The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (6 page)

The year was 1955. At thirty-two, Norman Mailer was the celebrated and reviled author of three novels, and a notorious brawler, sage and drunk. By his own admission, he was at this point arrogant, terrified, greedy, spoilt — and galvanised on marijuana.

q.
Do you feel that age will mould you into a high-priced please-the-public author?

A.
I doubt it, but I also know that exhaustion of the will can come to anyone.

It would be tempting, here in 1981, to pounce on the young Mailer's stoned foreboding. His latest money-spinner,
Of Women and Their Elegance,
has taken a pummelling from the American press and is due for a torrid time of it over here. With its terrible title (that 'OP somehow guaranteeing the vulgarity of the enterprise), its irrelevant photographs and coffee-table packaging, the volume seems to boast its own vulnerability to attack. As you flap through its slippery pages, you find that it is Mailer's second book about Marilyn Monroe, and his third book running about the recently dead and their sex lives (its immediate predecessor was
The Executioner's Song,
the story of the murderer Gary Gilmore, who demanded death by firing squad in 1977). What happened to the man who has said — loud and often — that he hoped 'to dare a new art of the brave'? Clearly it is time for some revision of Mailer's American dream.

Now, at fifty-seven, Mailer has accumulated six wives and eight (or maybe nine) children. He is obliged to earn over $400,000 a year to stay abreast of alimony and tuition fees. Last year his summer house was confiscated by the taxmen. He has received, and spent, a $635,000 advance on an unwritten novel. And he is still half a million dollars in debt.

In his three-storey brownstone apartment in Brooklyn Heights, overlooking New York Harbor and the Dunhill lighters of Manhattan, Mailer perched on a stiff-backed chair, and told me to sit on the old velvet sofa. 'I can "t sit on a soft chair. I writhe around a lot. Hurts my back,' he said with an apologetic wince.

The battered but comfortable apartment feels like a ship. A pulley system leads to the upper floors. Mailer used to have a crow's-nest office at the top; the once-vigorous author would clamber up a rope to begin the day's work. Now he goes to a rented office down the street, trudging back for lunch. Children of alarmingly various ages had gathered for their supper in the dining area. Mailer's sixth wife, the dark-eyed model and actress Norris Church ('she's half my age and twice my height'), sat imposingly near by, reading a buxom magazine.

His face is more delicate and less pugnacious than you would expect, the body more rounded, dapper and diminutive. The tangled hair is white but plentiful, the frequent smile knowing but unreserved. Despite his long history of exhibitionism, he no longer enjoys giving interviews. You can sense him wondering how much of his charm he will need to disclose.

Mailer watched wistfully as I feasted on my drink. 'It's the terrible price you have .to pay,' he said, referring to his own eight-month abstinence. 'The day just wasn't long enough, and I have to work so hard now, to make the money. My nerves have been pretty well encrusted by booze, thank God. It's okay. It just means there's nothing to look forward to at the end of the day.’

'Thanks a lot,' said Norris. 'What about me?’

'No, the sex is great. The fucking's great. I just miss it, that's all.’

This reminded me of another sacrifice Mailer has been forced to make. He has always argued that any act of sex is invalid, corrupt, soul-endangering, etc., if the chance of conception has been ruled out. 'I've got eight kids,' said Mailer. 'I can't
afford
to believe that any more — My hopes and expectations have changed. I no longer feel prepared to go to the wall for any big ideas.’

'Have you mellowed', I asked cautiously,'- or what?’

'Not really. Let's say I've adjusted to circumstances. At last.’

Well, it has been a long haul. This is the man - and here headlines and half-impressions flash past - who stabbed his wife, who ran for mayor, who butted Gore Vidal, who 'won the election for Kennedy', who went on TV in his boxing trunks, who told novelist Alan Lelchuck that when he got through with him 'there'd be nothing left but a hank of hair and some fillings'.

