But this loving acceptance rubbed the rest of the family the wrong way. To them, Mike’s suicide was a betrayal. Their grief was colored with anger, frustration, and fear that bipolar disorder might someday claim yet another member of their family. Somehow, they felt, to honor Mike’s terrible decision was to make that more likely.
Barbara, the middle child, felt pulled in both directions—“as usual,” she says. “I guess it’s my role.”
Janet, at the memorial service five weeks after Mike’s suicide: “It was a beautiful death…. Anyone who knew him knows that if anyone could have beaten this thing, it was Mike. He tried so hard. He desperately wanted to live. We all wanted him to stay. But the reasons we had were for ourselves. He was in so much pain. He had this terrible disease. As health professionals, we had both seen the futility of keeping people alive long past the point where it makes sense for them or society…. As hard as it is for us to face, I know what he did was right for him. [Quoting from the Gospel of John:] ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’”
Marilyn, outdoors, just after the service: “This was not a ‘beautiful death.’ I resent any suggestion that suicide is an acceptable outcome for this illness, that it’s okay under these circumstances. What Mike did, what my mother did, is not okay. Most people who have this problem work their way through it without treatment. I have children. My children are at greater risk of committing suicide because of what Mike did, and what my mother did, just because they’re growing up in a family where suicide is part of their experience. And I’m angry about it.”
Ed, standing next to her: “We all went together to see this shrink after Mike did it. It’s probably something we should have done as a family years ago, I don’t know. But I told the shrink, ‘If any of my other kids so much as hint that they plan to do this, let me know. I’ll shoot ’em first.’ It would be better than living through this again.”
Peter, back home with Marilyn in Vermont: “It’s easy to second-guess from this far away. This was the only way out Mike could see for himself. Maybe something else could have been done. Maybe not. But don’t give me this ‘beautiful death’ bullshit. It’s a fucking tragedy.”
Annalee, at her home in Alaska, sobbing: “I really believe if he had taken as much as he could take…it wasn’t fair to ask him to keep on taking it…. No matter how hard on us it would be to lose him, he didn’t deserve that much pain. I couldn’t ask him to keep on enduring it…I never could actually bring myself to say…‘It’s okay to kill yourself ’…but I wanted him to know…I wanted to leave him with this feeling…I wouldn’t resent him for it…hate him for it.”
Barbara, home in Vermont: “I’ve been struggling really hard with this, with trying to feel that what Mike and Mom did was okay, but that suicide is not okay for anyone else. It isn’t easy…. There’s no closure with suicide. You can’t come to terms with it. You can’t. That’s the terrible thing about it. So I don’t think there was anything beautiful about what my brother did, much as I love him. ‘Beautiful’ is living life to the fullest. Suicide is not beautiful.”
FIGHT WITH FAME (NORMAN MAILER)
DECEMBER 1984
Norman Mailer was one of the writers whose work initially inspired me—particularly Armies of the Night, Of a Fire on the Moon, and The Executioner’s Song—and I undertook this story just to get a chance to meet him in person. After the story appeared, I was surprised to receive a complimentary letter from Mailer. He wrote, “Research is research, and we all can do it, but insight is rare. My God, have I become that transparent?” His words of encouragement meant a lot to me, and still do.
Norman Mailer has done it again.
He has this new book called Tough Guys Don’t Dance. It’s a murder story. Now, it’s no literary alp, not even in the pyramid range, really. It’s more the size of a sand castle, modest but nicely crafted, and with what will likely be a similar lifespan. But even Norman Mailer is entitled to aim low now and then, and, face it, tough guys and murders are Mailer’s meat. So Random House was happy enough just before publication to throw a dinner party in Washington, D.C., to tout the book and show off its new hotshot writer. And after dinner, reporters were invited to ask questions. That was when he did it.
