Norman Mailer Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE The Riptides of Fame: June 1948

  ONE Long Branch and Brooklyn

  TWO Harvard

  THREE The Army

  FOUR Paris and Hollywood: Prominent and Empty

  FIVE The Deer Park

  SIX General Marijuana and the Navigator

  SEVEN A Felonious Assault and An American Dream

  EIGHT Third Person Personal: Armies and After

  NINE Politician to Prisoner

  TEN The Turn to Biography

  ELEVEN Death Wishes: Gilmore and Abbott

  TWELVE Pharaohs and Tough Guys

  THIRTEEN An Unfinished Cathedral: Harlot’s Ghost

  FOURTEEN A Merry Life and a Married One

  FIFTEEN Old Freighter, Uncertain Sea

  Appreciations

  Books by Norman Mailer

  Photographs

  About J. Michael Lennon

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Photo Credits

  Index

  To my wife, Donna Pedro Lennon, and Barbara Mailer Wasserman, with love and gratitude

  and to the memory of Robert F. Lucid

  “There are two sides to me, and the side that is the observer is paramount.”

  —Norman Mailer

  PROLOGUE

  THE RIPTIDES OF FAME: JUNE 1948

  After delivering the manuscript of his war novel The Naked and the Dead to his publisher, Norman Mailer sailed to Europe with his wife, Beatrice, on October 3, 1947. Having for most of his life known only the Depression and the war in the Pacific, he had always viewed with romantic envy the expatriate pasts of the Lost Generation writers he admired: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Henry Miller. So to go to Europe on the GI Bill as he now could seemed like a miraculous opportunity. Paris was the bull’s-eye destination for aspiring writers, including Stanley Karnow, a Harvard graduate and veteran who arrived there a few months before Mailer. His memoir, Paris in the Fifties, opens with the question: “Porquoi Paris? Its name alone was magic. The city, the legendary Ville Lumière, promised something for everyone—beauty, sophistication, culture, cuisine, sex, escape and that indefinable called ambience.” Mailer partook of all of these pleasures during his ten-month stay there. He differed from most of his countrymen, however, in one respect: he was a writer when he arrived: besides Naked, he had written two unpublished novels in college. While enjoying Paris and taking trips to other countries, he was trying to get a new novel going. It was one of the happiest seasons of his life, shadowed only by his anxiety about the future.

  In the spring of 1948 he drove to Italy in a small Peugeot, accompanied by his wife, younger sister, and mother—Beatrice, Barbara, and Fanny. They left Paris on June 1, drove east to Switzerland and then south to Italy. It began to rain as they drove through the foothills of the Alps, and turned to snow when they reached higher elevations. Mailer had to keep downshifting on the hairpin turns because the Peugeot didn’t have much horsepower. By the time they reached the St. Gotthard Pass, they were in a blizzard. At the peak they had to back up to let another car pass, coming perilously close to the edge. Mailer relished the experience. They spent a few days in the villages and resorts of the northern lake country, and then moved on to Florence and Venice. In mid-June they arrived in Rome, where they hoped to pick up their mail, forwarded by Mailer’s father, Barney, an accountant working for a postwar relief organization in Paris.

  Rinehart and Co., Mailer’s publisher, had mounted a major publicity campaign for The Naked and the Dead, and he and his family (his mother and sister had come over in April) were eager for news of its reception. The mail in Rome contained several reviews, all positive, even glowing. After two or three days of sightseeing, Fan left them and took the train back to Paris to join Barney. Mailer, Bea, and Barbara drove down to Naples, then on the morning of June 23 they began the long drive back to France. Mailer was preoccupied, thinking about the reviews, the return trip to the United States, and a cable he had just received from Lillian Hellman, who wanted to write a dramatic adaptation of his novel. He had seen her play The Little Foxes on Broadway when he was in college, and had “a lot of respect for her as a playwright,” as he told his editor. In Paris, he had begun a new novel, but it was a fragment, and he didn’t know if he wanted to continue with it. He had the feeling that he’d be busy when he got home in August. They drove on, and after a long ride arrived in the late afternoon at the American Express office in Nice. Barney had forwarded the next batch of mail from the States.

