Norman Mailer Read online

  Part three centers on Branstein’s attempt to hop a moving freight car, something he has never attempted. He tells himself that a successful attempt will be the equivalent of his grandfather’s escape from Russia. But he misses the ladder, and this failure presages another defeat, with which the novel concludes. Branstein crawls back to Sheila and his “past life of indecision and fear.” The novel ends with a gloomy coda describing their honeymoon in California. Sheila is pleased with her catch; he is beaten down and morose.

  Bristling with adjectives, thin on motivation and clogged with dialogue, Mailer’s first novel is nevertheless an amazing feat for a nineteen-year-old. He was teaching himself how to write an extended narrative with a dozen or fifteen major characters, all seen from an omniscient point of view, a practice run that would help him in depicting the thoughts of as many GIs in The Naked and the Dead. With some gaps here and some repetitions there, he was still able to maintain a narrative line for ninety thousand words, pacing it with various set pieces, some of them containing sharply observed evocations of place. The novel also recycles, sometimes awkwardly, previously written short stories. He was learning to marshal his resources. While the novel shows promise, and some of his one-dimensional characters are sharply drawn, the background of a world at war—save for a few references to the Civil War in Spain—is completely ignored. The novel is a revilement of hedonism and corruption. Robert Branstein sells out to the power nexus but is not entirely despicable because he has learned some lessons, the first being to dislike himself. Shortly after Mailer finished the novel, there was a fire at the Scarboro, a major tragedy for the family. The Schneider clan was distressed; the retreat where he had learned to write burned to the ground.

  The completed novel went off to Amussen at about the same time that Mailer arrived at Harvard in mid-September 1941, driving up in a 1936 Chevy convertible given to him by Uncle Dave. He and Marty Lubin had been accepted the previous spring into Dunster House, home of the “Dunster Funsters,” and had moved into a fifth floor suite overlooking the Charles River. The Dunster suite, the car (equipped with a mattress in the trunk), not to mention his Advocate and Signet sinecures, gave him for the first time the sense of being fully vested at Harvard. He was again playing house football and was co-captain for a time. His family had let him keep the $100 from Story and he had a student job drafting a schematic of Harvard’s gas and water mains. The only fly in the ointment was his major, now that his avocation had become his vocation. He wrote home that he hated his sole engineering course. His other courses were Philosophy, Sociology, and English 2-A, the second in Harvard’s series of creative writing courses. As in his sophomore writing class, he submitted portions of his summer’s work—excerpts from “No Percentage”—as well as six new stories.

  Amussen arranged to meet Mailer in Cambridge and came by on October 4 to tell him that John Farrar liked “No Percentage” and was going to show it to his partner, Stanley Rinehart. Anne and Dave Kessler, whose support of their nephew seemed overly proprietary to Fan, visited twice during the fall semester to congratulate him. “The Greatest Thing in the World” came out in Story on October 15 and within days Mailer had received letters expressing interest in his work, one from a literary agent and another from an editor. They were followed by a letter from Burnett, who wrote to say he hoped Mailer would give him right of first refusal for future work. Two weeks later Amussen wrote to say that he had given the novel to an agent, Monte Stein, for an outside opinion. Stein said it “shows brilliance,” and Amussen agreed. Whit Burnett, who had been sent one of several copies of the typescript, came to the same conclusion, telling Mailer that “the writing and psychology are brilliant.”

  ON DECEMBER 7 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the next day the United States declared war. President Conant called a mass meeting at Sanders Theatre. Mailer probably attended, but if not he certainly heard the gist of Conant’s message: the time of uncertainty about the U.S. war role is over and Harvard men will be called on to serve. The campus was transformed within weeks and graduation was accelerated for many students. Mailer’s response was to begin a new journal of observations, plans, and sketches. Sy Breslow said that Mailer felt the war “would feed the novel he wanted to write afterward. He was desperately searching for experience,” an observation confirmed by what Mailer later wrote about the moment his generation would never forget:

  I may as well confess that by December 8th or 9th of 1941, in the forty-eight hours after Pearl Harbor, while worthy young man were wondering where they could be of aid to the war effort, and practical young men were deciding which branch of the service was the surest for landing a safe commission, I was worrying darkly whether it would be more likely that a great war novel would be written about Europe or the Pacific.

