The world has long since finished having its Norman Mailer conversation, but few writers in their day received as much attention. Mailer made himself into a figure about whom everyone felt the need to have a view, and there was a lot to have a view about. Mailer wrote fiction, drama, poetry, biography, journalism, screenplays, newspaper columns, and a “true-life novel.” His first book, “The Naked and the Dead,” came out when he was twenty-five, in 1948, and was a Times No. 1 best-seller for eleven weeks, and he had at least one book on the best-seller list in every decade after that until his death, in 2007.
He won two Pulitzer Prizes—for “The Armies of the Night,” in 1969, and “The Executioner’s Song” (the true-life novel), in 1980. He directed and acted in three underground movies, one of which Pauline Kael called “the worst movie that I’ve stayed to see all the way through.” He produced an Off Broadway play, based on his third novel, “The Deer Park,” which was a flop, and directed a Hollywood feature film, “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” adapted from another of his novels, which managed to break even despite being nominated for Golden Raspberry Awards in seven categories. He appeared often, sometimes raucously, on talk shows and in various public venues. He was interviewed more than seven hundred times, and he wrote forty-five thousand letters.
He had six wives, eight children, and many mistresses, one whom he saw for nearly sixty years, and another who wrote a memoir about their affair and sold her papers to Harvard University. He co-founded the Village Voice, in 1955, but stopped writing for it because it wasn’t outrageous enough. He ran for the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, in 1969, and did not finish last. He was arrested at least four times, and was confined for seventeen days in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue after stabbing his second wife, Adele, and coming within a fraction of an inch of killing her, at a party in their apartment, in 1960. Five years later, he published “An American Dream,” in which the depressed protagonist strangles his wife and throws her body out the window of an East Side apartment building, which makes him feel much better.
In 1981, he supported the parole of a convicted murderer, Jack Abbott, whose prison writings he helped to get published, and who proceeded to kill a waiter six weeks after his release and then fled. “Culture is worth a little risk,” Mailer told reporters after Abbott had been captured. When he wrote to Abbott’s parole board, he had just finished writing “The Executioner’s Song,” about a man not very different from Abbott, Gary Gilmore, who killed two defenseless people three months after being paroled.
His books received some of the best and some of the worst reviews ever published. The word “disaster” appears in more than one. Starting with “Advertisements for Myself,” which came out in 1959, he frequently inserted himself into his work, sometimes in the guise of a fictional alter-ego and sometimes as himself described in the third person. Even when he set a novel, “Ancient Evenings,” in Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs, he planned a sequel in which the protagonist appears three thousand years later reincarnated as Norman Mailer.
He published dyspeptic criticism of his contemporaries, and feuded publicly with several of them, including William Styron and Gore Vidal, and privately with a long list of colleagues and collaborators. He told (bad) dirty jokes on the wrong occasions, drank to excess, picked fights at parties, was unfaithful to all of his wives, and habitually spent more than he took in. To raise money, he once charged admission to his own birthday party.
People came. Most people who knew Mailer really liked him. He was a narcissist with a hundred friends. He could be boorish, petty, and cold, but mostly he was gracious, generous, and bemused. He had a twinkle. He was deeply defended and perpetually on display at the same time, the very definition of vulnerability. As Jonathan Lethem, an admirer, recently put it, he is “the perfect example of the kind of writer we’re defiantly hopeful not to suffer in our midst anymore . . . the paradigm for a novelist’s willful abuse of his credibility with readers, and a White Elephant par excellence.”
J. Michael Lennon’s “Norman Mailer: A Double Life” (Simon & Schuster) is the fifth life of Mailer so far. The author has a major stake in Mailer’s reputation. He met Mailer in 1972, worked with him on many projects, and is his authorized biographer and the president of the Norman Mailer Society.
Lennon also helped to assemble Mailer’s papers, now housed at the University of Texas in Austin, and he quotes from Mailer’s letters approximately seven hundred times. The letters are Mailer at his best. He is (usually) witty, sweet, and self-aware. (Mailer wrote more than a few kiss-off letters, too. These are not so sweet.) After the nineteen-fifties, Mailer dictated most of his letters, but they still have the baroque flavor of the published prose—the startling conceits, the ingenious syntax, and the mordant humor—minus a lot of the bombast. It’s astonishing that there are forty-five thousand of them. That’s four times the number of extant Henry James letters.
