9.

Underground Rumbles

NORMAN MAILER

Twenty-five-year-old Norman Mailer was living with his wife in France when his debut novel was published. On a hot June day in 1948, he collected his mail from an American Express office while driving through Nice with his sister and a friend. Going through the stack of cables and letters and clippings in the car, Mailer looked up and said, “Gee, I’m number one on the best seller list.” The Naked and the Dead swamped its startlingly young author in a tidal wave of fame. The reviews announced the arrival of a major talent, and readers thrilled to a young veteran’s front-lines account of the war that had recently shaken the world. America may not have been quite prepared for the horrifying Holocaust stories of a person like Sophie from Sophie’s Choice, but accounts of the U.S. soldiers who had beaten back the enemies of freedom—that was different. “Everyone was ready,” Mailer wrote five decades later, “for a big war novel that gave some idea of what it had all been like—it thrived on its scenes of combat—and it had a best-seller style.”

As one of Mailer’s heroes, Henry Miller, described his own prose, the writing of The Naked and the Dead is “direct as a knife thrust.” It provides an unsanitized and vivid picture of the troops who are trying to seize a small island in the Pacific theater. The novel offered up an antidote to the patriotic cheerfulness and bluster that had shaped the public image of what is sometimes called “the good war.” The army that fights for a just cause, Mailer reminded us, does not look like pure virtue up close. The exercise of American power both enthralled and repelled him, and that tension ratchets up the energy of the book. Mailer wanted to reproduce the way GIs really lived and talked. He knew that presented a problem and used the word “fug” throughout in place of “fuck,” which is distracting and unfortunate, and still the first publishing house to offer him a contract refused to put out the book unless the content was cleaned up further. (Official censorship and lawsuits were a legitimate concern; Miller’s books were still banned in the United States and were not legally available until 1961.) The Naked and the Dead, picked up by a different publisher at a bargain, did draw fire from the critics for its obscenity and coarseness. But the portrayal of the boots on the ground has an authenticity that gives the novel a gathering force.

While he was churning out his seven-hundred-page debut in fifteen months, mostly in a stifling room in a boardinghouse in Brooklyn Heights, Mailer kept four books on the shelf by his desk. Among them was U.S.A., by John Dos Passos, another war veteran, who had written much of Manhattan Transfer while living a few blocks away on Columbia Heights. Critics saw the strong influence, perhaps too strong, of Dos Passos, and Mailer later acknowledged the debt in style and technique. Also on the shelf was Of Time and the River. As Mailer well knew, Thomas Wolfe had tortured himself over that epic on the very same terrain, stalking the nighttime Heights, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and back, finally falling asleep only to see in his dreams the “blazing visions” of his anxieties. Like his contemporary William Styron, later a major rival, Mailer saw a greatness in Wolfe. He admired the southerner’s ambition to capture the whole American experience with a vision that came “up from the people.” The price Mailer paid for this reverence, he once suggested, was his “occasional overrich descriptions.”

When Mailer returned to the States after mounting the best-seller list, money was suddenly not a problem, yet he and his wife rented a room in the same lousy Remsen Street boardinghouse that he had earlier used only as a place to work. He brought a royalties check from his publisher to deposit it at the neighborhood branch of Bankers Trust. The clerk, holding a check worth roughly three hundred thousand dollars in today’s terms, peered at the customer’s combat jacket and T-shirt. He asked for the name of Mailer’s usual clerk at a Manhattan branch and placed a call to verify his identity. Mailer heard him let out a long “Ohhh” before he hung up and congratulated Mailer for writing that book. Or so the story went in Mailer’s telling.

Like anyone, Mailer wanted to be admired, but selling two hundred thousand copies in the first year caught him flat-footed. His wife wrote in a letter to friends that Mailer had become something of a local hero, joking that he’d supplanted doctors and lawyers as the model son for Jewish Brooklyn mothers: “‘Go to your room, Sonny,’ they tell their offspring, ‘and write a book like Norman Mailer did.’” Of course the success was satisfying and at first he soaked up the attention, which fed his already formidable ego. But in quiet moments, he later said, what he felt was this: “I must have done something wrong. They shouldn’t have liked it.”

The reception of The Naked and the Dead troubled him because he conceived of it as fiercely antiwar, which many people seemed not to understand. Graver still, the book’s success threatened his conception of himself as an oppositional figure, a fighter against all that is easily swallowed by mainstream culture. Now he’d have to fight against himself. And so he did. Mailer battled everyone else, too, and in full view—the bigger the stage, the better. Soon enough he became widely known as a bully, a drunk, and a misogynist. The reading world turned out for each book to debate whether he had fallen on his face or had shown his gift for saying what no one else could see or had the guts to say. He was the leading enfant terrible of the American literary century.