  Mailer’s journal was also used for a running commentary on his relationship with Beatrice Silverman, a Boston University student from nearby Chelsea whom he met just after the Pearl Harbor attack, and with whom he had his first mature sexual relationship. Larry Weiss, now one of his closest friends, introduced him to Bea, as everyone called her. The plan was for the two Harvard men to meet Bea and another BU woman at a Boston Symphony concert. While waiting to see if tickets were available, they talked and Bea saw that Mailer “didn’t know his ass from his elbow about music.” He suggested that they return to his room at Dunster for a drink. Necking followed and when the others left, they went to bed. Bea was not a sexual novice. “She was very helpful, put it that way,” Mailer recalled, “and it worked.”

  And so we were off to the races for a year and a half. We were together all the time. But I had to be the best she’d ever had, which started a crazy theme in my head, which I didn’t get rid of for many, many, many years, because I always had a fear that I wasn’t the best lover with any woman I was with, that I was serious about, and if it didn’t take, that was the end of it. And if it did take, then I had to be the best. And if I couldn’t be, that was probably the end of it, too. So, you know, you can get a woman to tell you anything.

  Physically, they were an odd couple. Bea was five foot two, and slightly zaftig. She had long brown hair and an attractive heart-shaped face. Mailer was a few pounds lighter than Bea and six or seven inches taller. He described himself in his journal as having a “triangular face, oily, too much hair, glasses too big, chin too small.” No matter, they were in love and were soon a well-known couple at Harvard, where Bea spent a lot of time. Women were not allowed in the houses in the evening, but she flouted the rules and stayed overnight on many a weekend and their adventures in the sack became notorious; they were “setting records,” he said, and were proud of it.

  Bea used profanity regularly and this offended some of their friends, but Mailer admired Bea’s use of crude language, which surpassed his own. Her favorite expression, meant to convey tempus fugit, was “Meanwhile, the foetus is growing.” But she was also kind and maternal, he said. They were both leftist in their politics but Bea was a step ahead, having read a lot of left-wing literature as well as Havelock Ellis and some Freud. In a psychological profile of her, written as a term paper his senior year, Mailer noted that “to her any concept of absolutes or static custom is absurd.” She was a feminist thirty years ahead of the wave, he said later, and was both intellectually honest and candid. He believed that he was brighter than she was and liked that because it gave him a “comfort zone,” but he admitted that she was more knowledgeable and was a better student. A musicology major, she also took courses in social psychology. Lacking much financial support from her parents, she paid for her final two years of college by waitressing and giving lessons on the piano, an instrument she had played from an early age. Her relations with her parents were sour and she looked forward to being out of the house and independent. Within a few months, they were talking about marriage.

  At the start of the spring semester Mailer’s Advocate friend Pete Barton invited Mailer for dinner at Lowell House, where they discussed Mailer’s writing, sp
ecifically, “The Schedule Breaker,” which Barton liked. This story of seduction led Barton, in a halting manner, to ask Mailer how many times he had had sex. Mailer told him everything and they went on to speak of Barton’s fears of disease and pregnancy. The contrast between the reserved Barton and the uninhibited Mailer can be seen in another entry in his journal. At first titled “Exit Blues,” but later known (by its chorus line) as “The Bodily Function Blues,” it was to be sung to the tune of “St. Louis Blues.” The fact that Mailer was classed as a “listener” or “monotone” in grade school music classes did not deter him from delivering it with gusto from his college days until well into his eighties. A sample:

  Ah can’t piss, Ah can’t urinate

  Ah can’t bleed, Ah can’t even menstruate

  Ah can’t talk, Ah can’t elucidate

  Ah can’t shit, Ah can’t defecate

  Ah can’t gargle, Ah can’t salivate

  But worst of all, the worst of all

  Ah can’t fuck, Ah just can’t copulate

  Ah got those bodily function blues.