Mailer’s life is a pasture fairly well plowed, and a lot of Lennon’s story is familiar, though he adds many details and corrects some canards. He is especially good on the late, lion-in-winter years: on Mailer’s sixth, and longest, marriage, to Norris Church; on his relationship with their son, John Buffalo; and on his struggles with the final works, more fantastically ambitious than ever—the God book (“God: An Uncommon Conversation,” of which Lennon is co-author), the Jesus book (“The Gospel According to the Son”), and the Hitler book (“The Castle in the Forest”).
There is something comic and stirring, something Falstaffian, in these pages of the biography, about the stubborn refusal to give it up, any of it. During a visit to San Francisco on a book tour for “The Castle in the Forest,” at the age of eighty-four, walking with two canes, barely able to read the menu, he propositions his oldest mistress. (She tells him she would only fall asleep; he agrees, and gets her a cab.) Mailer expected too much from life, but that is much better than expecting too little.
The consensus verdict on Mailer’s work was reached almost fifty years ago. It is that he wrote nonfiction like a novelist, sometimes a great one, and fiction like someone who was trying to write something else—the psychoanalysis of the American mind, or the secret history of the Cold War, or the “Das Kapital” of sex. Fiction wasn’t a congenial form. He had too much to say.
Mailer’s nonfiction belongs to the New Journalism, the name conferred by Tom Wolfe on the style of magazine writing that flourished in the nineteen-sixties. Mailer believed that, as he put it, “not the techniques but the world of fiction” could be brought to the facts of journalism. “If you put the facts together in such a way that they truly breathe for the reader, then you’re writing fiction,” he said near the end of his life. “Something can be true and still be fiction.”
His most important innovation as a journalist was the reporter as character, the practice of treating himself as a participant in the events he was covering. He said that he came up with the idea while he was editing his movies: he realized that Mailer the director was treating Mailer the actor in the third person—asking himself things like, What would Mailer do now?
He inaugurated the technique in “The Armies of the Night,” a book that grew out of a story for Harper’s about the 1967 antiwar March on the Pentagon. He used it again in 1971, in “Of a Fire on the Moon,” about the Apollo 11 mission, and in 1975, in “The Fight,” about the Rumble in the Jungle, the heavyweight title bout in which Muhammad Ali upset George Foreman, in Zaire. He used it in “The Executioner’s Song,” too, although in that book the reporter-character is Mailer’s collaborator, Lawrence Schiller, the man who secured the rights and conducted most of the interviews before Mailer joined the project.
Mailer thought that the device exposed the fly-on-the-wall fallacy of conventional journalism. “I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all time,” he said. He made the way in which events are reported part of what is reported.
But he found it hard to make things up. This was a source of endless frustration, since he thought that novel-writing was the higher calling. “I loved journalism,” he once admitted to Lennon, “because it gave me what I’d always been weakest in—exactly that, the story. Then I discovered that this was the horror of it. Audiences liked it better.”
The scale and multiple agendas of Mailer’s novels led him into formal difficulties—notably prolixity, characters who function as mouthpieces, and a painful inability to reach closure. After “Why Are We in Vietnam?,” published in 1967, which is really a long story, modelled on Faulkner’s “The Bear,” his novels tended toward grandiosity and incompletion. “Ancient Evenings,” which took him twelve years to write, and which came out in 1983, was intended to be the first novel in a trilogy. So was “The Castle in the Forest”; the next volume was to take up the story of Rasputin. “Harlot’s Ghost,” almost thirteen hundred pages, published in 1991, ends with the words “To be continued.”
Lennon suggests that these schemes were just Mailer’s way of firing himself up. But they support the impression that Mailer was trying to do with his fiction something that fiction is not good for. Though he regretted calling “The Executioner’s Song” a true-life novel, that is essentially what it is, a work of literature made out of the lives of actual people, and its imaginatively achieved realism is why many readers have felt that it’s the best thing he ever did. “It’s the first book I’ve written without a clear sense of what I thought and what I wanted to teach others,” he wrote to Abbott after it was finished. Precisely.