*   *   *

Mailer was raised in a less fancy Brooklyn environment than the Heights, but it wasn’t so gritty as he sometimes let others believe. In the first few years of his life, his family moved from Long Branch, New Jersey, where he was born in 1923, to Flatbush, near Cortelyou Road. They fit the demographic profile that made Flatbush what it was when William Styron wound up there after the war: they were Jewish and they were climbing up the ladder, already better off than was the norm in the Jewish enclaves of Williamsburg and Brownsville but not so comfortable as the home owners of Borough Park. Mailer’s father, Barney, born in Lithuania, had lived in South Africa and been trained as an accountant before immigrating to the United States. He and his wife, Fanny, benefited from their association with wealthier relatives, particularly Barney’s brother-in-law, who had immigrated earlier and done very well for himself. He sometimes took in Norman and his sister in the summers by the beach in New Jersey. He also owned a heating oil company in Brooklyn, and Mailer’s parents both worked there for a time, with Fanny outlasting Barney and eventually running the place. She put in long hours taking orders and coordinating deliveries, but she took in enough to have help at home with the kids. Barney had trouble getting jobs throughout the Depression, and, like Alfred Kazin’s father in Brownsville, he was greeted each day with the question, “Did you find work?” But in the Kazin family the question had much more urgency. Barney Mailer always dressed impeccably and carried himself with high style and dignity, and many people who knew him would have been surprised to hear that he was ever unemployed.

The family moved to a two-bedroom apartment at 555 Crown Street, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, when Norman was nine years old. It was a step up. Now they were living in the vicinity of Eastern Parkway (the area sometimes went by that name) among the “alrightnik” Jews whom Kazin thought of as citizens of another world. The Mailers chose the neighborhood partly because it was even more Jewish than Flatbush. Corner vendors sold Yiddish newspapers like the Jewish Morning Journal, the Forward, and the Communist Freiheit. As a Mailer friend recalled it, about twenty synagogues, packed on holidays, lined Eastern Parkway, and “everything in the neighborhood was kosher—the butchers and the delicatessens, everything.” By comparison, Flatbush was marred by “cheap goyim,” Mailer’s mother told Peter Manso, author of the juicy Mailer: His Life and Times (1985). Fanny had a streak of prickly pride; she argued with Mailer’s teacher over a grade, for instance, and years later, when she sensed anti-Semitism while house hunting in Brooklyn Heights, she told off the offender. “I just couldn’t leave without telling her she’s a bum,” she recalled. The adult Norman Mailer could never do that either.

That mediocre grade was an aberration. Mailer was a very fine student. His classmates in the nearby public elementary school, P.S. 161 (still in operation), fit a certain image of the city kid of the pre-television era, particularly the Brooklyn kid. They spent their free time hanging out by the candy store, where you could get an egg cream or a soda mixed on the spot. They played ball in the streets, with each block fielding its own team, and they got into occasional scrapes. The rumor was that Mailer’s protective mother kept him from joining much of the fun. In any case he took more of an interest in his studies and his musical instruments. A childhood friend described a genteel atmosphere in the Mailer house, with an emphasis on manners. “None of us obeyed our parents; he did.” In his high school years he got interested in sex and went on group outings to the Star Burlesque at a theater on Jay Street in downtown Brooklyn. But he did little else to ruffle the feathers of his parents, who lavished attention on him. When he graduated from eighth grade, the principal announced that he had “the highest IQ we’ve ever had at P.S. 161.”

He went on to Boys’ High School, a venerated public institution in a grand Romanesque Revival building at 832 Marcy Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. (The building still stands, though the school merged with another to create Boys and Girls High School in a new location.) Alumni of Boys’ High include the composer Aaron Copland, the polymathic science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, and Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz was a few years too young to know Mailer in high school but later they became close friends. Later still, they turned against each other. The rift came when Mailer published a virtuoso essay in Partisan Review about Podhoretz’s book Making It that threw some brutal punches. In the piece, Mailer shows approval for the way Podhoretz’s book about the “dirty little secret” of ambition and success had mounted a challenge to the New York literary establishment by subjecting it to scrutiny. The old guard had in fact overwhelmingly hated the book. But Mailer comes down hard on Podhoretz for not pissing off the establishment enough, and then proceeds to give it a go himself. Sorry, pal, the essay seems to say, you aren’t up to the job: “My old dear great and good friend Norman Podhoretz … brings the mind of a major engineer to elucidating the character of complex literary structures but would seek—for such is the innocence of his good heart—to climb the Matterhorn on ice skates.” But Podhoretz would not have recognized this bruiser if he’d met him back in high school. Mailer got into some hallway debates but he was not a fighter. He continued to perform in the classroom, and at the age of sixteen he set off for Harvard to join the intellectual elite.

The true outline of Mailer’s youth was not what his adult self would have liked it to be. It was too average, too respectable. He had behaved too well. Mailer probably would have preferred to claim for himself the childhood of Henry Miller, whom he admired “enormously,” to the point of obsession. Near the peak of his career, after winning the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, Mailer took time out for an unprofitable book devoted to Miller, Genius and Lust, a collection of Miller excerpts with Mailer’s commentary interspersed. He was untroubled, clearly, that both Kate Millett and Gore Vidal had recently denounced him and Miller together, posing the two Brooklyn boys as key emblems of a misogynistic and nasty strain of literature. “There has been from Henry Miller and Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression,” Vidal wrote in the New York Review of Books. (Mailer and Vidal—“not a suitable valet for Henry Miller,” in Mailer’s view—had a famous rivalry, punctuated by kiss-off lines, televised showdowns, and even physical violence.)