  In addition to the exaggerated carnality of the lyrics, the contrast between the Anglo-Saxon and Latinate synonyms is worth noting. The juxtaposition of the two lexical streams, which would become one of the hallmarks of his prose, came in great measure from what he termed a “triangle” of influence—Hemingway, Faulkner, and Farrell. From Hemingway there was “the power of restraint” deriving in part from the sparing use of Latinate words; from Faulkner, “the power of excess” that came from the expansive use of multisyllabic words. Farrell was powerful because he “gave you the sense that reality is what you had to obey more than anything. I think I learned more from those three writers than any other American writers.”

  The influence of the three was heightened because Mailer never took any courses in English or continental literature except for a drama course his senior year. Because of the courses required for his major, and the six writing courses he took, his program of study was tight. Besides a year of French, his only other electives were one course each in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and fine arts. Mailer’s lopsided curriculum, coupled with his early loss of interest in engineering, was a boon. With little opportunity to be seduced by liberal arts courses, much of his energy went into mastering fictional techniques and reading contemporary writers. His curriculum, or lack of one, allowed him to look at the world without disciplinary glasses, much as another Harvard man, William James, had, and do so fearlessly.

  In the second semester of his junior year, he took “Modern American Literature” with Howard Mumford Jones. It was in this course, which he later said meant a lot to him, that he first encountered the writing of Dreiser and Faulkner. During his four years at Harvard, the only contact he had with European literature came when he sat in on some of Harry Levin’s course on Proust, Mann, and Joyce. Mailer had scant interest in eighteenth-century British poetry and this was another reason (the lack of high school Latin being the other) he didn’t change majors. Temperamentally, he was never much in sympathy with the British literary tradition, especially poetry, although he came to admire Milton. In later years he did favor continental writers, especially the French, an admiration that began when he read Man’s Fate in his senior year. Shortly after graduation he told a friend, “I’d like to be another Malraux.”

  At the same time as he was reading Faulkner, he was enrolled in his fourth writing course, English 3-A, with Theodore Morrison, a poet, novelist, and Chaucer scholar, who said he was “struck at once by the unmistakable presence of talent in Mailer’s undergraduate work.” The story that impressed him was “Right Shoe on Left Foot,” a taut seven thousand words about racial injustice in the South in which he attempted, with some success, to present the dialects of both southern blacks and whites. Pete Barton, Mailer wrote home, was crazy about the story and it was immediately accepted by the editors of the Advocate. The Crimson praised the new story, calling it a welcome departure from the “haunted degeneracy” of the aesthetes who had earlier dominated the magazine. Mailer was turning out stories at a rapid rate now, and Fan and a coworker at Sunlight Oil had some difficulty keeping up with his requests for clean, typed copies for his submissions and competitions. Another of his stories for Morrison, “Maybe Next Year,” was also accepted by the Advocate. Mailer thought enough of it to reprint it in Advertisements for Myself with a prefatory note explaining that the inspiration was Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

  When he learned that MGM was running a college contest to identify fledgling screenwriters, he bundled five stories he had written for Morrison, added “The Greatest Thing,” and submitted them. At the same time, he sent “Maybe Next Year” to Amussen, who sent it on to The New Yorker. He was also corresponding with Whit Burnett and planned to see him in New York. In his regular letters home, he often devoted a page to comments on the short stories of his sister, the beginning of his lifelong mentoring of other writers. As the star of the Advocate, he spent a great deal of time in the boardroom reading old copies of the magazine, although he found time to drop condoms filled with water out a third story window. Goethals found Mailer to be “incredibly self-disciplined,” but not at all starry-eyed about writing. “To him it was work. He used to say, ‘George, this business of inspiration is shit.’ ”