“This book is like an illegitimate baby,” he said. “It was written in two months, therefore born out of wedlock, and I’m struck by the fact that the event took place”—imagine here the publicists from Random House, starting suddenly like deer downwind of a hungry lion, gulping their last swallows of champagne and wheeling around in their chairs—“When I read it, I don’t wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write”—no, not true, not true! Not of you, Norman, an author who typically aims for nothing less than immortality with each new effort, and even if it were true, it’s damn faint praise—“I could have tarnished myself, but I didn’t”—there’s still time…only a few tables are in the way, we could maybe gag him and wrestle him out that side door before he can say another—“I’d come to a point in my life where I really felt up against it. If I didn’t write a book in two months”—oh, no!—“I owed my former publisher a large sum of money”—Oh, NO!…only two tables, have to dodge Norman’s fabled right uppercut—“I couldn’t write a word for months and had been drawing an advance…. If I didn’t write it”—no! Norman, no!—” with all I owed the IRS and my old publisher, I’d have to begin cheating Random House immediately.”
Too late. A publicist’s nightmare. It would be hard to script a paler pitch for what really is, really, quite a readable little book. But Mailer’s remarks were out, and the line on Tough Guys took on a life of its own. New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, the wires—straight from the author’s big mouth. He wrote it in two months to pay his bills. Why didn’t he just do an American Express commercial, for God’s sake?
So we find ourselves, three months later, at a small news conference on the seventh floor of the slick, modern Random House building in New York. Assembled in a long working conference room are five reporters, including the estimable John Barkham, of John Barkham Reviews. They have been invited by the publisher to talk with Norman Mailer about his new book. Tough Guys was published several weeks before, and despite the line on the book and a couple of prominent, nasty reviews—some critics clearly resented handling tainted goods—it has been holding steady in the middle of most best-seller lists.
Mailer enters on time, escorted by a crisp Random House executive named Carol Schneider, who stays roughly twelve inches off the author’s left shoulder at all times. At sixty-one, Mailer looks less pugnacious than pudgy. He is like a boyish grandfather, respectable but full of mischief. He looks flushed—this could be the result of having been recently in the sun, or it could be the afterglow of a long press agent’s lunch, perhaps both.
Whatever, his manner radiates vigor. His blue eyes, under a spray of white eyebrows, are quick and playful. He stands on the balls of his feet and seems always intently aware of where his hands are—in his pockets, gesturing, pointing, striking out at some elusive invisible enemy dodging just in front of him. Mailer’s clipped white curls are a happy mess. He has exceptionally large ears, the kind of ears kids probably teased him about when he was little. They protrude like supersensitive listening devices, making his face seem wider than it is long. He wears a navy blazer and a white shirt with fine stripes of pink, yellow, and blue. His gray slacks are belted tightly, rounding his belly out desperately over and under it. His collar is open, and his silk tie is yanked askew. In sum, he appears on this day like a man ready to make an effort but willing to go only so far. And, typically, there is that cheerful, reckless look in his eye.
Mailer wastes no time seizing the wheel at this small event.
“I have a story we can start with, ’cause I learned something over the weekend,” he says, his voice a staccato huff. He explains that he has just returned from a film festival in Colorado. He describes the festival briefly and says he showed
a film, Maidstone, a controversial 1963 effort about which few people have shared or even understood Mailer’s abundant enthusiasm. “Before the movie began, I talked about it, and I had everybody laughing and laughing. And I talked about it, how bad it was, everything that was wrong with it. And I thought—I really like the movie, you see—I thought they’d see that I was kidding them. And instead, what happened is—there were two hundred and fifty people in the theater at the start of the movie, and by the time the movie was over, there were eighty left. One hundred and seventy people walked out. I counted them.
“So I was thinking of that because when I was in Washington, then we were talking about Tough Guys—that was before the book came out—I started joking about it. I said I wrote this thing in two months, and I hope it’s good and so forth, blah, blah, blah. And, of course, a lot of people took it very seriously.”
Ah ha! Mailer had come around to the point. Ears perk up around the table. Tape recorders edge closer.