This is the Existential Hero, the Philosopher of Hip, the Chauvinist Pig, the Psychic Investigator, the Prisoner of Sex. For thirty years Mailer has been the cosseted superbrat of American letters. It has taken him quite a while to grow up. But the process has made for a fascinating spettacle.

'Early success — that was the worst damn thing that could have happened to me.' A bright Jewish boy from Brooklyn, a Harvard graduate, Norman went off to fight as a rifleman in the Philippines. Showing that mixture of recklessness and calculation which marks his entire career, Mailer had the express intention of gathering material for the Great American Novel of the Second World War. A brave but clumsy soldier, he survived his few skirmishes, came back to Brooklyn, and wrote
The Naked and the Dead.
He was twenty-four.

Before publication Mailer left for France with his first wife Beatrice. Calling in at the American Express office in Nice, Mailer was handed what amounted to a swag bag of money and fame. American express! Number-one bestseller, sobbing reviews, forty translation rights sold, Norman, get back here! That 'meant farewell', Mailer would write in
Advertisements for Myself
(1959), 'to an average man's experience'.

Early acclaim won't harm a writer if he has the strength, or the cynicism, not to believe in that acclaim. But Norman lapped it up, and is perhaps only now recovering from the deception. True, he was very young, the success was very great — and the book was very good. Reading
The Naked and the Dead
today, one is astounded by Mailer's precocious sense of human variety, by the way he goes a step further into the extremities of exhaustion, yearning and terror, and, above all, by his ability to listen intensely to the ordinary voices of America. The novel was impossibly adult: the immaturity was all to come.

It is hard to imagine the kind of freedom that was suddenly Mailer's. After an equivalent success, an English writer might warily give up his job as a schoolmaster, or buy a couple of filing cabinets.

But Mailer had the whole of America to play with. Flattered and lionised, he bummed around Hollywood failing to write a screenplay, lived it up a good deal, and discovered a further perk of literary fame: 'getting girls I would never otherwise have gotten'. 'I was a node in a new electronic landscape of celebrity, personality and status.' The only trouble was that he had nothing left to write about.

The reception of Mailer's second novel,
Barbary Shore
(1951), was hysterical too, but the nature of the hysteria had changed. 'It is relatively rare to discover a novel', wrote one of the more temperate reviewers, 'whose obvious intention is to debauch as many readers as possible, mentally, morally, physically and politically.' A murky, paceless tale of spies and subversives, predators and impotents, the new novel had little of the style and control of
The Naked and the Dead.
The prose gurgles with cliches, tautologies and uneasy mandarinisms. What offended the critics, of course, was the book's supposedly socialist message. What offends the present-day reader is the book's message, period.

The truth is that in the vacuum of success Mailer had fallen prey to the novelist's fatal disease: ideas. His naïveté about 'answers', 'the big illumination', 'the secret of everything' persists to this day. An admirer of Malraux and the equally humourless Jean Malaquais, Mailer dubbed
Barbary Shore
the 'first of the existentialist novels in America' and himself 'a Marxian anarchist' — 'a contradiction in terms, but a not unprofitable contradiction for trying to do some original thinking'. It is all too easy, though not very profitable, to imagine Mailer at this time, sitting around doing lots of original thinking. His thraldom to catchpenny shamanism had begun. Oh well, existentialism (so far as I can gather from Mailer's writing on the topic) means never having to say you're sorry.

Over the next few years Mailer underwent a kind of aesthetic nervous breakdown. The reverse he suffered over
Barbary Shore
released a primal scream of rage and hurt; it also wrecked his artistic confidence. The resulting combination of Big Ideas and naked desperation proved crucial to Mailer's psychology. In a deep haze of illness, depression and drink, Mailer gouged out
The Deer Park
(1955). It was turned down by seven publishers.

Against the grain as always, Mailer had this time fallen foul of the obscenity laws. Or so the publishers feared — or so they claimed they feared. Mailer raged against the 'snobs, snots and fools' of the literary establishment but refused - at first - to tone down his mannered portrait of Hollywood amorality. When the novel was finally accepted Mailer took another look at the page proofs, intending no lawyer's deletions but 'just a few touches for style'.