The verdict on the man is trickier, because the critical decorum that observes a boundary between the work and the person who wrote it doesn’t apply in Mailer’s case. The person was part of the literary proffer. Mailer ran for mayor of New York, proposed himself to the Kennedy Administration as a mediator on civil rights, and considered running in the Democratic Presidential primaries against Bill Clinton. He wanted to be a writer and a tribune at the same time. André Malraux, who wrote the hugely popular novels “Man’s Hope” and “Man’s Fate” in the nineteen-thirties and then served as a minister in two de Gaulle governments, was one of his models.
But the persona was inorganic. It was the product of years of earnest study. Mailer believed in instinct, but being instinctual didn’t come all that instinctively to him. “The little pisherke with the big ideas,” his first wife’s mother called him—and that’s just what he didn’t want to be. He was an intellectual who taught himself to discount the intellect.
Growing up, Mailer was a good boy, much doted upon, and an excellent student. He was reared in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. His father, Barney, was a South African émigré, a dapper gentleman and a compulsive gambler, who worked as an accountant. His mother, Fanny, née Schneider, was the daughter of a rabbi, did not suffer fools, and ran a small oil service and delivery firm set up by Barney’s brother-in-law to keep the family solvent.
Mailer entered Harvard at sixteen, and majored in engineering. (He briefly had an ambition to design airplanes.) In his freshman year, he read John Steinbeck, James T. Farrell, and John Dos Passos, and realized that you could write novels about the kind of life you lived. He had found his vocation. He thought that “Anna Karenina” was the greatest novel ever written.
He met his first wife, Beatrice (Bea) Silverman, at a concert. She was a student at Boston University, and more politically sophisticated and sexually experienced than he was. Mailer graduated in 1943, and they married the following year. Soon afterward, he was drafted.
Mailer chose to be drafted, rather than enlist in an officer-training program, because he wanted to gather material for a great war novel. He didn’t want to sit behind a desk. “The Naked and the Dead” is based on stories he heard from the men in the 112th Cavalry Regiment, a seasoned National Guard unit out of Fort Bliss, Texas, in which he served as a private in the Pacific Theatre. When he got back, after seventeen months overseas, he devoted himself to the task of producing the novel, rereading pages of “Anna Karenina” for inspiration. He submitted the manuscript in 1947, and then he and Bea, who had been an officer in the Waves, went to Paris for a year, taking classes on the G.I. Bill. They were in Europe when “The Naked and the Dead” came out, in May, 1948.
It was there that Mailer’s self-improvement regimen began. He socialized mainly with other Americans, but he travelled in France, Italy, Spain, and England, and became aware (possibly stimulated by Bea) of a looming postwar struggle between socialism and capitalism. When he got back to the United States, he began telling people that “The Naked and the Dead” should be read as a warning that the United States was preparing to go to war against the Soviet Union. This was, as he conceded to an interviewer, a retrospective interpretation: “I was just sitting in my room in Brooklyn, writing. All I knew was what I read in the newspapers.” But now he became some kind of socialist.
Mailer told part of the story of his literary and intellectual development over the next ten years in “Advertisements for Myself,” a collection of fiction and nonfiction pieces threaded together by commentary—a genre that he essentially invented and that he used several times in his career. A lot of the commentary has to do with the cravenness and duplicity of book publishers—fallout from Mailer’s experiences with his second and third novels, “Barbary Shore,” a political novel published in 1951, and “The Deer Park,” which came out in 1955, and is about Hollywood.
The novels got plenty of critical attention, but most of it was the bad kind. Mailer had trouble getting “The Deer Park” published at all, in part because of concerns about a passage describing, very allusively, fellatio. Obscenity had been an issue for the publisher of “The Naked and the Dead” as well. Mailer cared about obscenity. He hated books that prettified the stuff of ordinary life and speech, that rendered “motherfucking” as “motherloving.” But he was trying to honor that ideal at a time before the string of court cases—over “Howl,” “Tropic of Cancer,” “Naked Lunch,” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”—that changed the legal definition of obscenity and, with it, the publishing industry itself.
On the intellectual side, Mailer spent the decade putting together a personal theory of the cosmos that he remained committed to for the rest of his life. “Maybe I’m bragging,” he said in an interview in 1980, “but I think I have a coherent philosophy. I believe we could start talking about virtually anything, and before we were done I could connect our subject to almost anything in my universe.” That philosophy dates to the nineteen-fifties.
