Norman Mailer Page 11

  Mailer’s buddies had discovered geisha houses and learned the distinction between a geisha—a woman who entertained, poured sake, and in some instances had sex with visitors—and a joro, or common whore, who lacked the social graces. Before he was transferred to Choshi, he was taken by his friend Nat Ellis to a geisha house, where he made what he called “the time-honored American purchase—a piece of ass.” It was the first time he had had sex since he last saw Bea in the United States a year earlier. He went to geisha houses three more times, including once during one of his two visits to Tokyo the following March. He remembered his troubled feelings six decades later:

  I had very mixed feelings about fidelity. I thought we should be faithful; I wanted her [Bea] to be faithful to me, I’d go crazy at the thought she might be having an affair. As it turned out later, I think she did have a few unhappy, little affairs—unhappy in the sense that they were to her in her mind not quite right—I was having the same with the geisha girls. Just one or two, and it wasn’t right and I didn’t feel very virile because I was violating my own standards of, oaths of fidelity. And what I discovered is that an oath has a great influence upon a hard-on. You know, don’t give an oath and think your hard-on can ignore it. It can’t. That I learned early and never really learned it.

  Unfaithful in all of his marriages, Mailer was a serial philanderer. His affairs caused him and his family much misery over the next fifty years. But that night in Tateyama, when he returned to the barracks, he felt guilty and empty, as he told Bea when he confessed the next day.

  FROM SEPTEMBER OF 1945 to February of 1946, his discharge date changed almost weekly. He followed the changing promises of the War Department and watched the news as servicemen all over the world complained and demonstrated for early release. Mailer encouraged his mother and mother-in-law, two formidable Jewish matrons, to lobby on his behalf, and they did. By the beginning of March, he was all but certain that he would be home sometime in April.

  Planning the logistics for writing the novel was already under way. He wrote to Fan and gave her instructions on the kind of portable typewriter he wanted, and asked Bea to separate out all his letters dealing with the novel. Given the centrality of the mountain to his novel, he said it would be important to do some mountain climbing, perhaps in North Conway, where they had skied. Provincetown in the summer would be the perfect place to write, and Bea (who would be discharged shortly) began to look for a suitable place. All the while, plans for the novel spilled out in profusion. He sketched an outline of the events leading to the war and Roosevelt’s brilliance in mobilizing the country. With the passing of the president—“a great humanist”—Mailer feared there would be “a fascist backwash” in America after the war, given America’s victories and enormous power. He wanted this perspective to be the novel’s geopolitical backdrop.

  He wrote out the names of 161 soldiers he had known since he had been in the army. He had already selected eight of his principal characters, but needed more and wanted the largest possible pool from which to draw. He wanted his Recon platoon to have thirty to forty soldiers in it, but worried about the number he could include without confusion, and began counting the number of significant characters in novels at hand. When he found that there were only sixteen in a novel he admired, Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer, he concluded that he would limit his roster to fifteen. He ended up with a total of fourteen enlisted men as significant characters in Naked’s Recon platoon. Only three officers—General Cummings, Lieutenant Hearn, and Major Dalleson—have important roles.

  Looking back over his reading of the past year, he selected four books as models. He said he wanted to reread them before he started writing what he thought would be a novel of 90,000 to 100,000 words, a huge underestimation—Naked and the Dead is over 300,000 words. First on his list was The Informer, a tightly written story of betrayal and animalistic fear in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War. He prized it for its deft one- or two-paragraph character portraits. Simenon’s Home Town was next, admired for its “insights into the weakly Evil, the men who are small of soul & afraid rather than malign.” Albert Maltz’s 1944 novel, The Cross and the Arrow, set in wartime Germany, is the story of a factory worker who perseveres as the Nazi regime begins to devour its own. He wanted to study Maltz’s presentation of stubborn nobility. Finally, he planned to read Anna Karenina again in order “to steep myself in a good humanistic mood.”

