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| {{Byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.}} | | {{dc|dc=B|UFFALO AND I HAVE BEEN DATING FOR FOUR MONTHS.}}He asked me to be his girlfriend a month ago. Today he asked me to help him get his mom ready for her doctor’s appointment. |
| THE MAILER “SEEDS” STIRRED, as the Twentieth Century dawned and American literature soared. The last century would climax in the late 1920s, and
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| achieve its final “coming of age,” now superior to its English and European
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| counterparts, soon to be the new superpower’s final word.
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| An early starting line indicator in the history of literary legacy—the birth
| | We can’t find parking near 142 so Buffa asks me to wait for a spot to open up, while he heads upstairs. I’m terrible at parallel parking. Buffalo gives me his phone, and asks that I call 142 when I am at the door. |
| of Ernest Hemingway in 1899.As an unknown expatriate in early 1920s Paris,
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| America’s future “Papa” was, probably, its first to orbit into international literary recognition and power. Meanwhile, on the home grounds, Walt Whitman, in 1892, died.
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| In his monumental '' Leaves of Grass'', nine editions in total, Walt Whitman
| | A spot opens a few blocks away. |
| became the archetypal American Idealized Poet, the lover of the Universe,
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| and the singular Bard of Selfhood, Freedom and Democracy, with a Vision
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| of a Potential Utopian America. All his fresh idiomatic verse showered down
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| in future generations of writers and shaped their artistic, cultural and political beliefs, mostly “Leftist,” or “Liberal” or “Progressive” or any other relevant “ism.”
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| Whitman died amid minimal “cult” media (no Mark Twain sensational
| | I’m doing breathing exercises like one would do when giving birth, “Okay, Katrina, you got this. This doctor’s appointment is the last hope, if you crash the car, you’re toast. Please God, let me park this car.” |
| funeral). Whitman’s legacy was powerful and sometimes underground, but
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| clearly many contemporary and later writers were inseminated with Whitman “seeds.”And Norman Mailer was one of those who had more than his
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| share. For the Mailer scholar, legacy quotient is based more on his authorial singularity and less on the common characteristics of his generation of
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| contemporary writers. Whitman’s death announced that the nineteenth-century American Realism of Howells and James had ended. In its wings (awkward space?) {{pg|280|281}}
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| was formed the new Literary Naturalism that might be called the “dynamic
| | Mission accomplished. |
| male quintet.”
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| These five new literary figures—Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and the lesser writer, Richard Harding Davis, a power-packed Quintet—personified the Mailer “seed womb” that gave rise
| | I’m in the car, about to call Buffalo, when I realize I have my boyfriend’s phone at my fingertips. I’ve never looked through Buffa’s phone, but it’s tempting. After contemplating, I finally decide to give the texts a peak. As I go for it I hear Norman say, “you nosy bitch,” and I scream out loud, “oh, shut up, it’s just this once!” I find an infinite number of women contacting Buffa. I’m all fired up but I try to cool myself off for Norris. |
| to the man from Brooklyn and his subsequent place on the international literary scene. | |
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| The new literary generation, post-Civil War Realism, was Naturalism, a French import, and its chief spokesman was Emile Zola (1840-1902), author and activist, with a postmortem solution to the cultural ashes of the Darwinian era in which “revealed religion” had suffered a downward slide. In its place loomed Scientism and its cousin, Technology, which was clearly related to Industrialism. The spirit of objectivity was ushered in and the arts were forced to adapt to this new cultural reality. Thus, there could be no more significant aesthetic apartheid. Zola insisted on a remedial “cultural marriage.” The new union was a merging of arts and sciences.
| | Norris is sitting at her Vanity table, slightly pissed because she hates the drugs she is on, and “feels like a junky,” but other than that she is in great spirits. She points to her closet, and asks me to pick out a dress. I find a nice long comfy one. |
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| Zola published his 1800 manifesto, ''The Experimental Novel'', in which he
| | “Okay, now open up my closet and find me the matching beige sweater.” |
| advocated that writers (and other artists) imitate the scientific method and,
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| experimentally, return to nature, follow natural laws, and apply a somewhat
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| strict theory and practice. Thus, a writer must observe and record and interpret less and be more objective—underplaying figurative and melodramatic prose. This perspective was primarily theoretical, but in practice
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| resulted in hardcore realism that still included some romantic excess (exactly what Mailer subsequently achieved in his Naturalistic WWII novel, ''The Naked and the Dead'').