Mailer had several tutors: Jean Malaquais, a former Trotskyist whom he met in Paris; a Baltimore psychiatrist named Robert Lindner; and the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Malaquais believed that there was little to choose between the United States and the Soviet Union—that both were systems of state capitalism, dehumanizing bureaucracies, totalitarianisms of the spirit. Mailer thought that the United States wasn’t totalitarian yet, but that it might be headed that way, that it was always in danger of slipping into fascism.
Lindner, in “Prescription for Rebellion,” published in 1952, argued that psychology was an instrument of social adjustment, leading to “the breeding of a weak race of men who will live and die in slavery, the meek and unprotesting tools of their self-appointed masters.” The antidote was rebellion. “By nature, man is a rebel,” Lindner wrote. “He, man, can deny or suppress this instinct, but only at the expense of his manhood.” This became the grounds for Mailer’s embrace of instinct.
Mailer and Reich never met (Reich died, in federal prison, in 1957), but Mailer constructed his own version of Reich’s signature invention, the orgone accumulator: a box, in which the adept sits, that is supposed to attract something Reich called orgone radiation—a mysterious life force that, among other benefits, can cure cancer. Reich believed that cancer and mental illness are caused by sexual repression. “Psychic health depends upon orgasmic potency,” he wrote, in “The Function of the Orgasm,” published in English in 1942. “In the case of orgastic impotence, from which a vast majority of humans are suffering, biological energy is dammed up, thus becoming a source of all kinds of irrational behavior.”
The book, Mailer told Reich’s biographer Christopher Turner many years later, “opened a great deal because to speak personally, I’d been stuck with an itch in my own orgasm. . . . And his notion that the orgasm in a certain sense was the essence of the character, which came out and was expressed in the orgasm, gave me much food for thought over the years.”
If you combine these ideas, and throw in a belief in God and reincarnation, you get the Mailer theory of everything. Mailer thought that God exists but is not completely in control of his creation. He needs us to help him in his struggle with the Devil. How can we help? By acting instinctively and taking risks, on the understanding, as Mailer liked to say, that the best move lies close to the worst. It’s no good choosing a middle path. We have to risk being damned if we hope to save God, preserve our souls for reincarnation, and avoid cancer. The guiding power in all this business is the unconscious, which Mailer thought had “an enormous teleological sense,” and which he named “the navigator.”
Mailer announced the new philosophy, or most of it, in the essay “The White Negro,” which he published in Irving Howe’s journal, Dissent, in 1957. The essay explains that the black man in America lives on the knife edge of physical danger. He lives in the present, “relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body.” The vehicle for this mode of existence is jazz, “the music of orgasm.”
The “white Negro,” also known as “the hipster,” is a white man who has “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro.” He lives by his instincts—not, like his black counterpart, under the threat of the lawman or the lynch mob but in the shadow of the concentration camp and the atomic bomb. Mailer proposed that two teen-agers who beat to death the owner of a candy store are living existentially, since their act puts them into a dangerous relation to the law.
Although Howe later regretted not questioning the passage about the candy-store owner, the editorial board at Dissent accepted Mailer’s essay without debate. Its argument was familiar to the kind of intellectual who wrote for journals like Dissent in the nineteen-fifties. It cobbled together ideas associated with texts that were squarely inside the mid-century canon of European modernism—Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Lawrence, Gide, Camus—along with notions about race that belonged to the white person’s cult of jazz.
Mailer made the essay the centerpiece of “Advertisements for Myself,” in which he proposed himself as the writer-hero of this existentialist vision—and announced a new novel that would take ten years to write and would be “the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters.” Much of what he wrote about afterward got reduced (or inflated) to the inflexible dualism of this homemade cosmology. Nothing was simply good or not so good; it had to be either the best or the worst, a benefit to God or a gift to the Devil. Mailer was undecided whether the Beatles were “demons or saints”; he thought the Twist was evil and that masturbation was a vice; he disapproved of contraception.