“You see, I did write the thing in two months—I want to get into that—but if I had thought it was not a good book, I never would have talked that way. I would have said, ‘I worked on this thing for five years, I went back to it many times, and I suffered over it terribly. It came to birth through great pain, and I hope you like it.’”
This comment is delivered like a punch line, and it leaves Mailer’s small audience laughing. In person, much more of the comedy in Mailer’s view of himself comes across than it does in his prose. One of the reporters, ignorant of the earlier remarks, asks, “What did you say about the book on that occasion, that you have come to regret?”
“Well, I don’t regret it, I just think it was chancy what I did, and silly.” Having won the audience over with wit, Mailer now turns serious. “What I did was, I started talking about how I had written the book in two months—which is absolutely true—and that, ah…I don’t remember what I said.”
Mailer looks over at Schneider.
“Do you remember what I said?” he asks.
Touchy here. Clearly, elaborating on the earlier statements is not a good idea. Mailer is looking for some coaching. For those present who weren’t quite sure what is going on, the scene has come into focus. It is an act of contrition, of sorts. Mailer isn’t exactly eating his words, just taking them back in his mouth, chewing them over again, and assembling the remasticated material with greater care.
“You discussed financial things,” says Schneider, discreetly.
“I talked about how much I was in debt, and about how I was writing this book to get out of debt. Sometimes you write a bad book that way, and sometimes you write a good book. And that I actually thought that I had written a good book.”
“You made the analogy of being a gambler,” says Schneider. “You said you had made ‘a pretty good bet tonight,’ which was a positive thing.”
“Oh, you mean that thing, that I took a big chance?” Mailer asks.
“Yes.”
“Well, the chance I took was just that when I started writing it, I had built up in my mind that I had to write the thing in two months. Looking back on it now, a year later, that two months was not necessary…. But I had set it in my mind that I had to do it in two months. And I think, looking back on it, what it was, was that I needed that. Because if you write a book, if you say to yourself ahead of time, I’ve got to write this novel or this work in three months, two months, six weeks, eighteen weeks, or whatever, if you give yourself a severe deadline, then it’s equivalent to having to drive a hundred miles to a hospital with a pregnant woman in the rear seat, and you have to get there, say in one hundred minutes. Now, if you’re driving that hundred miles in one hundred minutes on a mountain road, you’re going to do the best driving you’ve ever done in your life.
“As it was, it brought this intense concentration to the very center of my head. I’ve never lived with a book as closely as I did with this one for about sixty-one days. In comparison to my normal rate, if I had written this book the way I’d normally write, I would have spent eight months on it, ten months, just in the writing. And the other element of it that was odd was that, as far as in relation to my own work, this was as finished a first draft as I’ve ever written. I then had about eight or ten months to work on the book, and I did, but none of the work was structural.
“If you’ve got a poem”—Mailer, charmingly, pronounces this word “pome”—“or a book of poems you feel is in fairly good shape, one of the pleasures of being a poet, I’ve always thought, is that you can sit there for eight or ten months and work on these poems, and after reading one several times, you may change a word, you may not. You may then change and put the original word back. That’s what I did with this work after I’d finished it.”
Absolutely amazing. He has gone from a rush job done under financial pressure to a work as polished, as fastidiously turned and tenderly fitted as a volume of the finest verse.
Norman Mailer has done it again.
Tough Guys is an okay little book. Remarkable, really, for how quickly it was written and for what reason. Whatever difficulty it faces in literary circles owes more to Mailer’s mouth than to his prose.
Which is nothing new. It will take at least one generation of critics to sort out Mailer’s writing from the things Mailer has said about his writing. This confusion goes beyond his work. Because the subject matter of so much that Mailer writes is Mailer, it will take biographers a lot longer to sort out the actual Norman Mailer from the things Norman Mailer wrote about Norman Mailer from the things Norman Mailer said about Norman Mailer.