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| British philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) transformed the more
| | I open the closet to find endless sweaters, like forty-seven beige ones. I’m thinking, “Well, at least there’s no lack of reading material out there for Buff, this could take a while.” I start pulling out the sweaters one by one, and holding them up. |
| abstract biological Darwinism into a more practical cultural context, more
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| ethical and sociological. Historians dubbed this “Social Darwinism.” This
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| movement ushered in a new empirical arena, characterized by such stark
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| phrases as “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest,” “Laissez Faire”
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| and “Progress.” | |
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| There were new literary directions in the air. The two new dominant thematic “isms” were Scientism and Humanism, often hybridized. Homo sapiens existed in a materialistic and deterministic universe, manipulated by outside forces. Behavior thus was subject to two prime conditioning factors. What Zola called “psycho-chemical laws” became translated as “heredity”
| | “Nope . . . not that one. Keep going . . . Not that one.”{{pg|45|46}}Can you believe that I never find the right sweater? Finally, Norris settles on one. She asks me to grab her brown leather boots. They are tall, fancy |
| (later as DNA). What Zola called the “milieu” became “environmental,” and {{pg|281|282}}
| | boots . . . . I say, “Don’t you think you should go for comfort? Maybe your UGGS?” She thinks about it for a second, then agrees. |
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| its focus was the social sciences. Humans thus were biological pawns or social ciphers with limited free will. Thus evolved a literary sensibility that emphasized a character’s external and not inner world.
| | I start talking about my favorite parts of her memoir. I went from rarely ever reading to reading at the speed of light (as far as I’m concerned) because towards the end there, Buffalo never seemed to have good news and I |
| | wanted to share every part with her, so I read faster and faster. I found that I read the fastest at work, loaded on Red Bull. So there I was, two in the morning, sitting in the basement of a club leaning on a fridge of Jell-O shots, |
| | wearing nothing but a leotard, reading Norris’ memoir as fast as I could. |
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| Literary Naturalism offered new vistas, now Americanized, less dogmatic, and more pliable. There was a setting shift from the genteel upper and middle class to the “submerged tenth” or social bottom. The new prevailing mood was sordid, shocking, and depressing. There was new urban blight,
| | Norris starts putting on beautiful makeup while I brush her hair. It comes time for the lip liner, and I am mesmerized. I start brushing slower and slower. In Jersey, lip liner is like a competitive sport, so I never gave it a |
| factories and slums, along with their agrarian equivalent, the vanishing Jeffersonian farmer.
| | chance. But man, I’m reconsidering, because Norris sure makes it look good. |
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| Darwin is well known for his depictions of “atavism” or reversion to degradation or monstrosity, or earlier primal roots. In 1914, Edgar Rice Burroughs published, ''Tarzan and the Apes''. Earlier, in 1897, Bram Stoker wrote
| | Now she’s ready to go. We send Buffalo to get the car |
| ''Dracula'', a series of written letters, published on the eve of the “movies,” and
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| the coming erosion of the nineteenth-century’s power of the printed word. As for lycanthropy, Frank Norris (the American Naturalist writer, except for Dreiser, with the most Mailer “seeds”) wrote ''Vandover and the Brute'', a kind of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ''Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'' (1866) novel. Instead of “monster,” literary critics then preferred the phrase “brute,” a creature of
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| minimal intelligence, incompetent in the struggle for existence, and psychology and literature textbooks called such characters grotesques.