  Mailer was sent to Onahama, another hundred miles up the Pacific coast, in late January on temporary assignment as mess sergeant for twenty-five men. At the end of February, he returned to Choshi, where he reported to the top mess sergeant. He had excellent relations with his Japanese KPs in all of his cooking assignments. “I don’t know if it’s Harvard or Aunt Anne’s instruction in table manners,” he told Bea, “but I cannot treat a person as a servant.” The KPs worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week but they considered themselves fortunate because they ate well. He was a kindly boss. The spokesman of one KP group said to him: “Sair, there are much joyness in the hearts of the kitchen boys since you have come to be cook here.” Mailer enjoyed joking with them in Japanese, which he had learned a bit of. He also enjoyed writing “Sgt.” before his name on the return address of his letters. He kept thinking how nice his stripes would look when he returned to Brooklyn.

  On the night of April 3, he was awakened by the top mess sergeant. The KPs had left the kitchen in a mess, and he ordered Mailer to clean it up. Mailer wrote to Bea that he called him a “chickenshit son-of-a-bitch” and the sergeant stomped out. Mailer was summoned to the captain’s office. Drunk and angry, the captain ordered Mailer to apologize to the mess sergeant and threatened to court-martial him when he argued back. Mailer apologized and, throbbing with self-loathing, walked out. “I hated him [the captain] enough to kill him then,” he said. After a sleepless night, he decided he’d turn in his stripes, which made him feel better. But the next day when he told the captain he was turning in his stripes, the captain replied with some heat, “You’re not turning them in, I’m taking them.” Later, the mess sergeant told him the captain had no intention of demoting him until Mailer opened his mouth. He told Bea that his only solace was to feel the joy of complete renunciation. “Sweet Sarge is Poor Private again,” he said. He told Bea that he had gotten too proud of his sergeant’s stripes. He left the army the way he came in, as a buck private.

  The moment when the captain took away his sergeantcy, he said later, “was when the keel was laid for The Naked and the Dead.” He transformed the crawfishing incident into the pivotal confrontation between General Cummings and Lieutenant Hearn, which leads indirectly to Hearn’s death. But this came much later, in the final draft of Naked. His immediate response to the event was to write Bea a letter outlining an episode in which Red Valsen commits an offense similar to his own and is court-martialed. Valsen’s hatred of officers is so intense that it becomes a blind spot in his otherwise fair-minded outlook. Mailer was not much different in this regard. Even in his old age, he would snap at some slight by saying, “You sound like an officer!”

  In this last letter home in April, he announced to Bea that he had received travel orders. A week later he was on his way to the 4th Replacement Depot in Yokohama. When he arrived there, he ran into his buddy from basic training and Fort Ord, Clifford Maskovsky, who now was a master sergeant. When Mailer saw his rank, he said, “Whose ass did you kiss to get those stripes?” The two friends were both aboard the USS U.S. Grant (AP 29) when it left with a thousand-plus GIs for the United States on April 26, arriving at Fort Lawton, near Seattle, a week later. Maskovsky was sergeant of the guard on the crossing and Mailer asked him for a good detail so he could avoid guard duty. Maskovsky put him in charge of candy distribution, a soft job. He read Anna Karenina for the third time on the voyage.

  By the time they arrived, Mailer had given away all his medals, even his Combat Infantryman’s Badge. He was the only buck private on the train from Seattle to Fort Dix. There was a f
inal ignominy; everyone on the train was drinking and horsing around, and he got into a fight with a much bigger GI who broke his nose. On May 2, having served two years, one month, and six days, he was given an honorable discharge and mustering-out pay of $117.91. He got on the train and “went home like a stripped duck.”

  Mailer often said that the army had been the worst experience of his life, and the most valuable. Trained as a fire control operator, he served consecutively as a clerk, aerial photography trainee, shower builder, wire lineman, rifleman, laundryman, cook, and mess sergeant. Shot at several times, he shot back but probably killed no one. He was demeaned, ignored, humiliated, busted, and tested to a fare-thee-well. By his own admission, he was “the third lousiest guy in a platoon of 12.” But he survived twenty-five reconnaissance patrols and grew as a man and an artist. He knew his army. He summed up his situation concisely in a letter to Bea halfway through his tour: “You know really my only decent function as a man is to be a lover and/or an author.” Sustained by his wife, his family, and a sturdy belief in his vocation, he was now prepared to become a full-time writer, the only line of work, besides soldiering, he ever followed for more than a couple of months. “Through most of the Great Wet Boot which was World War II for me,” he wrote,

  I kept a cold maniacal thing in my heart, sharp as a shiv. I would listen to other G.I.s beating their gums about how when they got out they were going to write a fugging book which would expose the fugging army, and I would think in my fatigue-slowed brain that if they only knew what I was going to do, they would elect me sergeant on the spot.