If Mailer had stood shoulder to shoulder with Miller, throwing rocks at the south side kids on the streets of turn-of-the-century Williamsburg, if he, too, had clashed with his bourgeois parents and his teachers and dropped out of college after six weeks—that he would look back on and smile. Instead he cringed over an upbringing characterized by love and achievement, the way others feel shame about early poverty and dysfunction. He wanted to become someone different and not look back. In the relatively rare instances when Mailer discussed his youth, either he played up its coarseness or he admitted that he had trouble reckoning with his childhood. “I left what part of me belonged to Brooklyn and the Jews on the streets of Crown Heights,” he once wrote. “In college, it came over me like a poor man’s rich fever that I had less connection to the past than anyone I knew.” In his mid-forties he still felt the sting of this anxiety. Watching himself on-screen in a documentary, he saw not the warrior and radical and “champion of obscenity” he had happily become but instead “a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.”

At Harvard, Mailer began to cultivate his tough-guy streak. In Mailer (1999), a nuanced and superb biography written without his participation, Mary V. Dearborn suggests that in college Mailer needed a new way to get the attention that had come to him automatically back in Brooklyn, where he was the smartest guy around and always had his mother’s fawning approval. Now he chain-smoked, tipping his ash into the upturned cuff of his trousers; tried out for a house football team; and spun tales of amorous adventures that his friends found dubious. One of them told biographer Hilary Mills, “I did not, by any standards, see him as sexually precocious, except in his fantasy life. There, my god, yes.” Mailer also tried his friends’ patience by constantly saying he was just a poor Jewish kid from Brooklyn: “It was his standard riposte, playing the slum child.”

Mailer got himself elected to the board of the leading college literary magazine, the Advocate, and became embroiled in the aesthetic controversy roiling the publication. The central debate echoed Philip Rahv’s identification of two camps in literature, the “palefaces” and the “redskins,” in a very influential essay published in the Kenyon Review the same year Mailer entered college, 1939. On campus and in editorial meetings, Mailer sided with the redskin faction, which Rahv argued was best represented by the original bard of Brooklyn, Walt Whitman; Mailer favored vigorous, raw, and often proletarian writing over the refined, intellectual, and polished work of the aesthetes he found precious. He had lately fallen under the spell of Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and most of all James T. Farrell, whose Studs Lonigan trilogy, set in Chicago, showed him that loners and failures casting about in the sweaty city could be the stuff of the novel.

Although Mailer completed his degree in engineering, writing became his overriding preoccupation. He was something of a self-made writer, as was Thomas Wolfe, another early model of his. Like Wolfe, he began scrawling like mad when he still had much to learn about literature or history. What resulted was sometimes naive and hollow, but it was also unfettered by the kind of critical instinct that can stifle creativity. Mailer was running free. In 1941, at eighteen, he won Story magazine’s annual prize for the best undergraduate fiction. That got him noticed by an executive at Time magazine and a young book editor, Ted Amussen, who later signed up The Naked and the Dead.

The campus became more and more consumed by the war in Europe, as students and faculty moved from a predominately isolationist position in ’39 toward heated arguments about intervention (mirroring the debates happening at the same time among the crowd on Middagh Street). Mailer didn’t seem much interested in the politics of it. He later wrote that in the forty-eight hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, “I was worrying darkly whether it would be more likely that a great war novel would be written about Europe or the Pacific.” He graduated in 1943, in a ceremony shadowed by thoughts of the draft cards that were soon to follow the diplomas. Half a year passed before he got his notice, for reasons unknown to him, and during that time he did not volunteer; at twenty years old, he harbored fears of battle, he later admitted, which left him nagged by guilt.

In the meantime he lived with his parents, who had just moved to an apartment in a narrow, elegant town house on a lovely block in Brooklyn Heights, at 102 Pierrepont Street. The fact that a summons to war could arrive on any given day contributed to his urgency to write. He rented cheap studio space in an industrial building down by the Fulton Ferry Landing in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, near Whitman’s old office at the Eagle, and he worked hard. He knew the area had a literary pedigree, and he liked that. Walking down to the studio from the Heights in the morning, Mailer passed within a couple of blocks of the building where Whitman printed Leaves of Grass; and the Henry Street apartment Henry Miller shared with June and her lover in the twenties; and February House, where George Davis still presided and where Richard Wright was still living on the bottom floor.

Before leaving for basic training, Mailer married a woman he had met in college, Bea Silverman, and finished a novel he’d written in nine months called A Transit to Narcissus, based on his experience working for one week at a mental hospital while at Harvard. Ted Amussen turned down the book, as did about twenty other publishers, with the rejection letters continuing to reach him one by one down at Fort Bragg.

The army sent Mailer to the Pacific theater to join the mission to retake the Philippines. Mailer would have qualified to start as an officer, as was the expected course of Harvard graduates, but he had enlisted intentionally as a private; he didn’t want the responsibility of rank, and he thought that this way he had a better chance of seeing action. His developing subversive streak meant that he didn’t want anybody keeping him in line, yet he didn’t want to play the authority role either. He had “absolutely no use” for officers, an army buddy said. His resentment of the higher-ups would find its way into the pages of The Naked and the Dead, where many of them come off very badly, most notably General Cummings. Mailer cycled through two posts early in his time in Asia, each time clashing with a superior. Apparently by request, he was finally assigned to frontline duty on the main island of Luzon, as a rifleman with a unit much like the one in his novel-to-be.