  A month earlier, Mailer recorded his anticipations in his journal. He had seen “batches of reviews” by May 12—the novel came out on May 6—and realized its prospects were excellent.

  The thing I’ve got to get down here is my reactions to the book’s success. The depression to start with—I feel trapped. My anonymity is lost, and the book I wrote to avoid having to expose my mediocre talents in harsher market places has ended in this psychological sense by betraying me; I dread the return to America where every word I say will have too much importance, too much misinterpretation. And of course I am sensitive to the hatreds my name is going to evoke.

  But across from that is the other phenomenon. I feel myself more empty than I ever have, and to fill the vacuum, to prime the motor, I need praise. Each good review gives fuel, each warm letter, but as time goes by I need more and more for less and less effect. This kind of praise-opium could best be treated in fiction through the publicity mad actress who has to see her face and name more and more to believe in her reality, and of course loses the line between her own personality, and the one created for her by the papers.

  Mailer’s desire for fame, and his distaste for it, never abated over his long career. Nor did his ability to determine how he might write about his current situation, whatever it might be. It became a reflex.

  Hot and dusty and sweaty from the ride to Nice, Barbara and Bea sat in the Peugeot while Mailer went in for the mail. He returned with an enormous packet of clippings, cables, reviews, and letters. “The reviews were mostly marvelous,” Barbara wrote. “Our friends were all excited and writing to us (I remember my Progressive Party lover wrote, ‘What kind of book is this that both the Times and the Daily Worker praise?’)” The atmosphere in the car got “somewhat frenetic and hysterical.”

  I don’t think we finished reading any letter or review because it was always interrupted by word of a comment on what someone else was reading. Finally Norman said, in a rather small voice which I will never forget the sound of because it so totally captured the feeling that none of this was quite real, “Gee, I’m first on the best seller list.” We laughed. And laughed. And I thought of all this excitement going on 3,000 miles away, and Norman was the cause of it, but it didn’t seem to have any relation to “Us.”

  Looking back on that day almost sixty years later, Mailer said, “It was a great shock.” He had been hoping he would earn enough money from Naked and the Dead to write his next book. Now the novel was number one on the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for eleven consecutive weeks. All told, it remained on the list for sixty-two weeks. “I knew I’d be a celebrity when I came back to America and I felt very funny towards it, totally unprepared,” he said. “I’d always seen myself as an observer. And now I knew, realized, that I was going to be an actor. An actor on the American stage, so to speak. I don’t mean I
knew it all at once. But there were certainly intimations of that.”

  Shortly after leaving the army, Mailer had been told by a New York editor that no one was interested in war novels. Everyone was tired of the war. But by 1948, readers were eager to remember and explore the experience, and Mailer’s novel, which looked at World War II from both the battlefields of the Pacific and the home front, was perfectly suited. “It was the luckiest timing of my career,” he said later. Even so, he was concerned that the publicity surrounding the novel, and its huge sales, would alienate the readers of the leading literary journal in the United States, the Partisan Review. Success as a writer, he said, was like getting “caught in a riptide. Two waves coming in from different directions. You get more attention in one place and less in the other. The ego is on a jumping jack.” He and Bea believed PR’s readers were mainly snobs, but he still wanted to see his name on its front cover.

  But the largest drawback of fame was that it cut him off from real experience, as he called it, the kind he’d had in the army, experience that was thrust on you, as opposed to the kind one sought. “I used to feel that I didn’t know anything because I got rich too soon,” he said. “I used to feel sorry for myself.” But after some years of demeaning his fame, he started to enjoy it. It was “an acquired appetite.” He agreed with the Marquis de Sade that “there is no pleasure greater than that obtained from a conquered repugnance.” When he reached that point he wanted more and more of it, recognizing that being famous at an early age was a genuine, if unusual, experience. If he was unable to enjoy normal life, he now had “a sense of how . . . not tenuous, not fragile . . . how delicate, perhaps, is identity.” Success had brought on an identity crisis. After that, he said, “It was as if there was somebody named Norman Mailer, but to meet him people had to meet me first.” Then, as his fame waxed and waned over the next decade, he saw that “I could now write about the identity of people who had a certain amount of power.” One of Mailer’s most important subjects is power, and how it is gained, lost, regained, or dwindled away, and the conflicted, intricate psyches of those who exercise it.