  THE NIGHT OF his homecoming, Bea and Mailer went to a Brooklyn Heights hotel. The “unguent” of Bea’s breasts, as he said in his letters, was all he needed to heal his ego bruises. The hotel was expensive, however, and after a week they moved into the family’s apartment down the street. The clan laved out solicitude. After a few weeks, he was eager to begin writing, but before they left for Provincetown, Mailer made an appointment with the senior editor at Random House, Robert Linscott, who had found some merit in A Transit to Narcissus. He told the white-haired editor his idea for the novel, and the kindly Linscott said, “Oh, dear boy, don’t, don’t, write a war novel. We’ve over-published war novels and you won’t be able to get a publisher.” Mailer was unsettled by this advice, but knew he had no choice. “It was the only book I had in me, and I had to write it.” He had support from Adeline (née Lubell) Naiman.

  Adeline was the former Radcliffe roommate of Bea’s sister, Phyllis, and had become a good friend of Mailer’s sister, Barbara. She, the Silverman sisters, her friend Rhoda Lazare, and Adeline had created what Mailer called “the Norman legend” during the war. After Adeline was hired as a junior editor at Little, Brown, she began corresponding with Mailer in Japan and asked if she could see Transit, adding that she believed he was going to be a great writer. By then, he had decided it was a badly flawed work, and replied he would only consent to publication if no changes were requested and it appeared under a nom de plume. There the matter rested until mid-June when he, Bea, and Fan went to visit the Silvermans in Chelsea, and a luncheon meeting with Adeline and her mother at the Oxford Grill in Cambridge was arranged. Adeline remembers being disappointed by a slight, short young man “who wasn’t dashingly articulate.” Mailer was knocked back by her cultivation; he estimated she had read three times as much as he had. “She was a real name dropper, culturally speaking . . . very sure of herself. Full of stuff, full of vitamins,” he recalled. Although he was uncharacteristically reserved at the luncheon, he did tell her about the new novel and they agreed to stay in touch. She became a lifelong friend.

  After the luncheon, he and Bea took the train to Provincetown. Bea had arranged to rent a cottage. The Mailers thought that the Crow’s Nest Cottages, as the double row of beachfront cottages were called, were in Provincetown, but they were actually a half mile over the line in North Truro. They had no car and pedaled bikes into Provincetown to go shopping. He immediately fell into a routine, writing from eleven to six on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Fan, Barney, and Barbara came up for a week in July, and the Silvermans also visited, but the young couple didn’t socialize much. By the end of August, he had a 184-page typescript.

  It had always been Mailer’s baseline assumption that there would be no hero in The Naked and the Dead. This is clear from the sheaf of letters Bea had pulled together, close to a hundred from his overseas correspondence. There were as many comments on Martinez, Red, and Wilson as on Croft, but fewer on General Cummings and Lieutenant Hearn. Mailer was writing an ensemble novel about an understrength reconnaissance platoon. Each soldier would have his time in the spotlight and would interact, more or less, with every other soldier. He also intended to write about officers, drawing on his experience as a regimental clerk. By the time he reached Provincetown, he had a four-by-six card for each major character, the front side giving a baker’s dozen of the soldier’s traits and the back outlining his history. For example, the front of General Cummings’s card lists: “love of planning & chess, ambition, love of wife, weight of responsibility, love of ease and luxury, maintenance of manner (bonhomie), wise hard knowledge of men, fear (pressure from the top), love of army ethical system, snobbery.” The back of Red’s card gives his year of birth (1912) and his jobs: “coal miner 1927–1930; hobo, 1930–31—sporadic, 1931–41; short order cook, shingler, plumber, harvester, flop house keeper, painter, truck driver, tailor.” All of these occupations are mentioned in Red’s “Time Machine” episode; he doesn’t change markedly from Mailer’s first conception of him. Cummings, on the other hand, while retaining some of the traits listed, underwent a major transformation. He becomes more intellectual, spartan, sadistic, and, most important, more reactionary. And, by the final draft, he has no love for his wife. He tells Hearn, “The truth is, Robert, my wife is a bitch.” Mailer makes Cummings a homosexual, as he later stated.

