“Then I began to realize that the kind of writing I was going to do would be altogether different from the kind of writing I thought I would do. After The Naked and the Dead I wanted to write huge collective novels about American life, but I knew I had to go out and get experience, and my celebrity made it impossible. I then began to realize that there was something else that I was going to get which would hopefully be equally valuable, and that was that I was having a form of twentieth-century experience which would become more and more prevalent: I was utterly separated from my roots. I was successful, and I was alienated, and that was a twentieth-century condition.”
Mailer was one of the first American writers to realize that American media had created a kind of instant, disposable, pasteurized, and homogenized culture that was layered like sweet frosting over the real matter of life. This was the candy Olympus he now inhabited. His fame assured invitations to appear on TV talk shows and to be interviewed by popular, glossy magazines. He was his own best subject matter. If people were so interested in Norman Mailer, then he wasn’t going to leave the subject to amateurs.
Beginning with Advertisements for Myself in 1958, the book that Mailer says was the turning point in his career, the one in which he finally discovered his personal style and method, he has struggled to live up to, or to become, whatever it is that The Writer needs to be in this age. At a time when it seems no single intelligent mind can have a coherent grasp of life, Mailer has been one defiantly opinionated intellect. Asked to write about a major public event—a political convention, a demonstration, or even a trip to the moon—Mailer did more than just accumulate a mountain of information, interview the experts, and relay the sum of it in an entertaining way. He set himself, Norman Mailer, smack in the middle of whatever it was, let it happen to him, and then wrote about how it looked and felt and smelled and sounded and tasted, and about what it made him think—as if he mattered! And he did matter! It redeemed the role of the individual, unexpert, but intelligent man, the honest citizen—The Writer—as an essential part of the world.
More than the lives of any of his contemporaries, Mailer’s life became a public life, his writing became the story, ultimately, of himself—or himself as The Writer—even when he wasn’t at the center of the story. The Writer’s job was to experience, observe, and make sense of the world, and that’s what Mailer has done. In the process, he has accumulated more than any other contemporary writer a permanent record—in fiction and nonfiction—of the interior life of his age, of its intellect and emotions, of its beliefs and superstitions, of its hopes and fears, its genius and its folly. Whether anyone agrees with Mailer is utterly beside the point. As Mailer himself has said, defending his admiration for Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges despite Borges’s reactionary opinions, “I detest having to think of a writer by his politics first. It’s like thinking of people by way of their anus.”
Those who dismiss Mailer angrily because they don’t agree with him miss the point. The point is, ideally, that we all should live and think and talk as courageously and defiantly as Jorge Luis Borges, or as Norman Mailer. We are not supposed to all agree with him. Norman Mailer’s special hell would be a place where everyone always agreed with him. He would have no one to fight.
After helping to define novel-length journalism and immediate autobiography as legitimate literary forms during the 1960s and 1970s, Mailer has turned once more to fiction.
Throughout his career, he has insisted that he is primarily a novelist. At the height of his success with nonfiction, this was interpreted as his insistence on being taken as seriously as a novelist, no matter what form his writing took. But Mailer never really bought that. To him, the biggest challenges were always looming off ahead. The Novels.
His big step in that direction, a transitional work, was The Executioner’s Song, which many regard as his masterpiece. It was a book with a masterful grasp of America, as attuned to the odd complexities of Gary Gilmore’s rural life as to the cynical priorities of the urban hustlers who marketed Gilmore’s macabre execution. It was a book that stretched every facet of reporting and writing to ultimately deserve Mailer’s paradoxical subtitle A True Life Novel, which was impressively sanctioned when it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1979. He had used novelistic techniques in the past but always in reporting an event through his own eyes. This was the first long piece of nonfictional storytelling that Mailer ever wrote without placing himself in the story. He adopted a pose much more like that of a novelist, an omniscient narrator with full powers to manipulate characters, viewpoint, and scene, to tell a true story. He even set out to imitate the voice of the writer Mailer has always most admired, Hemingway.
“I spent a lot of time in Utah before I started writing The Executioner’s Song, and I came away fascinated with the speech of people out west, and how they said so much in that flat, laid-back way,” he says. “So I thought I’d see how simple a style I could work with. And one of the things that did was it brought back my respect for Hemingway. Because what I saw was a style that wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t one quarter as good as Hemingway’s style. So that gave me new respect for him. I’d always secretly thought it was a little easier to write like Hemingway than, in fact, it is.”
It was as though Mailer had come full circle. He had begun his career trying to be a novelist in the Hemingway mold. His own fame and the pressures it brought to bear on him forced him off in an altogether different literary direction, into journalism, essays, and extended nonfictional writing. Now he had found his way to a perfect marriage of the two forms, a nonfictional novel written in imitation of Hemingway, but—especially in the second half of the book, “Eastern Voices”—Mailer through and through.