  His literary career had a significant foreground—in Brooklyn, Harvard, and combat in the Philippines—but it began officially, one might say, on that hot day in Nice. Before they opened the mail and saw the magnitude of the novel’s reception, Barbara said, “was the last time Norman could feel he was himself and not Norman Mailer.” He said that he “felt kind of blue” after reading the mail in Nice. When they returned to Paris a few days later, he told his sister, “I think the book may be better than I am.” He had turned twenty-five only a few months earlier.

  ONE

  LONG BRANCH AND BROOKLYN

  Norman Mailer knew little about his grandparents’ lives in Lithuania, then part of Russia. The Mailers and the Schneiders lived in three towns, not more than sixty miles apart, in central and northeastern Lithuania: Panevezys, Anyksciai, and Utena. Unknown to each other in Russia, the two families emigrated at the end of the nineteenth century to escape economic hardship or persecution, or both, the Mailers settling in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the Schneiders in New Jersey.

  Mailer’s maternal grandfather, Hyman (Chaim) Jehuda Schneider, was a precocious child who studied the Torah and Talmud from a very early age. Mailer’s mother, Fan, said that he was “sent at the age of seven to the yeshiva in Wolozin [Volozhin], Russia, which was comparable to Columbia [University] in the U.S.” Commonly referred to as “the Mother of Yeshivas,” the Volozhin Yeshiva was the home of the Misnagdim, the opponents of Hasidism, the rambunctious, anti-formalist movement that developed among European Jews in the latter part of the eighteenth century. “My father,” Fan wrote, “was a staunch follower of the Misnagdim. He felt the Hasidim were not so learned; they depended too much on the rabbi and his blessings.” There is more than a slight irony in the fact that her son would become fascinated by the mysticism of the Hasidim. In the early 1960s, he wrote six columns for Commentary, reflections on folk stories collected by Martin Buber that centered on the Hasidim’s dialectic, which, Mailer said, “placed madness next to practicality, illumination side by side with duty, and arrogance in bed with humility.” Early and late, Mailer gravitated to incompatibles.

  Born in 1859, Schneider was a rabbi by sixteen and, at about the same age, married Ida Kamrass. They had six children, in order: Joseph, Rebecca (Beck), Jennie, a son who died at childbirth, Rose, and the youngest, Fanny or Fan. At the end of the century, the Jews in the Pale of Settlement (comprised of the bulk of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Belarus) were being driven abroad by double taxation and forced enlistments in the czar’s army. Parlous conditions from 1881 to 1914 forced over two million to emigrate. Sometime in early 1891, Schneider left for the United States with his half-sister, Lena, his half-brother, Morris, and his wife’s youngest sister, Minnie. Ida, pregnant with Fan, stayed behind. The Schneiders were separated for three years. Ida, her sixty-two-year-old mother, Leah Sacks, and the five children arrived in New York in October 1894, sailing from Rotterdam on the SS Veendam.

  When Hyman Schneider arrived in 1891, he was advised to set up a soda water and newspaper stand on the Lower East Side. He and Lena opened the stand at four A.M. and worked shifts until late at night. Irish gangs, operating with impunity, dominated the area and took what they wanted. Sixty years later, Mailer had an apartment not far from where his grandfather had once toiled. After six months, Schneider left the city and became a peddler in rural New Jersey. He also taught Hebrew to Jewish families in Belmar before finally settling in the resort town of Long Branch, where, according to Fan, he was “induced” by the small local Jewish community to start a kosher grocery store.

  In The Naked and the Dead, Mailer drew on his earliest memories for a description of the store run by Joey Goldstein’s grandfather, a learned Jew who quotes the medieval Jewish poet and scholar Yehuda Halevi:

  Inside there is a narrow marble counter and an aisle about two feet wide for the customers who stand on the eroded oil cloth. In the summer it is sticky, and the pitch comes off on one’s shoes. On the counter are two glass jars with metal covers and a bent ladling spoon containing essence of cherry, essence of orange. (Coca-Cola is not yet in vogue.) Beside them is a tan moist cube of halvah on a block of wood. The flies are sluggish, and one has to prod them before they fly away.