Combat was not heavy, as much of the Japanese force had been beaten back already. Mailer was involved in only “a couple of firefights and skirmishes,” in his words, less than The Naked and the Dead would lead some readers to believe, but he did live under the threat of a Japanese ambush, sleeping in bivouacs and patrolling in awful jungle conditions. He wrote four or five letters a week to his first wife, Bea, and he started asking her to save them, for material. A diary might rot or get lost. His discharge after the war thrilled him. Dearborn writes that Mailer told his second wife that his discharge papers carried the notation “This man does not know how to take orders,” next to which Mailer wrote, “Fuck this guy.”

*   *   *

Returning to the States in May 1946, Mailer began work on his World War II novel almost immediately, at twenty-three. He and Bea rented a place that summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, where Mailer would spend a lot of time throughout his life. He worked diligently both there and at his parents’ place on Pierrepont Street during the initial months of writing The Naked and the Dead. Fanny and Barney now had a neighbor in their building who Mailer knew was a writer. Norman would see the tall man downstairs at the mailboxes and make small talk, but he wasn’t much impressed: “I can remember thinking, This guy’s never going anywhere. I’m sure he thought the same of me.” The neighbor was Arthur Miller.

Soon Norman and Bea took a small two-room apartment with a miniature kitchen at 49 Remsen Street, three blocks away from his parents and a block from 91 Remsen, where Henry and June Miller lived just after getting married and just before getting booted for not paying rent. Mailer felt he needed a separate place to write, and by chance a new friend, the writer Norman Rosten, was vacating for a few months an attic space in a rooming house just down the street. Mailer was living on the fairly tight budget afforded by the GI Bill for returning veterans, but the price was right for the space, at four dollars a week. The building, 20 Remsen Street, stood where Montague Terrace meets Remsen and comes to its end. The stoop was a literal stone’s throw from the chaotic Thomas Wolfe apartment at No. 5 Montague Terrace and Auden’s old apartment at No. 1.

Much of the labor that went into The Naked and the Dead happened in that stuffy and depressing attic. Mailer approached the writing with a professional determination, carefully charting his characters and scenes on index cards and turning out about twenty-five draft pages a week. The insecurities of the typical young, aspiring author were not for him; there was little stewing over whether the novel was any good, none about whether he was cut out for this. “I doubt if ever again I will have a book which is so easy to write,” he wrote in his mid-thirties.

In the same essay, from Advertisements for Myself (1959), Mailer explained with remarkable candor the personal toll of scoring a big hit with his first novel.

I spent the next few years trying to gobble up the experience of a victorious man when I was still no man at all.… So success furnished me great energy, but I wasted most of it in the gears of old habit, and had experience which was overheated, brilliant, anxious, gauche, grim—even, I suspect—killing. My farewell to an average man’s experience was too abrupt.

Mailer felt the pressure of following up his opening act, and he didn’t know where to turn for a second novel, partly because his youth did not interest or inspire him: “There was nothing left in the first twenty-four years of my life to write about.”

In fact, he did draw from his own past in his next work, though he altered it in the direction of the bizarre. Barbary Shore (1951) is Mailer’s only book set principally in Brooklyn, though he lived there for the majority of his life. The novel, short by Mailer’s standards, takes place contemporaneously in a boardinghouse very similar to 20 Remsen Street. The first-person narrator, Michael Lovett, rents a room there with help from a writer friend, and he begins work on a novel. Lovett believes he was in the war, only he can’t be sure because he has somehow been rendered almost entirely amnesiac about his previous life, presumably by the same injury that has left scars and surgical marks on his body. The first sentence establishes the atmosphere of uneasy ambiguity and doubt: “Probably I was in the war.”

The summer Brooklyn streets outside are nearly as down at the heel as the boardinghouse itself. Lovett looks toward Manhattan and watches “a dirty moon yellow the water”; a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge yields the sight of a bum collapsing drunkenly; at the foot of the bridge is “a bare little park with concrete paths and a stunted tree” where Lovett hears the sound of the elevated train and thinks of “the long ride out to the end of the line, and the Negro slums along the way where children sleeping on the fire-escape would turn in their slumber as the train passed, moaning a little in acceptance of its fury.”

Living in a room neighboring Lovett’s is a man who becomes more central in some ways than the narrator. Mailer later called this character, named McLeod, “an intensified version of Charlie Devlin,” Mailer’s actual neighbor at 20 Remsen. Devlin was an eccentric loner who wrote fiction that was never published, but he had a sharp, sometimes cruel intelligence, and an acute literary judgment that Mailer respected; Mailer hired him to edit The Naked and the Dead before he turned it in. (Devlin convinced him to make significant cuts, often giving long, very sardonic accounts of why a passage was all wrong, until Mailer interrupted: “I got it. I agree.”)

In Barbary Shore, McLeod is set up as a kind of mentor-interlocutor to the narrator. McLeod’s way of getting to know Lovett is to interrogate him in a weird conversational style that suggests a real curiosity but also a palpable derisiveness with no evident cause. Lovett is understandably unnerved, but also curious, and so are we, at first. McLeod has a rivalry with the resident of the other room on their floor, Leroy Hollingsworth, who initially seems to be a young bank clerk from a small town, wide-eyed at the big city across the river. Hollingsworth is not who he says he is, though, and neither is McLeod, and neither is a possibly deranged young woman who takes a room downstairs and becomes involved in the story.