After enormous effort, Mailer had managed to define himself in the terms of an intellectual culture that was just about to go out of fashion. Within fifteen years, every element in this way of thinking was discredited or obsolete. Like many apostles of change, he ended up a symptom of the times he set out to transform.
Mailer’s cosmology was not just a literary conceit; it was the prism through which he understood himself. Mailer met Adele Morales in 1951, when his marriage to Bea was breaking up. Adele was Latina—her mother was Spanish and her father was Peruvian—but she grew up in Bensonhurst, and when Mailer met her she was an art student, studying painting with Hans Hofmann, in the Village. She was, in short, a typical young New Yorker with creative ambitions, but Mailer saw her as an exotic, and, as he later did with Norris Church, whose name he invented, he imagined himself in a Henry Higgins role. The relationship was highly sexual. (“Am I fucking too much?” Mailer asked himself in his diary from that period.)
The stabbing took place in the early morning of November 20, 1960, a month after Mailer made his spectacular New Journalistic début, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” a report for Esquire on the Democratic National Convention that nominated John F. Kennedy for President. Mailer had planned a party in anticipation of his announcement that he was running for mayor. He wanted to bring together people from all walks of life, both bankers and street people. None of the former showed up, but a number of the latter were among the two hundred or so guests who came to the Mailers’ apartment, on West Ninety-fourth Street.
If it fell short of Mailer’s vision, it was still an unusual gathering. The guests included the Paris Review editor George Plimpton, the Columbia sociologist C. Wright Mills, the bandleader Peter Duchin, the screenwriter Donald Stewart* (“The Philadelphia Story”), the publisher Jason Epstein, the editors Robert Silvers (then at Harper’s) and Norman Podhoretz (of Commentary), and the poet Allen Ginsberg. The mood seems to have been sour from the start. Mailer wore a bullfighter’s shirt, got drunk, and kept going outside to pick fights on the street. Adele shut herself in the bathroom with a friend to complain about her marriage. Ginsberg got into an argument with Podhoretz and called him a “big dumb fuckhead”—which, since Ginsberg was the most pacific of men, was a sure sign that the karma was not good.
By the time the stabbing occurred, most of the guests had left. According to both his and her recollections, Adele taunted Mailer and called him a fag, and he stabbed her, with a penknife, twice, in the back and in the abdomen. The second wound pierced her pericardium. She was taken to the hospital, and underwent a four-hour operation. Mailer showed up before the surgery and gave the doctor some advice. Afterward, in her hospital room, he explained why he had stabbed her. “I love you and I had to save you from cancer,” he said. Years later, discussing the stabbing with his daughter Susan, he told her, “I let God down.”
Nearly everyone who knew the Mailers, and whose reflections have been reported, blamed Adele. In the literary world, the act was interpreted by the lights of the modernist myth of the artist. James Baldwin, no admirer of “The White Negro,” explained that, by trying to kill his wife, Mailer was hoping to rescue the writer in himself from the spiritual prison he had created with his fantasies of becoming a politician: “It is like burning down the house in order, at last, to be free of it.” Lionel Trilling told his wife, Diana, that the stabbing was, in her words, “a Dostoevskyan ploy”: Mailer was testing the limits of evil in himself.
The stabbing seems to have enhanced Mailer’s social and literary cachet. He began his affair with the woman who became his third wife, Jeanne Campbell, while Adele was still recovering, and during the next ten years he seemed to be everywhere. From 1962 through 1972, he published seventeen books (several were collections of previously published pieces), directed three movies, and relaunched his campaign for mayor. He was nearly irresistible, until he hit an immovable object.
Mailer saw the women’s movement as, potentially, part of the drift toward totalitarianism. The great horror that it pointed to, and that he thought was implicit in its program, was in-vitro fertilization—the ability of women to conceive children without the sexual participation of men. In his response to the movement, “The Prisoner of Sex,” which came out in 1971, he laid out his sexual cosmology, much of which must have come as news to most women—for example, that women have always had the power to choose unconsciously (not a contradiction in Mailer-land) whether or not to become pregnant during a sexual encounter.
To promote the book, he agreed to m.c. a panel at Town Hall, composed of the Australian feminist Germaine Greer, who was promoting her own book, “The Female Eunuch”; Jill Johnston, a Voice columnist and lesbian activist; Jacqueline Ceballos, the president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women; and Diana Trilling.
