Norman Mailer Page 10

  His erotic letters could be as long and elaborate as his descriptions of patrols. They often had dramatic elements—costumes, props, scene changes—and resemble Jacobean masques as much as pornography. In one letter he describes a small room, heavily curtained and lit by candles. He is dressed only in a robe and Bea has a “black halo, black stockings and shoes and flimsy-like short black panties with no seat, and of course some wisp across your paps.” They drink wine and he places an olive in her navel and then lettuce leaves on her breasts, which he nibbles. They eat off the same plate, taking bites between embraces.

  We go back to finish the raspberry ice, and you straddle me in the chair and my hot hard pride slips into your lubricious embrace. We fuck very gently, and finish the ice, and light cigarettes, and drink more wine, until we glow and become tumescent so that I must lay you out on the divan, and fuck the shit out of you. Do you like my French mind, darling? Do you love the thought of alternating food nibbles and love nibbles? Am I heating your snatch from 10,000 miles?

  Bea’s letters, while ardent, were more restrained. They were long, supportive, and full of plans for the future. Her duty was considerably easier than his and her belief in his potential as a writer was rock steady. She told him about her friends, family news, and sent him portions of the novel that she was writing about life in the WAVES. Mailer sent back supportive critiques, but her novel was turned down after the war and she didn’t have the desire to continue. “I gave up writing,” she said in 1948. “I found out how hard it was.”

  When Bea wrote to him about being heartsick and confused by photographs of war atrocities, asking what it all meant, he gave her two possibilities. Perhaps God was the supreme artist, he said, detached but curious about how the situations and oppositions put in motion would play out. This deity would resemble “a very intense Somerset Maugham,” but one utterly without compassion. Another possibility was that everything was chaos, meaningless, and men killed each other in the same savage way that ants did. Years later, he said to an interviewer, “Remember that awful priest who said, ‘There are no atheists in foxholes’? It was a remark to turn people into atheists for 25 years. I remember every time I got into a foxhole I said to myself, ‘This is one man who’s an atheist in a foxhole!”

  By late June, the 112th began to relax a bit. The invasion of Japan was at the back of everyone’s mind, but it was many months away. Patrols continued, with only occasional contact with the dispirited enemy. Mailer was able to focus more on the novel, especially after he learned that Seaver was turning down an excerpt from A Transit to Narcissus for the 1945 Cross-Section. He knew the men in Recon well by now and had begun the culling process, choosing his models. He told Bea that this novel would differ from his earlier ones in two respects: he wanted it to grow out of the interaction of his characters with the natural environment, and he intended to pick his characters before he had the plot.

  In June, Mailer met Francis Irby Gwaltney, or “Fig,” a tall, red-haired soldier from Arkansas, who transferred into the 112th. He had not been to college but had literary interests and the night they met the two sat up all night in a foxhole talking about the novels of Thomas Wolfe. He admired Fig’s nasal drawl and his irreverence. They soon became buddies and their friendship deepened when a soldier said something negative about Jews. Fig shouted, “You can’t talk that way—I’m Jewish!” The soldier said Gwaltney was no Jew and Fig yelled back, “I am a fuckin’ Jew.” Fig, Mailer later said, was about as Jewish as George W. Bush. Assigned to Recon, Fig made patrols with Mailer, whom he later described as “a brave soldier, but not a good one. He couldn’t see worth a damn. Nearsighted.” Mailer told Fig about his plans for the novel. He would use him as the model for Wilson, one of the key characters of Naked. Fig was the only member of the 112th Mailer stayed in regular contact with after the war.