Barbary Shore is a very peculiar book. The first two-thirds, though often baffling, sustain our interest in figuring out what exactly is happening. Mailer creates an effectively queasy feeling of disorientation by unhooking the action from ready explanation and familiar signposts. Something called “the little object” figures centrally but is never described; McLeod is said to have roots in a Balkan country that is never named; Trotsky is repeatedly alluded to but also never named. We are in an allegory of sorts, an allegory steeped in anxiety, whether justified or paranoiac, about world-historical forces and massive authorities bearing down on individual lives. It eventually emerges that McLeod was an active and radical member of the Communist Party and that Hollingsworth is an operative of an unnamed government agency reminiscent of the FBI. He has been assigned to unmask McLeod and pry from his clutches a “little object” he may have stolen from the agency. Their verbal showdowns generate a certain drama about who is telling the truth and what Mailer is up to, but eventually the method in the madness becomes only too clear.

McLeod’s character may resemble Charlie Devlin’s, but his ideas come straight from Jean Malaquais, a radical to whom the novel is dedicated. Mailer met Malaquais in France in the late forties and became intrigued by his combative and prickly personality, which alienated others. Malaquais, who had written a novel praised by Trotsky himself, didn’t think highly of Mailer. He would tell him how poorly The Naked and the Dead was written (Malaquais translated it into French), and he would argue with Mailer for hours about politics, telling him he was naive. Malaquais recalled to Manso that Mailer “seemed eager, touching, romantic. Also, how do you say?—uncouth? His manners were those of a young Brooklyn boy, not eccentric, not bohemian, with fuzzy notions and no culture, as far as I was concerned. Even then he had this talent for expatiating about philosophers he didn’t have the vaguest understanding of.” Malaquais represented a new opponent for Mailer to spar with. The Naked and the Dead had won nearly everyone over. But here was an exception—here was someone new to impress.

The last third of Barbary Shore takes a bad turn. Several chapters are devoted to extended political speechifying by McLeod, standing in for Malaquais, and the novel suffers for it. We wait in vain for signs of skepticism from Lovett, and the contest of will and wit between McLeod and Hollingsworth becomes heavily rigged.

In 1951, critics did not care for McLeod’s sermon, nor for the novel, which took a beating that Mailer was not prepared for. Mailer was embracing a maverick form of leftism—both anti-Communist and anti-American—that was popular with almost nobody, Malaquais excepted. Moreover, Mailer, at twenty-eight, had become a devoted follower of Malaquais and many felt he was not politically sophisticated enough to adequately question his views. The writer and editor John Leonard said much later that though he was sympathetic to the book’s project, “Mailer—posing as the bad boy—invented himself as though everyone before him, the people who wrote about American culture and society in the thirties and forties, hadn’t written, as though they hadn’t thought they’d solved certain problems.” Irving Howe’s review in the Nation showed some of the resulting frustration.

Mailer has come to his radicalism a little late: he does not really know in his flesh and bones what has happened to the socialist hope in the era of Hitler and Stalin, and that is why he can refer so cavalierly to democracy and carry on like a stale pamphleteer. He is sincere and he is serious; I admire his courage.… But I can only say that his relation to his material, like his presentation of it, is not authentic. Otherwise he would not seem so sure.

The hatchet jobs poured in: the Herald Tribune (“dull, in execution if not conception”); the New Yorker (“it has a monolithic flawless badness”); Saturday Review of Literature (“I think it is a mistake”); and, perhaps harshest of all, Time magazine, a nemesis of Mailer’s (“Paceless, tasteless and graceless”).

Although Mailer knew the politics of Barbary Shore would not be greeted warmly, the book’s reception was a rude shock that lasted a long time. He did not expect to see his skill as a novelist be challenged and to lose so quickly the status that his debut had won him. The years that followed were among the darkest of his life; in fact, the whole decade that followed The Naked and the Dead may have been his worst. We know Mailer had over fifty more years of literary celebrity ahead of him despite the flop of Barbary Shore; he, of course, did not, and he began to “act out,” to use the kind of schoolmarmish term he abhorred. Before splitting with Bea, he took up with the mercurial woman who became his second wife, Adele Morales. Her outlandish behavior and penchant for manipulating male attention calls to mind Henry Miller’s great love, June. Mailer picked fights just for the sake of it and began a lifelong habit of butting heads with people—literally. (He did it to Vidal in the dressing room backstage before the two authors had a nakedly hostile debate on The Dick Cavett Show.) Mailer helped found the Village Voice and then wrote bad columns with the explicit goal of being “actively disliked each week.” When his 1955 novel, The Deer Park, had a hard time of it with the critics, he took out a big ad in the Voice featuring quotes from the most cutting reviews. Having heard somewhere that William Styron was spreading a rumor that Adele was a lesbian, he sent Styron a vicious letter that severed their friendship for over twenty years. Looking back in the late fifties, Mailer wrote, “There may have been too many fights for me, too much sex, liquor, marijuana, benzedrine and seconal, much too much ridiculous and brain-blasting rage at the miniscule frustrations of a most loathsome literary world.”