The evening was a carnival. There was continual heckling; the Beat poet Gregory Corso noisily walked out of the hall; Johnston was rushed at the end of her presentation by two women who began groping her onstage. Betty Friedan, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Cynthia Ozick asked questions from the floor, all addressed to Mailer, who presided in a business suit and tie, his uniform at the time. Greer stole the show, but in a way that gave Mailer the appearance of being a sexist who might be worth reforming.
Mailer was not at his worst that evening, but he never really got over it. He never really understood the women’s movement, either. “The whole question of women’s liberation is the deepest question that faces us,” he said at Town Hall, “and we’re gonna go right into the very elements of existence and eternity before we’re through with it.” Unless you are the kind of person who thinks that the Beatles pose an urgent eschatological problem, this is exactly wrong. A lot of confusion is caused by the Shakespeare’s (or Mozart’s) sister argument. The point of the women’s movement was not to create a society in which exceptional women can produce great work. It was to create a society in which the life chances of a mediocre woman are no different from the life chances of a mediocre man. It was about normalizing society, not turning it upside down. Eternity had nothing to do with it.
The stabbing had not disrupted Mailer’s career path, but the women’s movement did. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Mailer had depended on the interest and support of an intellectual community, centered in New York City, whose authority extended from the English departments at Columbia and Rutgers to journals like Dissent, Commentary, Partisan Review, and The New York Review of Books. Mailer understood how valuable that support was. The first people he went to see after he was released from Bellevue, in 1960, were the Podhoretzes and the Trillings.
After 1970, though, that community, and the journalistic and academic worlds generally, began to split apart. Feminism had something to do with this. Feminist intellectuals found the university (marginally) more welcoming than places like Partisan Review. The mid-century modernist canon slid into neglect and even disrepute; existentialism went out of fashion; the cult of jazz was dead. There was a new syllabus. Mailer was on it, but as a minor figure of academic interest, someone who worked along the interestingly problematic fact-fiction border. Intellectually, he became a token of everything that was being supplanted.
By then, though, he had found a different community for support and nourishment. This was the very community that he had made his name in the nineteen-fifties by denouncing: the publishing industry. The obscenity cases of the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties helped to transform publishing from an industry of genteel, privately owned firms (with a few pirates) into one of publicly traded companies run by businessmen. In 1959, Random House went public, and used the capital to buy two other houses, Knopf and Pantheon. In 1965, the entire company was bought by RCA, which owned NBC. Publishing became big business.
Gentility was not part of the new ethos, because gentility did not sell books. Readers no longer associated sexual explicitness with avant-garde obscurity or with smut. And since, legally, literary merit now trumped virtually any kind of obscenity, the ideal product for trade publishers was a work by a writer of highbrow reputation that contained plenty of explicit sexual content. By the mid-nineteen-sixties, this had become a best-selling formula. It was the period of John Barth’s “Giles Goat-Boy,” the unexpurgated edition of J. P. Donleavy’s “The Ginger Man,” Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Gore Vidal’s “Myra Breckenridge,” and John Updike’s “Couples.”
Mailer was the darling of the post-“Lady Chatterley” publishing business. No serious writer had greater name recognition, and this meant that reviews didn’t matter. People bought Mailer’s books because they were books by Norman Mailer. And obscenity brought out the stylist in him; it helped him form his mature, post-naturalist voice. The flat-affect prose of “The Naked and the Dead”—
Anyone who published that in 1950 would have ended up in court.
In 1971, the year of the Town Hall debate, Mailer signed a million-dollar contract, reported to be a record, to write a trilogy that, according to his agent, would “encompass the entire history of a human family from ancient times to the world of the future.” This was the deal that yielded, twelve years later, “Ancient Evenings.” But the book confirmed the industry’s thinking: in the Times Book Review, Benjamin DeMott called the novel “a disaster,” and it spent seventeen weeks on the best-seller list and made back the advance.
The million-dollar deal began a pattern of big advances for projects with clear commercial potential. These included texts for three picture books—two on Marilyn Monroe, one on graffiti—and “The Executioner’s Song,” the book piece of a multimedia enterprise. Mailer had a keen sense of financial opportunity, but little sense of husbandry, so his contracts eventually took the form of monthly payments at the rate of thirty thousand dollars.