Then, last year, the return voyage was complete. Mailer finished his long-awaited “Egyptian novel,” Ancient Evenings. It was a richly imaginative and powerful book, the work of a great novelist attempting to speak in a heightened, invented language of magic and metaphor. The book is narrated by a man newly dead and, through him, by his great-grandfather, a man who has lived four lives. The story undulates from one state to another, from the eerie confusion of a consciousness caught between life and death, from the battlefields of an ancient civilization to the subtle shifts of palace intrigue. Ancient Evenings is an attempt to break through the normal cultural constraints of fiction. It speaks to a kind of universal consciousness, free of place and even time. It deals with man’s loss of God, or the gods, and with the essential mystery of death. Critics will be debating the value of Ancient Evenings long after Mailer is gone, but few would argue that it is not an audacious effort.
After a book like that, it was no wonder that the literary world was somewhat skeptical of a modest effort like Tough Guys Don’t Dance. And such a precedent helped to explain why Mailer’s initial comments on the book fueled this skepticism about it, and why Random House might have felt the need for this damage-control news conference, which, after about an hour, is coming to a close.
Before it does, John Barkham addresses the issue directly.
“Norman, was this book by way of relaxation after the Egyptian novel?” he asks.
“It’s never relaxation to write,” says the author, showing only faint umbrage. “I was trying to do a mile a minute over mountain roads. When I was working on it, I felt like I might bust a blood vessel. I thought, I’m working so hard on this one. When it was over, I probably, uh, looking back on it now the answer to your question is, from the outside and maybe even from the inside, yes. After Ancient Evenings, it was relaxing because I could hold it all in my head at once. In Ancient Evenings, I always felt a little bit like a furniture mover. You know, I was always taking a piano up four flights of stairs.”
Writing a murder mystery would be perfect relaxation for the man who carried copies of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler all through the Pacific in his duffel bag during World War II.
“I’d been thinking of doing one for many years,” he says. “And I’ve always lov
ed Hammett and Chandler. Whenever I get tired of writing, I go and read them, and reread them. I read them five times, eight times. Every one of their books. This is over many years, over forty years. They’re a tonic. So, I’ve always wanted to write a murder mystery, and I’ve always been very curious about how it would turn out. And I also knew I could never write a book the way they do. Because they had a different psychology than I do. You know, I think to write a quick, brisk detective novel, where the emphasis is entirely on reaction, you have to have a notion of people that’s executive. That is, you have to be able to dismiss them completely in a sentence and not worry about whether that character has more stuff going in him or her than you’ve given them. I’ve never been able to do that. I always linger over my characters, finger them, paw them.”
Mailer’s conscious approach to his early nonfiction, the books about himself, was to write fast, to present his thinking raw. In his return to fiction, Mailer is again the careful young writer who compiled biographical details about each of his characters in The Naked and the Dead on three-by-five cards. He is writing again with extreme deliberation and with careful control. He is trying to improve on his performance, trying to write his best books.
“My age is on my mind,” he says. “I’m sixty-one, and I feel that it’s a likelihood that I’ve got ten or twelve, I don’t know how many more years of good writing, but obviously I will outlive that period at which I can write well. So I want to make the books count now. Which is not to say I wouldn’t do journalism. If something were big enough in a way or, to me, exciting enough in a way, I could well wind up doing journalism, because I like it, I enjoy it. I enjoy the writing of it much more in certain ways than fiction, because there isn’t that terrible worry there, it’s more of a relaxed performance. But I would have to believe it counted for something.
“When you write a novel—if you’re the kind of writer I am—you don’t know where you’re going when you start,” he says. “You don’t know how you’ll finish it. Every time I’ve known how a book was going to finish, I’d write a chapter, and I’d never get past the first chapter. This has happened three or four times over the years. And those are the books I never finish, the ones where I plot out the thing completely in advance. And I realized after a while that, for me, knowing what the plot of my book was going to be in detail would be like being married to someone whose every habit you knew. And there was just no life left in the relationship. And there’s something stifling about a book whose end appears to me immediately. I prefer to discover the end of a book. That gave me great pause, because in writing a novel—the big difference between writing a novel and writing nonfiction is that, if you’re writing nonfiction as I have about an event most of the time, in fact all the nonfiction I’ve done has been about an event, the story is given to you. And one of my favorite notions is that God is a better novelist than the novelist. In The Executioner’s Song, for example, I kept being amazed at how good a novelist God was. How much better God was than I was as a novelist, because in places where if I had had the material up to there I would have gone in a certain direction, and the real direction was more interesting.
“But, nonetheless, even if you’re not as good a novelist as God, you do have to make these godlike choices when you’re writing a novel. And you have to decide where the characters go. When you’re writing about an event, the story has been handed to you. Whether it’s a good story or a bad story, it’s there. And all you have to worry about is your style. And the amount of energy you can put into the writing. And the amount of inventiveness you can bring legitimately to these facts. But your problems are essentially simplified. It really is a classic discipline, the end is given you, and then you have to fulfill the details artfully.”