That last quotation comes from Advertisements for Myself (1959), and it suggests the new self-awareness that helped to make that obnoxiously titled book an extraordinary demonstration of why Mailer mattered. Advertisements revealed that somewhere in the destructive bonfire of Mailer’s late twenties and early thirties was the inner flame of his true talent. The book is a hodgepodge of material, much of it previously published and some of it poorly written. The valuable elements come mostly in the newly written italicized text that appears between the excerpts. Here Mailer speaks plainly, freely acknowledging his ego, his desire to outrage, and his failings from the first bracing sentence: “Like many another vain, empty, and bullying body of our time, I have been running for President these last ten years in the privacy of my mind, and it occurs to me that I am less close now than when I began.” In admitting his mixed opinions of his own career and work, Mailer pulls a very rare maneuver. (“I don’t see how I can recommend ‘A Calculus at Heaven,’” he writes, introducing his early novella.) Aha, the reader now thinks, if this man realizes he’s an arrogant bully and that “obviously Barbary Shore was not good enough,” then here is a man I can listen to. Partly this is tactical, a canny way of disarming the audience so he can tangle with them once again.

The collection’s biggest shocker in literary circles was the short piece, newly published, called “Evaluations—Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room.” In it Mailer takes up one contemporary fiction writer after another, for a few sentences or paragraphs each, and gives his unsparing assessment. A selection of examples: James Jones, a former close friend of Mailer’s, “has sold out badly”; Styron’s “mind was uncorrupted by a new idea”; Capote has what it takes, Mailer thinks, but “has shown no evidence that he is serious about the deep resources of the novel”; Kerouac’s “rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore”; about Saul Bellow, future winner of the Nobel Prize, Mailer says, “I cannot take him seriously as a major novelist.” In a typical gesture, he also dismisses with one stroke “the talented women who write today.” Mailer’s sexism was undeniable, and his writing suffered for his almost total failure to take women seriously.

Seen from one angle, Mailer’s drive-by shooting of his peers is an irresponsible exercise that seems as if it could have been written in a heedless night or two. It was like doing a cannonball into a swimming pool full of adults. But the piece is in keeping with Mailer’s larger purpose in the book, which is to throw down the gauntlet: I know this is against the rules, but who made these rules, and why should we listen? We all have our private thoughts and conversations, he seems to say, so let’s put it out in the open, quick and dirty. In other words, Mailer was writing a blog forty years early.

Another of the book’s audacious provocations was “The White Negro,” an essay that had aroused controversy when it appeared in Dissent two years earlier, in 1957. In this case Mailer introduces the piece without apology: “It is one of the best things I have done.” In the essay, Mailer posits that in the age of the death camps, the atom bomb, and fifties conformity, the country has been gripped by an existential fear that now stymies creative and vital instincts. Faced with this grim reality, a new breed of person has arisen, “the American existentialist—the hipster,” who holds that “the only life-giving answer is … to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself.” In the dichotomy between “the Hip” and “the Square” that Mailer puts forward, “the source of Hip is the Negro.” But a certain segment of white people have begun to adopt the Hip attitudes of black life, as a result of a “ménage-a-trois” involving the bohemian, the juvenile delinquent, and the Negro, a marriage in which “marijuana was the wedding ring.” (Nice touch, that one.) Whether white or black, the hipster is a kind of mystic in Mailer’s vision. He—always he, never she in Mailer—obeys no code derived from his upbringing or past. His only morality is “to be engaged in one primal battle: to open the limits of the possible for oneself, for oneself alone, because that is one’s need.”

What raised a ruckus in “The White Negro” was not only the offensive assumptions and stereotypes about “the Negro” but Mailer’s attitude and tone. He sounded awfully approving about the antisocial stance he was describing, and he seemed to be sincere in suggesting the merits of “encouraging the psychopath in oneself.” In the most controversial passage, Mailer speaks of the “courage” of a hypothetical pair of hoodlums who “beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper,” thereby “daring the unknown.” This was the era of Eisenhower, of suburbanization and wholesomeness and homogenization, of Leave It to Beaver and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Elvis Presley could be shown on television only from the waist up. A lot of people were unprepared for “The White Negro.”

Mailer was consciously testing the limits here, crossing lines, baiting the audience. His writing in “The White Negro” is incautious, abstract, and full of suspect generalizations. But the essay wielded influence in intellectual circles by boldly moving into taboo terrain that others were tiptoeing around. Mailer put his finger on something, and his critics would have a harder and harder time denying that fact as time went on. As Mary Dearborn argues, Mailer identified a rebellious agitation—brewing under the surface of the fifties—that would become central to the story of the sixties. The hip sensibility Mailer described, with some modifications over time, was a driving force of the civil rights era, the hippie movement, free love, drug culture, and the general breakdown of consensus values. Mailer was digging into fertile ground.

For all his wild punches and loud oratory, Mailer had a gift for sensing the underground rumbles in American life. Even in Barbary Shore, the central preoccupations were legitimate and prescient. Typically, the way he later described the novel sounds unhinged, but it captures something of the wild anxieties of America in the early Cold War era, when jubilation over victory in World War II was giving way in some quarters to fear of another world war and an atmosphere of political repression: “Barbary Shore … has in its high fevers a kind of insane insight into the psychic mysteries of Stalinists, secret policemen, narcissists, children, Lesbians, hysterics, revolutionaries—it has an air which for me is the air of our time, authority and nihilism stalking one another in the orgiastic hollow of this century.”

