The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Meeting Mailer

Written by
Richard Stratton

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Abstract: A writer recounts his relationship with Norman Mailer, beginning in the 1970s.

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URL: https://prmlr.us/mr08stra

“It was the early 1970's.” I was living in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on a writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center. Across Commercial Street, the narrow lane meandering through town, cater-cornered to the garret apartment where I lived, was a big red brick house on Cape Cod Bay. A young woman, Bobbi, worked in that house as a cook and housekeeper for Norman Mailer. Bobbi lived in the ground floor apartment of the building I lived in and over the fall and winter months we became friends.

“You should meet Norman,” Bobbi said to me one evening as we sat drinking wine and talking. “You guys would hit it off.”

By then I was already a Mailer aficionado. I had come to his writing through his movies. On a whim one night I went to a screening at Brandeis of Beyond the Law—it was the title that attracted me. Ninety minutes later I walked out of the auditorium determined to read Mailer, for anyone who could make a film that bold and outrageous about cops and criminals, I knew, had to have much to teach me about writing.

I read Mailer over the next several months, and, during the summer while I attended a writing course at Harvard, his alma mater, I got up the nerve to write him a letter. First I read the early novels, The Naked and the Dead, Barbary Shore, The Deer Park, then, The Armies of the Night, and I was hooked. This was, after all, a time when the death of the novel had already been announced and readers and writers of fiction were in mourning. Given what we were living through at the time—the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, the war in Vietnam and rioting in the streets of American cities, as seen on the evening news—reading fiction was a bit like reading obituaries. The potential for fiction to ignite the public consciousness had been usurped by reporting current events and what was to become known as the new journalism. With The Armies of the Night, Mailer became its stellar performer, there in the event, balls to the wall, and back at his desk, writing with a hard-on.

Reading Mailer changed my life. This was the kind of writer I wanted to be, the kind of man I hoped to be: engagé. He lived what he wrote about and then wrote about what he lived as though the quality of his life depended on the truth he discovered in the experience, reflected by the prose. I said to myself, after reading Advertisements for Myself, I’ve got to meet this guy. First I communed with him psychically, then on paper. I wrote him a short letter inspired by his essay “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” which was first published in Esquire, on the death of Benny “Kid” Paret at the gloved hands of Emile Griffith. Mailer answered me with an equally concise note, dated 19 August, 1970: Dear Mr. Stratton: I’ve been up in Maine and now I’m in New York and won’t get to P-town till the fall. Will you still be in Hyannis? If so, I might take you up on your offer. Sincerely, Norman Mailer.

I’m not sure what exactly I had offered, and in the meantime I had left Hyannis; but the fact that Mailer wrote back was enough to inspire me to decamp and move to Provincetown. The Fine Arts Work Center provided a modest stipend, which I augmented working as a carpenter. It was by chance that I moved into the apartment across the street from the home Mailer rented that off-season, and later bought; and another lucky coincidence, if you believe in such things, that Bobbi lived in the same building I moved into and we became friends. I like to think I was so turned on by Mailer’s work, I wanted so much to know him, I created an energy field that drew me to him and vice versa.

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