By this stage Mailer was 'bombed and sapped and charged and stoned with lush, with benny, saggy, Milltown, coffee, and two packs a day'. His artistic nerve began to jangle with his commercial sense. 'I needed a success and I needed it badly ...
The Deer Park
had damn well better make it,' wrote Mailer in a startlingly candid passage in
Advertisements for Myself.
Shamefacedly, he started cleaning up some doubtful scenes. He wanted 'a powerful bestseller' but also wanted 'to save the book from being minor'.

Having rendered the book major (whew!), and even more powerful, Mailer waited anxiously for publication. On a mescaline trip, he rewrote the last six lines. Confident for a while, he lost his nerve again and sent out copies of the book to various bigwigs with fawning inscriptions ('if you do not answer,' he wrote to Hemingway, '... then fuck you, and I will never attempt to communicate with you again.' Hemingway didn't answer).
The Deer Park
was a 'half success', as indeed was its due, and not the 'breakthrough' for which Norman had pined. As a last gesture, he put together a full-page advertisement with choice quotes from the reviews: 'Disgusting. Nasty. Sordid and crummy. Junk.’

'Norman,' a friend said to him at the time. 'You're a writer. You shouldn't be doing all this.' 'You're wrong,' said Mailer. 'This is
exactly
what I should be doing.’

American success has been doubly unkind to him. Never timid, Mailer accepted his fate — and proceeded to do his growing up in public. 'I was on the edge of many things', he wrote later, 'and I had more than a bit of violence in me.’

Earlier that winter I had gone to see Mailer on the $i-million-doilar set of
Ragtime,
Miles Forman's rambling film version of the Doctorow novel. Turn-of-the-century New York had been re-created on an acre of Shepperton mud. Nattily dressed, his wig prinked, Mailer was playing the role of the architect Stanford White, and Norris, appropriately, was playing his wife. In the scene they were shooting that morning, White was to make his entrance into Madison Square Garden (whose facade had been reconstructed for the occasion), there to be shot in the head by an enraged cuckold.

The interior murder scene had already been filmed. In the car on the way back to the studios that day, and later over lunch, Mailer elaborated on his existential anxieties about his 'symbolic death' on the screen. 'They put wires, charges and blood packs in my hair. Unpleasant, but that didn't bother me so much as the idea of enacting my death. Then John Lennon was shot, two days before we did the scene. After that I knew which death was for real.’

'Okay, Norman!' the megaphone had bawled on the set that morning. 'Let's do it again!' For the seventh time the jalopy pulled up at the steps of Madison Square Garden. Mr and Mrs White pushed through the waiting newsmen while antique cameras flared and
fizzed.
Norman got to say his lines. It was the Mailers' last scene on the film, and the mood was genial. When the final take was finished, Forman shouted out: 'Okay! Let's hear it for Norman!' Norman smiled and nodded at the applause of the crew, pleased, braced, unembarrassable to the last.

During the sixties Mailer directed and starred in three films of his own,
Wild 90, Outside the Law,
and
Maidstone,
in which he pretends to be, respectively, a mafioso, a cop and a film director. All three were disasters, and much of the money lost was Mailer's own. But still, he hardly needed the big screen by this point: he was doing most of his acting in real life.

So began the years of the Performing Self. Why write it when you can live it? The author was no longer a craven figure hunched over his desk: the Author was a Hero, an Event, a Spectacle.

In the autumn of 1960 Mailer threw a party with his second wife Adele Morales, a Peruvian painter. 'She's an Indian, primitive and elemental,' he liked to boast. Things got a little too elemental that night on the Upper West Side. After several fistfights, and in a frenzy of alcoholic paranoia, Mailer forcibly divided his guests into two opposing groups, those for and against him. Towards dawn he stabbed Adele, nearly fatally. In a subsequent poem which I have been unable to trace, Mailer wrote that 'So long as you use a knife/There's some love left,' or words to that effect. Cheering for Adele, who anyway didn't press charges.