  In addition to Fig, Sergeant Mann, and General Cunningham, Mailer selected four other soldiers as models: Red Matthiesen, Ysidro Martinez, Isadore Feldman, and Roy Gallagher, soldiers whose ancestry was, respectively, Swedish, Mexican, Jewish, and Irish. He sent Bea a few comments on Feldman, a Brooklyn welder who was the model for Joey Goldstein, but never mentioned Gallagher, the sullen Bostonian whose name he retained. Martinez (Julio in the novel) and Red (Valsen in the novel) were described at length because they were the principals in incidents that would be plot turns in the novel. Martinez was one of a half dozen sergeants in Recon, and led Mailer’s squad. The contradictions in his character attracted Mailer. He was “soft-spoken, sly, deceitful, like an animal in the brush, and demonstrated more courage than any man I’ve ever known.” Terribly fearful and certain he was going to be killed, Martinez nevertheless volunteered repeatedly to lead patrols. He had huge qualms about killing, yet slit the throat of a Japanese soldier in the dead of night, as does his namesake in Naked.

  He had even more to say about Red, and borrowed more of his actual words than from any other soldier. An itinerant worker who rode the rails around the country from 1931 to 1937, Red was often only a few dollars away from hunger. He was in his late thirties when Mailer met him. Uneducated but intelligent, he impressed Mailer with his theology: “If there is a God, He sure must be a son of a bitch.” They became friends, and the reticent Red eventually told him his life story. He had no allegiances to any individual but huge sympathy for every underdog, including blacks. Fearless and ready to fight anyone who gave him any trouble, he recognized that his kidneys were going and he would soon have to compromise. In Naked, a weakened Red is forced to back down, crawfish, by the platoon sergeant, who is based—physically, not psychologically—on Sergeant Mann. His name is Sam Croft.

  In selecting a soldier as a character mold, Mailer looked for traits that would enable him to put that individual in dramatic situations with others. Obviously, he combined some characters and sculpted the personalities of others. But he began with real soldiers. Thus, the framework of the novel grew by accretion as he sorted through the hundreds of GIs he had known. Later, he constructed charts showing which soldiers had scenes with others to ensure that all characters had been used sufficiently and appropriately. “I studied engineering at Harvard, and I suppose it was the book of a young engineer,” he said. The last two major characters (who would not be delineated or given major roles until much later), were the commanding general, eventually called Edward Cummings, and a young second lieutenant, perhaps based in part on Horton, but definitely owing something to Lieutenant Hilliard in A Calculus at Heaven. At first he was just called “the second looey” and then later, Robert Hearn. He is the novel’s titular hero and he is murdered by Croft, the novel’s secret hero.

  BY MID-JULY, FIGHTING on Luzon was effectively over and Mailer was in garrison learning for the umpteenth time the manual of arms, reading Spengler, and discussing books with Fig. He was excited about the new GI Bill and the 52-20 Club, which would provide veterans with $20 a week for fifty-two weeks or until they got a job. He calculated that the two programs would give him and Bea a combined income of about $300 a month, plus tuition money. In addition, they had already saved $2,000. She was able to increase her savings rate because she was living with Fan, having transferred to New York. Barney was still in Washington and Barbara in Cambridge. Mailer and Bea discussed living in Boston and taking graduate courses at Harvard. Influenced by Spengler, he was interested in studying comparative religion and history.

  There was but one obstacle, but it was stupendous, and studiously avoided in Mailer’s letters: the pending invasion of Japan, which was to be the largest amphibious assault in history. Operation Olympic would land fourteen divisions on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu on November 1, 1945. Four months later, using Kyushu as a base, Operation Coronet would land twenty-five divisions on the southern shore of the main Japanese island of Honshu and push north a hundred miles to Tokyo. His outfit, Mailer learned later, was scheduled to land at Tateyama Naval Airdrome on Honshu, which was surrounded by gun emplacements embedded in cliffs surrounding
the base on three sides. “We would have been massacred,” he said.

  The invasion plans became moot when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki three days apart in early August. The Japanese surrendered on August 15. On August 8 Mailer wrote to Bea that he approved of anything that got Americans home sooner, but he found the prospects for the future horrifying. He went on to condemn the sentimental adulation for machines that he had observed, especially among men in the air corps and the navy, saying that he felt “pathological” about machines. He ends the letter on a Spenglerian note: “We have come to the age when we love machines and hate women.” Mailer’s suspicion of all things mechanical and electronic, which would become one of the hallmarks of his worldview, was irreversible by August 1945. Twelve years later, he would begin his most famous essay, “The White Negro,” by pointing to the ongoing, immeasurable “psychic havoc” created by the combination of the atomic bomb and the concentration camps. He was perhaps the first writer to link these horrors in an integral way with the suffering and discrimination felt by African Americans, the aftermath of slavery.