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| There was further new “ism” fallout, a host of new taboo-breakers—a Darwin-Spencer focus on basic human needs: sex, hunger, survival skills,
| | I suddenly get this sour puss on my face and Norris asks, “What’s wrong, Honey?” |
| which meant more stark violence, force against force—that is, animalistic human survival. The American language was not spared. Its brainchild was the modern documentary. This new prose was steeped in objectivity. Furthermore, as writing aped the sciences, it relied on basic research and copious details. Some candor and frankness was welcomed, but not the overtly rhetorical and figurative.
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| The once-puritanical American vernacular finally had loosened its tongue. Taboo cultural matters, such as physical bodily functions, especially
| | “You wouldn’t believe all of the woman who are after Buffalo! It’s endless! I had no idea but they are texting and calling him constantly! I don’t know what to do . . . .” I instantly feel better having confessed. |
| sex, and its verbal offspring, profanity and depravity, were unleashed—at first slowly, but soon an avalanche of expletives poured out until the popular arts seemed awash with four-lettered realities. All of the above, collectively, was the cultural legacy of literary Naturalism. The first Naturalist novel, Stephen Crane’s ''Maggie: A Girl of the Streets'' (1893), modernized the literary scene. The twenty-two-year-old Crane and his shocking book ignited an overnight youth takeover of American letters and became the avant- {{pg|282|283}}
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| garde. At the forefront was the young male quintet, whose collective canons would transform earlier cherished literature, while they themselves were short-lived—quite literally premature deaths, except for Theodore Dreiser
| | Norris says in a matter of fact way, “Well, Honey, you’ve just got to tell um’ to stop.” |
| who survived just three years shy of ''The Naked and the Dead''.
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| Mailer was born in 1923 when Naturalism was in its prime—illustrated by its 1925 masterpieces, ''An American Tragedy'' and ''The Great Gatsby''. Of these
| | Just as she finishes her sentence, Buffalo bursts through the door and pumps his fists in the air as he often does when making an entrance, doing his best to make this outing as fun as possible. |
| powerful works, the pre-kindergarten Mailer would hardly be aware. But
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| who knows? Maybe Mailer’s literary DNA twitched and he could sense a change in times.
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| Stephen Crane (1871–1900) started out as a newspaperman writing the “Bowery Sketches,” which resulted, at age twenty-one, in ''Maggie''. Its focus
| | We look at Buffalo, and then at each other, and she says, “I can’t imagine why.” And we crack up laughing. |
| was slums and prostitution. This first Naturalist work shocked the country. It appeared in yellow covers, a tiny printing (at Crane’s own expense) with a self-protecting pseudonym, Johnston Smith (the two most frequently used names in the New York telephone book). Crane’s second opus was ''The Red Badge of Courage'' (1895), written from scratch with no actual war experience—and yet the first modern psychological treatment of war. This book
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| remained his masterpiece and, like Mailer, Crane was a literary star in his
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| mid-twenties. Thereafter, Crane fell in love with violence. He turned daredevil foreign war correspondent, in search of any available warfare moment, to foreshadow Hemingway and Mailer. Crane was America’s first modern
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| “Bad Boy Writer.” Later critics dubbed him the “Poetic Naturalist.” In raw content, his prose did have a veneer of tough fact. And he was a Zolaesque technician with a concern for form and economy. His diction remained compact, energetic, and provocative. Crane also wrote highly competent short fiction and stark verse. Crane’s work evolved into literary impressionism, with an accent on tone and mood, rather than on theme, plot, and character. The result was prose that was no longer logical and orderly, a drift toward the non-rational, amoral, and pre-speech—all of these qualities a very early preview of today’s postmodernism.