  In addition to the cards, which contain the names of the men on whom they are based, he drew up various charts detailing the interactions of the men in Croft’s platoon. It is comprised largely of men from all around the country, lower- and middle-class who have been beaten down, first by the Depression, and next by the army. Eight of the platoon (Croft, Valsen, Martinez, Gallagher, Wilson, Brown, Stanley, and Toglio) are veterans of the disastrous preceding campaign at the (fictional) island of Motome, where the Japanese blasted them out of their rubber assault rafts with antiaircraft guns. The other six members of the platoon are green replacements: Ridges, a dirt farmer from Arkansas; Roth, an unathletic Jew from New York who falls to his death climbing Mount Anaka, the peak that dominates the island; Goldstein, a welder from Brooklyn; Wyman, another midwesterner; Minetta, a malingerer from New Jersey; and Czienwicz, a petty criminal from Chicago known to all as “Polack.” Mailer was careful in how he allotted space to his characters. The backgrounds of eight of the fourteen enlisted men (Martinez, Croft, Valsen, Gallagher, Wilson, Goldstein, Brown, Polack), and two officers (Cummings and Hearn), are given in “Time Machine” flashbacks, a device adapted from the biographical chapters in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. The others are revealed in conversation or via his omniscient narrator, who presents the thoughts of nearly every named character in the novel, more than two dozen. Critics have argued, with some justice, that some of the profiles (Brown and Polack, in particular) are stereotypical, although Mailer has been praised for others, generally those that his own background enabled him to handle more surely (Roth, Goldstein, Gallagher, Hearn). On the other hand, most readers agree that the “Time Machine” device is helpful in understanding the actions of the men under duress. They are sociosexual in nature, again revealing the influence of D. H. Lawrence. The soldiers carry their carnal fears and desires with them, another weight in their backpacks. Mailer saw the biographies as “bi-functional”: they illumine motivation and provide pace. He explained one of his guiding beliefs for Naked and the Dead: “One was the product of one’s milieu, one’s parents
, one’s food, one’s conversations, one’s dearest and/or most odious human relations. One was the sum of one’s own history as it was cradled in the larger history of one’s time.” So while there is justice in saying that some of the characters are stock and predictable, it is not true of Cummings and Hearn; their heavily worked intellectual conversations “show something of the turn my later writing would take,” he said. The two officers and, arguably, Croft and Goldstein, are dynamic characters who change in unforeseen ways in the crucible of jungle warfare.

  Roth’s original name was Frankenheim. Mailer changed it to Rothberg and finally to Roth. He is a graduate of City College of New York, and worked in the city’s real estate tax office. The only enlisted man in his outfit with a college education, he is also the only character with a four-by-six card that has no “Time Machine” episode. Sensitive, lazy, and depressed, Roth is the martyred Jew in the novel. Like Mailer, he is recently married. One reason, it can be surmised, why Mailer eschewed a “Time Machine” biography for Roth is to avoid having two New York Jews profiled. The other, perhaps, is so comparisons to his creator would not be as easy to make. There is no mention of a Roth, a Rothberg, or a Frankenheim in his master list of soldiers, in his letters, or the recollections of others in the 112th. But Mailer was not drawing a self-portrait. As with characters in several of his later novels—Stephen Rojack in An American Dream, most notably—Roth is a fictional first cousin at best.

  A meeting with Adeline was arranged for early September, and he and Bea took the morning ferry across the bay to Boston. He brought his first draft and Adeline sequestered herself to read it, finishing in the late afternoon. Her brief report, written that same day, stated boldly that the novel “is going to be the greatest novel to come out of World War II and we must publish it.” Mailer remembered it as an “incredible document.” She followed her spontaneous encomium about ten days later with a formal assessment, in which she outlined the novel’s loose plot and lauded “the author’s marvelous sense of spoken language rhythms and the colloquial idiom.” In her conclusion she warns that if the novel is not accepted, “we are passing up the first really important novel to come out of the war and a potentially tremendous author.” She predicted that the novel could sell as many as 7,300 copies, a large number for a first novel, but far below its actual sales figures. She was the first professional to see the importance of the novel.