“Insane insight”—it’s a nice turn of phrase, and it succinctly captures what Mailer was all about. Mailer shares with many of his Brooklyn literary ancestors—notably Miller and Whitman—a fascination and affinity with the weirdo elements of society, the people without status, the ones who raise eyebrows, the “psychic outlaws,” as Mailer called them. Among his subjects were loner radicals (Barbary Shore), murderers (An American Dream, The Executioner’s Song), hunters drunk on testosterone (Why Are We in Vietnam?), and prizefighters (The Fight). Like Whitman and Miller, he embraced the animalistic, reveling in sex and in the raw human impulses.

Mailer also bore the influence of the “insane insight” of Wolfe, another man who liked to take shots at the high and mighty. Putting forth a Wolfe-like view, he wrote, “A young adventurer reads a great novel in the unvoiced hope it is a grindstone which sharpens his axe sufficiently to smash down doors now locked to him.” Showing great respect, Mailer described Wolfe as daring death with the boldness of his attack on the page, “firing the passions which rotted his brain on those long paranoid nights in Brooklyn when he wrote in exaltation and terror on the top of a refrigerator.” Mailer also hailed Wolfe, with somewhat less respect, for describing society “like the greatest five-year-old who ever lived, an invaluable achievement.”

Mailer was like a five-year-old, too. The phrase “enfant terrible” is fitting, for he often behaved like a tyrannical child—only a child with clout and a drinking problem. When sharply criticized by Kate Millett for his misogyny, Mailer proved her point by writing a dismissive rejoinder that called her “Kate-baby.” And that’s nothing compared to stabbing your wife with a penknife. It happened at a party that he and Adele threw in 1960 at an apartment they briefly lived in on the Upper West Side. Mailer had invited everyone from high-society types to homeless people and it became a rowdy affair. Mailer got blind drunk and began provoking guests, who grew uncomfortable and started to leave. Dearborn pieces together the events from various accounts of uncertain credibility. With a few guests still there very late, Adele screamed at Norman and he stabbed her in the stomach and the back. Chaos followed, as some cared for Adele while others protected Mailer and still others slipped away, protecting themselves. Adele briefly showed support for Mailer after he was arrested, which eventually helped him get off absurdly lightly for the crime. But that marriage didn’t last, and Adele was wife number two out of six for Mailer.

*   *   *

Mailer bought a Brooklyn brownstone at 142 Columbia Heights with his mother, and in 1962 he moved in with his third wife, a woman of aristocratic lineage named Lady Jeanne Campbell. He would keep the place for the remaining forty-five years of his life. For all of Mailer’s bad-boy antics, the house bore many hallmarks of the bourgeois life. Early on, he brought in a maid and began major renovations. The address, on a placid street with Manhattan skyline views and a storied literary history, would have been desirable to almost anyone. For Mailer, an added draw was the proximity to his parents. “Here I married this great and powerful writer,” Jeanne once joked, “and all we ever did was go to dinner with his mother.”

The renovation divided the building into five apartments and raised the roof. That made the top-level apartment’s living room two stories high, and the new windows offered a glorious view of the river and Manhattan. In the mid-seventies, facing money troubles, Mailer turned the brownstone into a condominium and sold off the lower three floors. The top-floor space, with the tall ceiling, remained the Mailer headquarters. He had a carpenter friend build a loft near the ceiling to serve as his office. To reach it, Mailer, ever the adventurer, had to scale a crow’s nest that led to a catwalk that led to a rope ladder—very pirate-on-the-high-seas.

In this apartment, Mailer raised his children (there were eight in all); wrote untold pages (for a time he kept a studio down the block); ate the same breakfast almost every day, often with his mother; celebrated his fourth and sixth weddings; built a huge model city out of Legos; and eventually brought his mother to live with him and his sixth and last wife, Norris Church Mailer. Norman also hosted fancy affairs at the Brooklyn brownstone, revealing that for all his anger at what he called “the Establishment” with a capital E, he had a weakness for glamour. These huge parties included a 1976 anniversary celebration of the marriage of historian Doris Kearns to Dick Goodwin. Among the A-list guests was Jacqueline Onassis, who had visited with Truman Capote one street over more than a decade before. Mailer also threw a soirée in 1965 in honor of the new light-heavyweight champion of the world, José Torres, as well as a fund-raising event for striking Columbia University students in 1968. In 1969, it was in the living room on Columbia Heights that Mailer and the columnist Jimmy Breslin and a coterie of friends and advisers (including Gloria Steinem, oddly) had a first merry meeting to discuss a run for New York City mayor.

Mailer had intended to run for mayor in the 1961 race, but the scandal surrounding the stabbing put an end to that. Not so in 1969, when Mailer shared a ticket with Breslin, under the slogan “No more bullshit.” (Unfortunately for the campaign, those words could not appear in papers or on television.) He ran in earnest, not as a stunt, but his platform included such curiosities as turning the city into the fifty-first state and developing a “Vegas East” at Coney Island. Mailer somehow secured about forty thousand votes, despite drunkenly insulting his supporters and staff in a speech at a fund-raiser at the Village Gate bar.

Mailer also became involved in the intrigue surrounding a drug ring that came under large-scale investigation in the early eighties. When a friend of his, Buzz Farbar, got busted in the sting, Farbar agreed to wear a wire and record his conversation with Mailer over lunch at Armando’s, a restaurant still in operation at 143 Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. The federal authorities were targeting the big-name author. Mailer, who might have sensed trouble, said nothing at lunch to incriminate himself. A drug smuggler who knew him told Dearborn that Mailer’s Brooklyn apartment was broken into and ransacked in the course of the investigation. It looked like the work of law enforcement: nothing was stolen, and a bag of Mailer’s pot was pointedly placed in the center of his bed.