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| The Western canon posthumously embraced Crane’s work, and he became a classic American. A veteran Mailer legacy quotient watcher might easily recast Crane’s treatment into a transplanted 1960s Mailer scenario. Yet, obviously, Crane’s most notable disciple was Hemingway, especially their similar lifestyles. But an obsessive Crane-Hemingway-Mailer’s thread, probably diminished rather than enhanced Mailer legacy quotient. As for the {{pg|283|284}}
| | I waved them off, and on my walk home, I stopped at a drugstore and got myself some lip liner. |
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| Crane-Mailer connection, its most positive legacy quotient factor was, despite writing in widely diverse times, each writer’s singularity.
| | Norris passed away just six days after that. I am so thankful for the short amount of time I got to spend with her. Norris had a magical way of disarming me, and immediately felt like a girlfriend. I was excited to have her down the street, to hold my hand when I needed it. And I suppose now, looking back, I realize why Buffalo wanted me to meet his mom, when we were only just friends, that warm August afternoon when we got ice cream. |
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| Another figure of singularity was Frank Norris (1870–1902). His literary DNA hinted as much, as did his Chicago affluent environment: his father, a successful jeweler; his mother, a teacher and actress; and their son, being
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| taught the arts in Paris where he fell in love with medieval fantasy and chivalry. At age fifteen, Norris moved to San Francisco and entered the University of California, where he excelled in writing and football and fell under
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| Zola’s spell. Later, he fondly called himself, the “Boy Zola.” When his parents divorced, he lost most of his inheritance (over a million dollars). But he persevered and, obeying Zola, he studied San Francisco’s “social bottom,” then went off to Harvard to study writing. He covered the Boer War as a
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| newspaper man, then to Cuba and the Spanish-American War and, later, more domesticated, be became an editor-reader at Doubleday publishers, where he helped shepherd into print Theodore Dreiser’s historic Naturalist novel, ''Sister Carrie''. Norris’s own canon, like Crane’s, was brief, but intense. From the outset, Norris’s literary trademark was sensationalism. Two subsequent novels, his second, ''Moran of the Lady Letty'', and his fourth, ''Blix'', were, at best, pulp melodramas. Norris struck gold in his controversial,
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| ''McTeague'' (1899). Compared with Crane’s slim yellow-wrapped ''Maggie'', Norris’s opus became America’s first major thematic Naturalist novel. Its protagonist, McTeague, was the Darwinian Adam or the “brute within” but with a heart of gold. He was sluggish, unambitious, easily pacified, a massive slowwitted, blonde-mustached dentist with enormous hands who pulled out
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| teeth with his bare hands, saddled with a mismatched grotesque wife, Trina
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| Sieppe. She was afflicted, literally enslaved with both “avarice” and “sensuality.” Such primal “greed,” both racial and ethnic, was rooted in her Swiss peasant blood, which impelled her to take her money to bed where she, psychotically, “made love” with it. Her husband disapproved and the marriage
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| turned violent.
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| The novel’s supporting cast were the people of Polk Street, a slice of San
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| Francisco’s social bottom, rundown and stinky, full of racial-ethnic degenerates who grossly overate and exhibited other unseemly behavior. The
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| novel’s denouement occurred in Death Valley, where hero and villain perished with “thirsty” operatics. Such mega-sensationalism was a natural scenario for, some say, the greatest silent film, entitled ''Greed'', directed by Erich.{{pg|284|285}}
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| von Stroheim, who shot on location in Death Valley. The final director’s cut was forty-two reels and was shown once in nine-and-a-half hours.
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| After ''McTeague'', Norris embarked on his short final phase and his first enterprise was a trilogy, ''The Epic of Wheat'', and its first novel was ''The Octopus: A Story of California'' (1901), which was panoramic serious fiction, and
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| well written. Its mammoth theme was economic determinism, or man in
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| the grip of uncontrollable forces. The two powers in conflict were the railroads, backed by urban bankers and industrialists, mostly state-wide and national, versus Californian wheat farmers, both rich and poor yet still
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| powerful.