  The invasion force was transformed into an occupation force. He was eager to see Japan and curious about the people, having only seen “starved, grinning, irritatingly polite and friendly prisoners.” But his comments on Japan, indeed his comments on all topics (save his novel), were outweighed for some time by speculation about and plans for his homecoming. Using the military’s point system, he calculated that he would have sufficient credits to be discharged in about a year. He wrote Bea that he could now think of the months ahead as “milestones instead of a chasm.” The knowledge that he was going to survive and that there would be no more campaigns made him think of all the dead, and of the “many summers that had gone by while they had hopes to go home. I could have wept for them.”

  At the end of August, the 112th sailed on the USS Lavaca (APA 180) for Japan. His ship was with the assembled fleet when the Japanese signed the surrender documents aboard the USS Missouri (BB 63) on September 2. There was a radio hook-up that allowed everyone to hear the ceremony. The 112th was given a place of honor, the fifty-yard line, as one trooper put it. All eyes were trained on the Missouri’s main deck. Mailer wrote to his parents, “The commentator said, ‘The sun has come out and is shining on Tokyo Bay as the surrender is signed and peace is with us.’ ” This, he said, “was one of the largest, bare-assed lies I’d ever heard.” The day was cloudy, with rain threatening. That afternoon the 112th landed at Tateyama, across the bay from Yokohama.

  His unit was now a constabulary force charged with demobilizing Japanese combat units. Tateyama was on the lip of a mountainous peninsula honeycombed with caves and bunkers connected underground by roads wide enough to accommodate jeeps. For a month, the soldiers detonated munitions and destroyed weapons. As they did their work, they saw the big guns that rolled on rails through tunnels cut to the back side of the mountain. The Japanese planned to elevate the guns and fire over the mountains into the harbor, while remaining unseen and impervious. The troopers shook their heads when they realized how deadly Operation Coronet would have been.

  Boredom set in and Mailer volunteered to be a cook. Now that the fighting was over, he was unemployed as a rifleman, so to speak, and had little to do but stand inspections. He hated the arrogance of army cooks, but liked the idea of learning to cook. The real incentive, however, was getting every other day off. He captured the raspy relationship between cooks and soldiers in “Chorus: The Chow Line,” one of the comic interludes in Naked and the Dead:

  The troops file by in an irregular line. . . . As they go by they sniff at the main course which has been dumped into a big square pan. It is canned Meat and Vegetable Stew heated slightly. The second cook, a fat red-faced man with a bald spot and a perpetual scowl, slaps a large spoonful in each of their mess plates.

  Red: What the fug is that swill?

  Cook: It’s owl shit. Wha’d you think it was?

  Red: Okay, I just thought it was somethin’ I couldn’t eat. . . .

  Wilson: Ah swear, don’t you ration destroyers know another way to fug up this stew?

  Cook: “When it’s smokin’, it’s cookin’; when it’s burnin’, it’s done.” That’s our motto.

  Wilson: (chuckling) Ah figgered you all had a system.

  Mailer was still a private first class (having been promoted a few months earlier), and the chances for further promotion in Recon Platoon were slim. As much as he disliked the army, the idea of a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve—which would come if he became a first cook—was attractive. The mess sergeant liked him, he told Bea, and that augured well.