Though it is not uncritical, Lennon’s biography generally makes the best case possible for its protagonist. This involves some selection. Lennon omits entirely the story of Mailer’s relationship with the Provincetown writer Peter Manso, for example. They were close friends, at one time sharing a house. In 1985, Manso published an ambitious oral biography called “Mailer: His Life and Times.” Mailer was unhappy with it, and the two men began a feud that lasted, with unrelenting bitterness, until the end of Mailer’s life.
On the other hand, Lennon devotes a great deal of space to a consideration of Mailer’s theory that the Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani was trying to sabotage his sales by running negative reviews well before his books’ publication dates. Mailer believed that she was a feminist, and out to get him; Lennon sees fit to quote Mailer’s characterization of her as a “token” and a “posterior aperture.”
Mailer does seem to have believed that the feminists did him in, that they made him a pariah in certain intellectual circles and toxic as a public figure. Lennon (and this may be the effect of so much contact with his subject) appears sympathetic to the theory. He is consequently sometimes elliptical when he confronts the troublesome topic of Mailer and women.
For example, before Gloria Steinem became the founding editor of Ms., she worked on Mailer’s 1969 mayoral campaign. Lennon says that Mailer “pursued her romantically, and they had a one-night stand.” This is true as far as it goes, but, as Steinem told two of her biographers, the tryst was unconsummated, because Mailer was unable to get an erection. She attributed this to too much alcohol on his part and too little interest on hers. Steinem also said that Mailer explained to her that legal abortion was better than birth control, because “at least that way women know they’re murderers.” Lennon doesn’t report this, either.
Mailer and Greer were both flirtatious and uninhibited people, and their relations have long been a subject of speculation. Diana Trilling thought that Mailer was attracted, but a little afraid of her. Lennon tells the story that, sometime after Town Hall, Mailer and Greer ran into each other at a dinner party, and, in the cab to her hotel, she tried to persuade him to come up to her room. According to Lennon, Mailer refused, stopped the cab, and got out. But Greer recounts the cab story in an essay she wrote a few months after Town Hall, and says that she told Mailer she was going to meet a friend. Lennon doesn’t offer her version.
Then, there is the stabbing. According to Adele’s memoir, “After the Party,” someone tried to help her after she was stabbed, but Mailer kicked her. “Get away from her,” he said. “Let the bitch die.” She says that some of Mailer’s friends presented her with a petition asking her to refuse to allow doctors to administer shock treatment to her husband, on the ground that it might damage his creative genius. Mailer’s mother came to see her, not to express sympathy but to insist that she tell the police that she had got her injuries by falling on a broken bottle. She says that Mailer told her to lie to the grand jury and say she couldn’t remember who had stabbed her, and that he didn’t apologize to her until 1988, at a reception for their daughter’s wedding. “I’m sorry I trashed your life,” he said. “You trashed your life, too,” was her reply. None of this is in Lennon’s book.
“Mailer confuses the life of action with the life of acting out,” the sociologist Ned Polsky wrote, in Dissent, in a response to “The White Negro.” Mailer took chances. He was sometimes ridiculously wrong; he was sometimes refreshingly right; he was never uninteresting. But, in the end, he was a play outlaw. Like the rest of us, he wanted approval. Back in the nineteen-fifties, when he was denouncing from on high the philistinism of the book business, he had his friend Mickey Knox, an actor, go into bookstores pretending to be a customer, asking the salespeople what they thought of “The Deer Park.” He had to know why he wasn’t popular.
Lennon’s over-all argument seems right: “Mailer’s desire for fame, and his distaste for it, never abated over his long career.” Mailer courted fame, but he didn’t know how to deal with it. The absence of attention made him anxious, and so did attention. A man who has so many mistresses, and has to have a partner waiting at home at the same time, is a needy man. Still, in spite of the vulnerability, and in spite of the botched projects and the preposterous and occasionally offensive theories and the personal misadventures, miscalculations that would have upended the careers of most writers, he produced some remarkable and original books. ♦
*An earlier version of this article misstated the name of one of the guests; it was the writer Donald Stewart, not his father, the screenwriter, Donald Ogden Stewart.