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| The octopus in the title figuratively refers to humankind’s kinship with
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| those entangling crushing primordial forces in Nature, opposed by human instinct. Yet this 1901 novel was well wrought. Critics and readers marveled at Norris’s unlimited literary potential. The second novel, ''The Pit'' (“The Chicago Story”), was published posthumously in 1903 and it focused on the production of wheat. The scene shifted from the vast agrarian to the
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| cramped urban scene and its “survival of the fittest.” The title referred to Chicago’s Board of Trade and the plot hinged on cutthroat attempts to corner the wheat market. Curtis Jadwin, an impassioned capitalist and a leading trade speculator, tests his Darwinian-Spencerian skills, both economically and romantically. Indeed, much of the novel is devoted to Jadwin’s marital woes. The novel’s ending threatens to be an absolute tragedy when the Wheat Market crashes, which breaks Jadwin’s monopoly and erases his assets—all caused by natural forces (in this instance, unforeseen heavy
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| wheat production in the far West). The third and final volume, ''The Wolf'', dealt with the consumption of wheat in France, a novel which remained unfinished and unpublished.
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| But literary quotient analysts pondered “Boy Zola’s” marvelous literary excesses. His concept of Nature as Force and Energy, plus his “isms,” plus ideological characters such as the Neitzchean Superman and even a Superwoman (see ''Moran and the Lady Letty''), plus his anti-intellectual prose (and
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| more elegant English), plus his atmospheric neo-primitivism and operatic
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| techniques—all contributed to his status. Norris, indeed, was an outstanding stylist. His prose style was an odd hybrid, part documentary and part “purple prose.” His tonal effects were multiplex—word packets of solemn
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| messages in slapstick wrappings. But what most separated him from this
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| first wave of American Naturalists was his becoming this movement’s great {{pg|285|286}}
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| est symbolist, akin to the twentieth-century-enshrined Melville. The Norris canon, posthumously, struck a strong prenatal Mailer connection with Norris’s aesthetics in ''The Responsibilities of a Novelist'' (1903). There, Norris discussed three groups of novels: (a) of “plot” (of telling); (b) of “character” (of showing); and (c) (his preference), of “theme” (of proving)—the message novel. Norris also interpreted Naturalism as a new form of Romance and compared it as it differed from the earlier Realism of Howells and James.
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| But what fascinated Mailer observers was Norris’s theorizing about his and
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| America’s future. Thus, late in his life, Norris emerged as a “big thinker.”
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| The once “Boy Zola” called for the American Novel, a “romance of force,” and its template, man’s “animal nature” transformed into a neo-epic, and its rhetoric would resemble a lifelike “symphony of energy,” a vast "orchestration of force.” Its narrative would focus on the human struggle for food, sex,
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| shelter, and other earthly basic or more sublime abstractions such as power,
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| wisdom, and justice.
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| What Norris was doing was making Naturalism and nationalism synonymous, and, in doing so, was previewing the literary gospel of America as the Twentieth Century’s “global superpower.” Norris, as seer, had prefigured the first Mailer seed storm. Mailer, either by reading or osmosis, would ingest the Norris message and he would make the most of the philosophic “Boy Zola.” Yes, of these five literary revolutionaries—Crane, Norris, London, Davis, and Dreiser—Norris remained the best bet for becoming Mailer’s earliest literary “blood brother.”
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| At the opposite pole of minimalism, in 1900, Theodore Dreiser’s Mailer influence was limited to his landmark Naturalist novel, ''Sister Carrie''. Unlike the other four writers with their strikingly early deaths, Dreiser survived
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| until 1945, on the eve of Mailer’s first draft of ''The Naked and the Dead''. Consequently, the more salient Dreiser-Mailer connection occurred after Dreiser’s two female-centered novels, ''Sister Carrie'' (1900) and ''Jennie Gerhardt'' (1911). Dreiser’s first novel was an instant failure, with few sales and the barest recognition. For a decade, a stricken Dreiser did not publish. In 1900, in the midst of a literary arch-masculine “ism,” Dreiser introduced
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| Naturalism’s first three-dimensional female protagonist in a highly readable
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| novel. Concurrent heroines, such as Crane’s slum-girl, ''Maggie'', and Norris’s
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| Viking Superwoman, ''Moran'', were either lab “case studies” or wild male fantasies. But Caroline Meeber (sister Carrie) came off the page as a real new {{pg|286|287}}
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| woman in a new real environment. A potential twentieth-century bestseller,
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| instead, got snuffed out and Dreiser, readerless, had vanished.
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