Mailer says he has been trying to make up his mind which of two potential novels he will write next. He says he has just about made up his mind, but stops short this day of saying what the book will be about.
“In announcing it, I think you take away the possibility of it,” he says.
“I don’t know why.”
On some days, he is less reticent. Anyone who talks as much as Norman Mailer has left clues elsewhere. Like in a 1980 interview reprinted in his book Pieces and Pontifications:
“After I finish the Egyptian novel, I’ve then got a second book I want to do about a spaceship in the future, maybe two or three centuries from now, and I’m appalled by the difficulties of the task.”
And there is a hint in the last page of Ancient Evenings, as the narrator describes his journey after death in terms of shifting time, of sailing past comets and through magnetic fields.
So it does seem Tough Guys Don’t Dance was a quick, money-making stop off the great highway of Norman Mailer’s progress. No matter. The true measure of literary worth is not the sweat on the author’s brow but the satisfaction in the belly of his reader. And one thing Mailer’s readers ought to be accustomed to by now is an unpredictable menu. He takes devilish delight in it. It is, after all, the perfect revenge for someone trapped in the panoptic eye, as if to say, You may see me, but you can’t know me. It is the same motivation that prompted Advertisements for Myself and everything that came after it. The last word on Norman Mailer is Norman Mailer—this from an interview in Pieces and Pontifications:
“I’ve always felt as if the way people react to me is not to me but to the latest photograph they’ve seen of me. So I can change the photograph and have the fun of observing the reactions. The devil in me loves the idea of being just that much of a changeling. You can never understand a writer until you find his private little vanity, and mine has always been that I will frustrate expectations. People think they’ve found a way of dismissing me, but, like the mad butler, I’ll be back serving the meal.”
THE FIGHT ROCKY LOST
SEPTEMBER 1984
Only a movie star would have an ego big enough to commission a statue of himself, and then donate it to one of the premier art museums in the world. Only Sylvester Stallone would have the colossal cojones to suggest that it be placed at the center position of the museum’s front entrance. The gesture provoked a one-of-a-kind battle in Philadelphia over the nature of art. Today, the infamous Rocky statue stands in front of the Spectrum, one of the sports venues in South Philly. To me, this is an outrage. The statue of Julius (Dr. J.) Erving, an actual living-breathing local sports legend, is shunted off to one side, and nowhere is there a statue of, say, Joe Frazier, a flesh-and-blood local pugilist who became champion of the world…in real life! Instead we have this schlocky monument to Stallone playing a fictional Philadelphia boxer. Go figure.
Once upon a time, in a far-off land of palm trees, sand dunes, and major expressways, there lived a dashing and possibly brilliant young movie star known throughout the land because he had written, directed, and starred in two very similar, but very successful, films about a lovable palooka from South Philly who becomes, on a diet of sheer willpower, raw eggs, and milk, champion of the boxing world.
One day this bright young star, who was named Sylvester Stallone, hit upon an especially good and supremely generous idea. His third film about Rocky Balboa, the lovable palooka, called for a bronze statue of the champ to be ceremoniously unveiled on the very spot where he had paused in earlier films to lift his arms and leap in silent tribute to himself. So, the star wondered, why not commission a real statue? Not just a prop, but a genuine work of art. And then, as a way of thanking all Philadelphians for their help in making the films, why not let the gracious city keep the statue right there. Right there at the top of the same steps he had made so famous!
The handsome and supremely well-built actor/writer/director decided to take a break from hefting heavy bars of iron and steel and honing his heavyweight script to telephone some of his friends. He told them of the idea, and they rejoiced in it and saw that it was good. Now, even though the actor had only the nicest intentions, it occurred to some of his friends, men with smaller hearts, but with minds more subtly attuned
to the benefits of publicity, that the actor had a very good idea indeed. And they thought, in their small-hearted but keen-minded way, It is no wonder that his friends call him Sly.
But it so happened that at the other end of the land, in the city of Philadelphia, there lurked near the top of those famous steps something even grander, something famous throughout the world. They called it the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an imposing and serious institution run by imposing and serious people. In fact, the steps where the actor had decided to place his statue actually belonged to the art museum! And the famous art museum decided that it did not want the famous actor’s statue on its front steps, so…
“Now, you got people who just want to deal with this in a negative frame of mind,” says Art Gorman, the Philadelphia truck driver who fought very hard to save the Rocky statue. “You got people who want to make out how Sly’s on this giant ego trip, you know, that all’s he wanted was to get a statue of himself set up on top of the art museum steps. I tell you, Sly ain’t like that. He’s good people, good people. The man was tryin’ to give something and, hey, what he was givin’ wasn’t bad, you know what I mean? Hey! It wasn’t bad.”