  The Schneider store catered to the Jewish population, which burgeoned each summer with the arrival of middle-class visitors and a few wealthy New Yorkers. Preoccupied by his studies, Rabbi Schneider played a relatively small role in the store; the women and older girls did most of the work with the two younger girls helping after school. Only Rose and Fan were able to graduate from high school.

  Along with recent arrivals from the Pale, itinerant rabbis, cantors, and others were put up for days at a time at their home, often staying until enough money could be collected for them to move on to the next town. Hyman was their informal counselor, an independent scholar who was glad to learn and teach. Over tea and sweets, he regaled the household with stories from the Talmud or read accounts of the life of his hero, Baruch Spinoza, a freethinking Portuguese Jew who was excommunicated by the Orthodox Jewish community of Amsterdam. Rabbi Schneider’s intellectual ability is an article of faith in the Mailer family. Fan’s husband, Barney, said the source of his son’s talent was “his maternal grandfather. A Talmudic scholar.” Fan added, “three of his grandsons went to Harvard.” Marjorie “Osie” Radin, the eldest of Mailer’s American cousins, who was nineteen when the rabbi died, said, “That’s where all the brains and talent came from.” In a memoir, Mailer’s sister, Barbara, answers the question “Who was Grandpa?”

  Certainly, in one view, the archetype of the timid Jew, the one who whispers in front of the firing squad, “Don’t make waves.” But also the saintly, kindly man, the revered intellectual, brave enough to come to a foreign land and work at menial entrepreneurship, too afraid of violence to stay in New York (a gang of thugs on
ce overturned his peddler’s cart), but too proud to be a rabbi who takes orders from others, orthodox in his rituals, but on the edge of apostasy in thought.

  In 1913 the Schneiders established a boardinghouse with sixty rooms in three adjacent houses on Morris Avenue, naming it the Maple Hotel and Cottages. Beck and her husband, Louis Shapiro, partnered with her parents in the operation of the Maple for two years before it burned to the ground in the winter of 1915, one of many such fires in Long Branch. The family remained in the hotel business, however, especially since it was easy to provide the guests with kosher food from the store. From 1916 to 1918, again with Beck and her husband, they leased the Scarboro Hotel on Ocean Avenue, built in 1882 and catering to an almost exclusively Jewish clientele. Beck and Louis later bought the hotel, expanded it, and added a coat of white stucco; eventually it became the largest hotel (two hundred rooms) in Long Branch and was a source of family pride until it too burned down in 1941.

  Although the Schneider girls worked twelve-hour days in the family business, they had a passionate interest in culture. At age twelve Fan read Anna Karenina (her son’s favorite novel) and, later in high school, Dickens and George Eliot. On Saturday nights, they went to the movies and, in the summers saw Broadway tryout plays and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas at Riverside Park.

  BY THE SUMMER of 1919, Fan would go into the hotel business full-time with her parents. She and her father went to Lakewood, New Jersey, in October of 1919 to lease a place as a winter resort. The fifteen-bedroom house was called Lakeview Lodge, although Fan noted bluntly, “I assure you there was no view.” New visitors were sought by placing ads in the New York Yiddish newspaper, the Tageblatt.

  One of the ads was read by a twenty-eight-year-old veteran of World War I, Isaac Barnett Mailer. Barney, as he was generally known, had studied accounting at Transvaal University in Johannesburg and then joined the South African army. Stationed in London from 1917 to 1919, he was mustered out in the summer of 1919 and decided to travel to the United States rather than return home. His parents, Benjamin and Celia Mailer, had lived in Johannesburg since emigrating from Lithuania in 1900, when Barney, the second of eleven surviving children, was nine. The Mailers had established themselves solidly there, operating various businesses. Barney arrived from Liverpool on the White Star liner SS Baltic in November 1919, and moved in with his sister Anne and her husband, David Kessler, who were then living in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.