This is a writer who has stalked the intellectual wilds of America for the last forty years like a great wounded bear, too belligerent to tame, too big to kill. He achieved worldwide literary acclaim at age twenty-five with the publication of his novel The Naked and the Dead. In the years that followed, he wrote two more novels that were critical disasters before turning to essays and nonfiction in Advertisements for Myself. While he continued to produce novels, none measured up to the mounting success of his nonfictional writing, primarily Armies of the Night, Of a Fire on the Moon, and The Executioner’s Song. Now, in his seventh decade, Mailer has returned again to fiction with his long-awaited Egyptian novel Ancient Evenings and the less ambitious Tough Guys Don’t Dance.
Through this long career, his reputation has been through more radical swings than that of any other contemporary author. After blowing Mailer’s literary dimensions to such outsize proportions when he was only twenty-five, many of the critics and academics responsible have come to regret it in the decades since. Their abundant early praise had helped create, perhaps prematurely, a literary giant, and he has been stomping unpredictably across the landscape of American letters ever since. He is a man who has accumulated more ex-wives than most men have suits and who once stabbed one of them in a drunken rage. A man who once tried to pick a fight at a news conference with the world heavyweight boxing champion; a man who once noted, in his celebrated essay “The White Negro,” that it took a kind of courage for two teenage hoodlums to beat an aging candy store owner to death; a man who labored to free from prison an author/murderer who then promptly killed again (about whom Mailer would subsequently, pleading for a lenient sentence, utter a remark that might well serve as his own epitaph: “Culture is worth a little risk”).
More than one big-time book critic has had second thoughts about this post–World War II wonderboy. But Mailer’s reputation was too big to quash after the reception given to The Naked and the Dead in 1948. It gave him The Writer’s privilege of having an important opinion of his own—even, or perhaps especially, about himself. No one has had the last word on Norman Mailer ever since.
“Mailer had the most developed sense of image; if not, he would have been a figure of deficiency, for people had been regarding him by his public image since he was twenty-five years old,” Mailer wrote in Armies of the Night. “He had in fact learned to live in the sarcophagus of his image—at night, in his sleep, he mi
ght dart out, and paint improvements on the sarcophagus. During the day, while he was helpless, newspapermen would carve ugly pictures on the living tomb of his legend. Of necessity, part of Mailer’s remaining funds of sensitivity went right into the war of supporting his image and working for it. Sometimes he thought his relation to this image was not unlike some poor fellow who strains his very testicles to bring in emoluments for his wife and yet is never favored with carnal knowledge of her.”
Mailer went off to World War II like the rest of his generation, took careful notes, and returned home to produce the kind of novel everyone was waiting for. The Naked and the Dead is still often called the best novel written about World War II. It is also the most conventional work Norman Mailer has ever written. He was playing by the rules.
The book “was written out of what I could learn from James T. Farrell and John Dos Passos with good doses of Thomas Wolfe and Tolstoy, plus homeopathic tinctures from Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Melville, and Dostoevski,” Mailer explained in 1976. “With all such help, it was a book that wrote itself. It had a style-proof style. That is to say, it had a best-seller style: no style. Very few people failed to read that book with some interest.”
And, voila! It made Norman Mailer famous. Mailer was one of the first of his generation of writers to feel the full force of literary fame in the modern world. What made the change so difficult was how damnably hard it made it to write.
“It changed my life,” Mailer said in an interview with biographer Hilary Mills. “After The Naked and the Dead, for seven or eight years, I kept walking around saying nobody treats me as if I’m real, nobody wants me for myself, for my five feet eight inches, everybody wants me for my celebrity. Therefore my experience wasn’t real. All the habits I’d formed up to that point of being an observer on the sidelines were shattered. Suddenly, if I went into a room, I was the center of the room, and so regardless of how I carried myself, everything I did was taken seriously and critically. I complained bitterly to myself about the unfairness of it, until the day I realized that it was fair, that was my experience. It’s the simplest remark to make to yourself, but it took me ten years to get to that point.