  When Barton took over as president of the magazine, Crockett replaced Broadwater as Pegasus. Mailer was a senior editor. It was the job of Pegasus to gather up all the manuscripts, supervise the layout, and get the magazine printed. The April ’42 issue was the first effort of the new team and each staff member had a story or poem in it. The issue was delayed, however, and delayed again. Crockett reported problems with the printers in Vermont and cautioned patience. Barton, Mailer wrote in “Our Man at Harvard,” “had suspended himself into a state of forbearance worthy of a Zen warrior considering the immense agitation the late appearance of the magazine had caused.” When it finally appeared, the contributions of almost all the new editorial team were gone. Crockett had boldly replaced the planned magazine with an entirely new one, a seventy-fifth anniversary double issue containing essays, poems, and stories from the likes of Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and many others. Crockett told Hilary Mills, Mailer’s first biographer, that his motive was to publish material of high quality rather than the “smart-alecky undergraduate juvenilia” that Barton and Mailer wanted to publish. In “Our Man at Harvard,” Mailer described Crockett’s coup as “a mammoth virtuoso literary crypto-CIA affair.” Barton, whom he likened to Billy Budd, took the blame for the entire situation, which was not a total fiasco in that Crockett’s assemblage, the last crack of the aesthetes’ whip, was acclaimed in the Boston papers. To keep everyone happy, Barton decreed that the planned issue would come out in May, containing the material that Crockett had suppressed. As a result, the Advocate fell into a financial slough and remained there until well after World War II.

  “Right Shoe on Left Foot” appeared in the May issue and “Maybe Next Year” in June, which lessened any pain Mailer may have felt when he learned that the story Amussen submitted to The New Yorker was turned down. He was also disappointed to learn that he was not selected in the MGM competition for young screenwriters, which, on the basis of his Story feat, he thought he had a chance to win. MGM had asked about his military obligation, but he didn’t want to think about it, although he knew he would have to sign up for the draft. His parents were getting concerned as millions of young men were enlisting or being drafted. There was a family discussion toward the end of his junior year in which a graduate school deferment in engineering was considered. When classes ended, Mailer told his family he wanted to remain in Boston, ostensibly to work on his latest literary interest—writing plays—but Bea, of course, was the magnet. The family knew about her by now and wanted to meet her as much as Bea wanted to meet them. He recorded a vignette in his journal that says a lot about their besotted state in early 1942.

  Bea and
I were eating at McBride’s tonight. We were sitting next to each other, alone, sitting very close. When the waitress came for the dessert & handed us two menus, Bea looked at them, smiling. “Two?” she said. “Two? Do we look like two people?”

  One unhappy by-product of their romance was a drop in his grades. For the second semester, he had only one A (from Theodore Morrison in English), two Cs, and a B. This slippage caused him to lose the scholarship he had had for two years and would crimp the family’s finances.

  Before final exams, Mailer nursed the Chevy back to Brooklyn to be junked. When he returned and the school year was over, he and Douglas Woolf, a Dunster friend, got jobs as attendants at the Boston State Hospital (formerly called the Lunatic Asylum) in nearby Mattapan. They were paid $15 a week plus room and board. He wrote home to say that the inmates were not dangerous and the grounds looked like a college campus. Fan was upset and Mailer tried to calm her down by telling her he was working mainly with shell-shocked veterans and that he was collecting material for his writing. They were assigned to the violent ward, where there were sixty inmates. Woolf was exhausted by the workload—mainly herding the unruly inmates—and the sixty-five-hour week and quit. Mailer hung on but after eight days left because of the pervasive brutality. When a black inmate went berserk, swinging two table legs, the attendants moved in with mattresses and Mailer tackled him. Then they beat him into unconsciousness. Mailer did not take part in the beating, but he sensed that he eventually might and, in revulsion, quit. He wrote home that the job had been “very hard, very horrible.” The systematic and heartless use of violence as an instrument of control marked him deeply.

  His parents and Uncle Dave sent him money to stay afloat and he sought work at the navy shipyard, newspapers, theaters, and at Harvard. He had written a one-act play, “The Darndest Thing Happened on Mars,” and made friends with members of the Harvard Dramatic Society. Within three days of leaving the hospital, he landed a soda fountain job for $18 a week and meals at a big department store, the C. F. Hovey Company in the Savin Hill section of Boston, not far from where he was sharing a room with friends. He had nights and weekends off and of course spent as much time as possible with Bea, mainly at her home on Cary Avenue in Chelsea, as neither the Chevy nor the Dunster suite were available. This threw him into contact with Bea’s mother, Jenny, who was annoyed by the couple’s petting.