than sufficient to meet the budget. Talese, who headed the planning committee for the congress, said that without Mailer “and his fund-raising efforts, we would not be having an international congress.” His eagerly anticipated evening with Vidal on November 17 drew a sell-out crowd, but the event was a dud. Both men criticized American imperial ambitions but with no special insights or revealing disagreements. Mailer’s sister recalled that Vidal was the better speaker that night. Before introducing Allen and Updike at the final Sunday event in December, Mailer apologized for his appearance with Vidal, calling it “a meeting of two toothless tigers.” As best he could during this hectic period, Mailer kept working on the new novel, and by the end of 1985 had four hundred pages of manuscript that he was describing to friends as “a spy novel.”
In the midst of the PEN events, he learned from his doctor, as he told his boxing friend, Jeffrey Michelson, in early October, “I don’t have a bad heart, but I don’t have a good one either.” Boxing was over for him he said, because of his wind. “It got to be sheer, simple hell just to get through a round,” he said. “My chest used to feel like it was going to explode.” He said he planned to eat a more healthy diet and asked Michelson to keep his condition confidential.
The news about his health came about the same time that he was selected by McCall’s magazine as one of the ten sexiest American men over sixty, along with Paul Newman, Cary Grant, Joe DiMaggio, and President Reagan. Meredith was asked for comment on Mailer and declined. When told, Mailer said that he would have given a quote: “At long last, love.” He told Knox, “It’s all such marvelous crap.” Confirming his confused status in the public eye, a few months later the Feminist Writers’ Guild made him the “Guest of Dishonor” at their ninth annual meeting, where those present played a game called “Pin the tail on Norman Mailer,” a protest against “his antifeminist writings.” Mailer had no comment. He received one other award, on November 20, the Lord & Taylor Rose Award made annually to “a person of public accomplishment.” Previous recipients included Lillian Hellman, Walter Cronkite, and Ella Fitzgerald. Michael Mailer was the master of ceremonies, and Liz Smith, Plimpton, Buckley, and Milos Forman spoke. Mailer was among friends. When he got to the lectern, he said just that morning he had been talking to his wife about the award. “I said to her how nice it was that Lord & Taylor is honoring me on my 60th birthday. She smiled at me and said, ‘You’re 62 and it’s not your birthday.’ ”
THE 48TH INTERNATIONAL PEN Congress opened on January 12, 1986, at the New York Public Library with welcoming remarks by Secretary of State George Shultz. The majority of the conferees from both the United States and foreign countries were left-leaning and Shultz was not received warmly, even though he condemned censorship. Mailer had invited him at the suggestion of John Kenneth Galbraith, but without consulting the Executive Board—a blunder that he later apologized for—and there was significant opposition, given the unpopularity of the Reagan administration among liberals. Mailer said he thought it was appropriate to have the nation’s top diplomat welcome the international delegates. E. L. Doctorow wrote an op-ed piece saying that Mailer’s action had put PEN “at the feet of the most ideologically right-wing Administration this country has seen,” and sixty-five of the seven-hundred-plus delegates signed a petition opposing it. Things improved slightly after the opening day furor, but the sour mood never dissipated. One commentator described the conference as “a week of petitions and statements and strategy meetings, of walkouts and protests and confrontations.” Aesthetics withered in the ideological heat.
The theme of the conference, the brainchild of novelist Donald Barthelme and poet and translator Richard Howard, was “The Imagination of the State,” intended to generate a discussion of two kinds of imagination, artistic and governmental. But many argued that states don’t have imaginations, just the opposite; states have agendas, narrow sets of self-serving goals rarely lubricated by literature. Shultz, many believed, was the servant of an administration that had no imagination, not even a brain. It was Mailer, after all, who said later that the first precept of President Reagan was: “Be as shallow as spit on a rock and you will prevail.” The conference theme was echoed in many of the titles of the panels: “How Does the State Imagine?” “Censorship in the U.S.,” and “Alienation in the State.” Susan Sontag chaired one of these and led off by stating that she didn’t understand the theme to be discussed. Mailer, who was in the audience, reminded Sontag that the panel themes “had been around for six months,” and said, “Couldn’t you have picked up the phone and asked?” Sontag, it was later revealed, was a member of PEN’s program committee. “I was livid,” he said.
On the fifth day of the conference, Mailer was attacked again, this time for the underrepresentation of women. A petition was presented to Mailer noting disproportions in the number of women involved in the Congress—there were only twenty-odd women out of 140 on conference panels. Earlier, when Betty Friedan confronted Mailer on the issue, he answered, “Oh, who’s counting?” Friedan, joined by Grace Paley, Erica Jong, Margaret Atwood, and several others, was counting, and they wanted an explanation and a public apology. Mailer pointed out that at least two dozen important women writers had declined invitations, including Mary McCarthy, Iris Murdoch, Diana Trilling, Joan Didion, Barbara Tuchman, Mavis Gallant, Ann Beattie, Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Yourcenar. His answer did not mollify the protesters, and the atmosphere worsened, especially after he said it was a bad idea to construct literary panels based on gender balance, adding that in many countries “there are no good women writers” because of the ingrained sexism of the culture that feminists deplored. Mailer started to dig himself into a deeper hole with comments about the mistake of stirring affirmative action into the literary pot, and some in the audience wondered if he would escape with his skin. Only after Gay Talese whispered some words of advice in Mailer’s ear did he promise that the petitions would be addressed, and shortly afterward closed down the discussion. An ad hoc committee, headed by Grace Paley, was established afterward to examine the demands of the protesters. Vonnegut, another PEN official, said at the time that if he had been in the president’s position he would have constituted the panels almost exactly the way Mailer had, given the roster of conferees from which to choose.