  Despite his exasperation at the delay in getting home, his time in Tateyama, and later in Choshi, one hundred miles north of Tateyama on the Pacific coast, was his happiest time in the military. He quickly mastered the army cooking routine and took pride in his work. Off duty, he explored the cliffs overlooking the ocean and made many notes for what he now referred to as “the jungle novel.” And he read widely. For the last half of 1945, a partial list includes Eric Ambler’s spy novels, Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, and Arthur Koestler’s collection of essays, The Yogi and the Commissar. He praised Lillian Smith’s novel about the lynching of blacks, Strange Fruit, but said it would have been better if it also explored the poor whites who committed the lynching. Her novel ends, he says, with the old question, “Why evil, why, why, why?” His answer: “Evil is not hard to understand. It is difficult only when the explanation tries to establish that it is not fundamental to the nature of man.” Charles Jackson’s novel of alcoholic abandon, The Lost Weekend, terrified him “because I have so much in common with the hero.” He found French novelist Georges Simenon’s Home Town to be magnificent. Over the years, Mailer read and reread hundreds of books by the prolific Simenon, praised his ability to construct tight, believable plots and gave copies of the Inspector Maigret novels to friends. But after Spengler, he had the most to say about Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

  He tackled The Brothers Karamazov first, reading it at the same time as Bea. He wasn’t at all impressed, he said, with the saintliness of Dostoyevsky’s Alyosha or by any of Tolstoy’s peasants in War and Peace. The men he had liked in the army because of their goodness struck him even more because of their lack of force. “Their goodness had no radiation,” he said. For the “jungle novel,” he planned to present each character in the manner of Tolstoy, that is, in “the self-beloved circle of his own mind.” He rhapsodized about Anna Karenina, finding it to be much greater than War and Peace. Throughout his life, he remarked on Tolstoy’s deep knowledge of humanity, his severe and unsentimental compassion, which he said later “reminds us that life is like a gladiator’s arena for the soul and so we feel strengthened by those who endure, and feel awe and pity for those who do not.”

  Tolstoy’s Kitty reminded him of Bea, and he pictured Anna with Bea’s face and body. He recalled their meals at Petitpas, a table d’hôte restaurant on West 29th Street where they engaged in “the language of knee against knee.” While he aimed for Tolstoyan scope and severity in his writing, his letters to Bea, now that their reunion was certain and near, often gushed with tenderness: “I adore thee sweets. Ever. I miss you as hard and clearly now as I did ten months ago. I shall never learn to live without you.” He would, of course, but he could hardly have foreseen it at the time.

  Cooking for 160 men in Tateyama was hard physical work. He liked it, felt useful. He put on some weight and hiked on off-days. He was now one of the senior men in the 112th, as most of the Texans had rotated home. The unit itself was due to return to Texas in January 1946 and be deactivated. Mailer was suspicious that he might be kept overseas because the military wanted to maintain troops in the Far East to counter Russian expansionism. In the meantime, cooking increased his self-confidence. “I feel very strong,” he told Bea. “I feel perfectly capable of telling a guy to blow it out his asshole if I don’t like what he says.” At the end of December 1945, he
was transferred to the 649th Ordnance Ammunition Company in Choshi, and when the first cook was sent home, he was made acting first cook. A month later he was promoted to sergeant, Tech-4. Although he told his parents that he felt like “a peon in a fascist organization,” he had his photo taken in his dress uniform, with his three stripes and combat infantryman’s badge, and sent it home to the family.

  Around the time he was transferred, one of the key characters of the jungle novel, Sergeant Croft, began to emerge. Mailer called him the “vision sergeant,” because of his deep yet inchoate desire to conquer the mountain that loomed over the jungle, and thus attain some deeper vision of the Godhead. Like Moby Dick, the mountain is real and symbolic, and he explicitly compares Croft to Ahab in the same letter in which he describes his sergeant as “an archetype of all the dark, bitter, inarticulate, capable and brooding men that America spawns.” He had already told Bea the story he had heard about a sergeant and a private in the 112th who captured a starving Japanese soldier. They gave him water, a K ration, and a cigarette, and when he closed his eyes, a bullet in the temple. “He died happy,” the sergeant said. He now decided that his vision sergeant would be the one to pull the trigger and Red (based on Matthieson) would be the private. Life was again traducing art; the incident would become one of the episodes that define Croft in Naked and the Dead. Except for a tense change, the description of Croft in “The Time Machine” chapter comes verbatim from Mailer’s letter:

  He was efficient and strong and usually empty and his main cast of mind was a superior contempt toward nearly all men. He hated weakness and he loved practically nothing. There was a crude unformed vision in his soul but he was rarely conscious of it.