A growing contingent of those around him became concerned about Mailer’s attraction to underworld figures. His fascination with transgressive and aggressive acts repeatedly got him into trouble (as in the case of “The White Negro”). In an infamous episode in the early eighties, Mailer helped publish the letters of Jack Henry Abbott, an imprisoned convicted killer he had been corresponding with. Mailer extended a job offer in case Abbott were granted parole. Upon his release, Abbott flew to Kennedy Airport, where Mailer met his flight at 1:00 a.m. They went back to Mailer’s place and the two had a late-night talk out on the terrace overlooking Manhattan’s skyline. About a month later, Abbott murdered a young waiter with a knife to the chest. During the trial, the press bore down on Mailer, who had to admit, “I have blood on my hands.”

If Mailer was too infatuated with violence—and there’s not much question that he was—that obsession also lent power to his work. His reported book The Fight chronicles the so-called Rumble in the Jungle, the heavyweight battle in Kinshasa, Zaire, between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. This account, informed by Mailer’s longtime love of boxing, produced some of his classic bravura reportage. (His on-screen commentary is a highlight of the dynamite 1996 documentary about this fight, When We Were Kings.) Here’s Mailer’s jazzy riff from The Fight on the climactic moment of the bout, when Ali tagged Foreman with a stiff right hand that sent him wheeling to the canvas: “He went over like a six-foot sixty-year-old butler who has just heard tragic news, yes, fell over all of a long collapsing two seconds, down came the champion in sections and Ali revolved with him in a close circle, hand primed to hit him one more time, and never the need, a wholly intimate escort to the floor.” In Mailer’s thousand-page 1979 book, The Executioner’s Song, a very lightly fictionalized account subtitled “A True Life Novel” (shades of In Cold Blood), Mailer revisited the story of Gary Gilmore, a convicted killer who was put to death by rifle squad in 1977. Written with dispassion in a direct, “straight jailhouse prose,” as Larned Bradford put it, the book proved divisive as usual, but it made a mark the size of a crater. Joan Didion’s New York Times review itself drew a lot of attention. Her praise for Mailer’s charting of “that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience,” her own terrain, rang out loudly, as did her closing sentence: “This is an absolutely astonishing book.” The Executioner’s Song won Mailer his second Pulitzer Prize.

The book that won him his first Pulitzer, The Armies of the Night (1968), is a work of nonfiction that could also have been called The Fight, but in this case a fight against violence. It recounts the October 1967 march on the Pentagon in protest against the Vietnam War. The book cemented Mailer’s reputation as one of the leading practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, which borrowed novelistic techniques and took a more personal and subjective approach to reporting. Mailer participated in the march, first giving a poorly received speech while swigging bourbon out of a coffee mug. He later deliberately got himself arrested and briefly imprisoned for “transgressing” a line of military police.

Mailer had adopted an antiwar line earlier than many others on the left. In 1965, a collection of New York intellectuals published an open letter in Partisan Review that gave a mixed assessment of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, opposing the current tack but stating that they “have not heard of any alternative policy” that would bring peace. Mailer’s printed reply was another attack on lily-livered literary New York: “Your words read like they were written in milk of magnesia.” He added, “The editors ask for a counterpolicy. I offer it. It is to get out of Asia.”

Mailer was uneasy about activism and about certain elements of the antiwar contingent, as he makes clear in the very funny opening chapters of The Armies of the Night. As in Advertisements for Myself, Mailer mixes in a redeeming element of self-mockery throughout the book. But his purpose in The Armies of the Night is serious. It is to stand with the motley crowd, the ragged opposition, against “the Pentagon, blind five-sided eye of a subtle oppression which had come to America out of the very air of the century.” As Dearborn writes, Mailer’s account, entertaining as it was, made readers understand that the ragtag protest movement, largely made up of students, was not to be taken lightly.

A core of ambivalence runs through The Armies of the Night, for Mailer is clearly disgusted with the course the United States has taken, but he can’t help feeling a swelling pride at taking part in the American tradition of speaking out. What always energized Mailer was a chance to do battle, to show that he was not a timid middle-class Brooklyn boy but a Brooklyn street fighter. In 1952 Mailer said, “Is there nothing to remind us that the writer does not need to be integrated into his society, and often works best in opposition to it?” Fifteen years later, he applied the principle in The Armies of the Night, but his opposition grew out of loyalty. In the New York Times review, one Brooklyn writer, Alfred Kazin, invoked another, Walt Whitman, to weigh the achievement of a third, Norman Mailer—all of them tied in a tradition of posing a challenge to a country they believed in.

When a writer gets old enough, like Whitman, one forgets that he was just as outrageous an egotist and actor as Norman Mailer is.… I believe that “Armies of the Night” is just as brilliant a personal testimony as Whitman’s diary of the Civil War, “Specimen Days,” and Whitman’s great essay on the crisis of the Republic during the Gilded Age, “Democratic Vistas.” I believe that it is a work of personal and political reportage that brings to the inner and developing crisis of the United States at this moment admirable sensibilities, candid intelligence, the most moving concern for America itself.