In point of fact, Mailer had little to do with selecting panel members, as he explained to novelist Mary Lee Settle, who wondered why she hadn’t been chosen for one. “I stayed away from that,” he wrote to her. “If I had started picking too many people, charges of nepotism, or whatever the word is, would damage us all.” Most of his effort had gone into fundraising. The participation petition called for PEN to “include women in the decision-making roles.” In a postmortem with The New York Times, Mailer said that the issue had not received much previous attention because “we have so many women in positions of such power.” At the time of the congress, women headed six of the eight permanent committees and occupied three of the six vice presidencies. Half of the seven-hundred-plus individuals that attended the conference were women. “What are people who are calling for change going to change?” Mailer asked. But given the paucity of women panelists, Friedan’s credentials, the backing of major figures such as Grace Paley, Erica Jong, and Nadine Gordimer, not to mention the feminist bull’s-eye on his back, the protest could have been foreseen. The “brilliant end run,” as Time called it, of inviting Shultz didn’t help him, and continuing anger over the final defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment a few years earlier may also have contributed, although Mailer was on record as supporting it. He continued with PEN until mid-1986 when his term was up, and stayed on the board for a time, but felt bruised by his treatment at the congress. When asked in later years about PEN, all he could say was “cannibals.”
The congress was not given over entirely to squabbling. There were lively receptions in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; at Gracie Mansion, hosted by Mayor Ed Koch; at the New York Times Building, hosted by publisher Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger Sr. Nearby coffee shops, restaurants, and the bars of the two hotels where most of the panels and readings took place, the St. Moritz (Trump’s hotel) and the Essex House, were crowded with writers in conversation. Mailer enjoyed the many dinners and cocktail parties, although the presence of Carole Mallory in the same room as Norris gave him no happiness.
Two months before the congress, Mailer asked Thomas Pynchon to take part and offered to have a drink with him. Pynchon wrote back with thanks and an apology, saying he would be away when the congress took place. “With luck, however, we may surface together in the same piece of space/time,” he said, making it sound as if some sort of psychic rendezvous was in the cards. He said he would enjoy having a drink with Mailer, although his would have to be “something like Ovaltine.” Mailer wrote back and gave Pynchon his telephone number for the next time he was in New York. The call never came, however. The Crying of Lot 49 was the only Pynchon novel that Mailer ever finished, and he deplored it as an extended shaggy dog story. What might have been said if the entropist and the existentialist had clinked mugs of Ovaltine across the table, across the abyss?
Mailer’s feelings about postmodern fiction surfaced in a letter he wrote to Gordon Lish a few months before the congress. Lish had edited some of his Esquire essays in the 1970s and had stayed in touch with him, sending him the books he was editing at Knopf, and his own fiction. One of these was Peru, an “obsessively circular novel,” as one reviewer put it. The novel (which might be a memoir, or so it hints) is about the memories the narrator, Gordon, has of a boy he killed in a sandbox by gashing his skull with a toy hoe. The boys are six. Little by little, memory byte by memory byte, Gordon remembers the gory details but with no emotion. Mailer liked Lish but detested his book.
Lish admired the work of Gertrude Stein, but this earned him no points with Mailer. “I whisper to you that I don’t really care in my secret heart whether Gertrude Stein lives forever or perishes tomorrow in Parnassus,” Mailer wrote. “You have the perfect right to go in your direction”—Stein’s direction—“just as I have to go in mine, but the directions are profoundly opposed.”
What your work catches is everything I detest about modern life. The entropy first, the breakdown of syntax, of concentration, mobility, all the murky tides that wash at our sensibilities. You capture that perfectly until my teeth are ready to grind. I feel as if literature is beleaguered, and that we must no longer study the disease but erect baroque monuments to stand against it, even if they’re no more meaningful than sand castles against the filthy dull polluted tide. I want literature that has more syntax, more concentration, more in the way of symbols, and not that damned torturous undertow [words illegible] deterioration of forms, pervasive indefinable dread, and anomie.
He ends his condemnation of postmodernism by saying that he hesitated to write this kind of letter, but remaining silent would only “subject us both to the dirty and mucky tide.” The letter was written just at the point when he was about to break from his spy novel and take up his rainmaking chores at PEN, and it is fair to surmise that his comments to Lish reminded him of the kind of novel he had begun, which he would devote himself to for the next five years. It would be his longest stretch of uninterrupted novel writing in forty years—almost uninterrupted, that is.