A Social Eye

Written by
Joan Didion

“ The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one’s position but made it more perilous. ” — The Deer Park

Norman Mailer, Living Legend. Known to gangsters, known to Presidents, known to readers of the Daily News. Wielder of the knife in the New York night. Actor in some national sexual fantasy. Candidate for Mayor, citizen-on-the-spot for civic improvement. Subject of the city’s morning chorus, offered up with careful nonchalance by people he does not recall: “Norman dropped up, late, drunk of course.” “Norman was there, and behaved badly.” Norman Mailer, Tout-New York.

Let us try, for a moment, Norman Mailer, Novelist, a persona which many people who know Norman prefer to patronize. Mailer is challenged to “writing contests” by advertising copywriters, condescended to by the kind of people who refer to Joseph Heller as “an authentic voice,” deprecated by failed fashion models whose attention span for printed matter stops with the plane schedule to Montego Bay. He writes “a lot of the voodoo about cancer,” reports the Herald Tribune’s Writer of the Year. And if it had always been easy to laugh at Mailer, it was never easier than when he announced, clearly in trouble, running scared, that he had dared himself to write a novel in installments for Esquire. (”Only a second-rater would take a stupid dare like that,” as Lulu says in The Deer Park.) Nonetheless, that novel, An American Dream, is one more instance in which Mailer is going to laugh last, for it is a remarkable book, a novel in many ways as good as The Deer Park, and The Deer Park is in many ways a perfect novel.

This page is part of
An American Dream Expanded.

An American Dream is about a New York celebrity. War hero, congressman, husband to an heiress, professor of existential philosophy, television personality, celebrity. That is Stephen Rojack, whom we meet on the edge of something. “I was approaching my forty-fourth year,” he explains, “but for the first time I knew why some of my friends, and so many of the women I had thought I understood, could not bear to be alone at night.” In the thirty-some hours which follow he feels the pull of suicide, murders his wife, meets and falls in love with a singer named Cherry, witnesses Cherry’s violent death, stands off the police, faces his father-in-law in the Waldorf Towers, discovers facts too dark to remember, and in the last few pages heads west, to Las Vegas, where “the sky was dark, the streets were light, the heat was a phenomenon.” In the 110° night he walks out alone onto the desert and makes a deranged call to the dead from a roadside telephone with a rusty dial. (A roadside telephone booth, the night, the heat. Imagine it: a glass booth, with a light that goes on when the door closes, the only light on that desert road. Did Rojack close the door? He does not say. Just that he dialed, and asked for Cherry. That telephone booth alone is worth the whole of a couple of dozen of Mailer’s contemporaries; it is distinctly the real thing.) He thinks he might make the call again, “but in the morning, I was something like sane again, and packed the car, and started on the long trip to Guatemala and Yucatán.”

There it is. Detectives, columnists, the Waldorf Towers, gangsters, charity balls, The Big Guy, Harvard, the CIA, the Kennedys, Mrs. Roosevelt, the Cardinal, Harlem, East River duplexes with flocked wallpaper, women with names like Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly. Sirens in the night, high places where the fix is in. Violence, the public memory of which fades with the next edition. New York. An American Dream is a “New York” novel, perhaps the only serious New York novel since The Great Gatsby. Other novels are set in New York, other novels are about Central Park West dentists who happen to live in New York; An American Dream is about New York, and Mailer is the first real novelist in a long time to perceive the obvious, to understand what legions of cheap writers and Walter Winchell have always known: that the essence of New York is celebrity, and that its true genius is tabloid melodrama.

In fact it is Fitzgerald whom Mailer most resembles. They share that instinct for the essence of things, that great social eye. It is not the eye for the brand name, not at all the eye of a Mary McCarthy or a Philip Roth; it is rather some fascination with the heart of the structure, some deep feeling for the mysteries of power. For both Mailer and Fitzgerald, as for the tellers of fairy tales, there remains something sexual about money, some sense in which the princess and the gold are inextricably one. In Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly, Rojack sees “a vision of treasure, far-off blood, and fear.” Sergius, in The Deer Park, thinks to linger awhile in Palm Springs, amid “the bright green foliage of its love and its money.” One thinks of Daisy, whose voice was full of money. And Deborah herself: is she not, like Nicole Diver, a woman for whose sake “trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California”?

Again, both Mailer and Fitzgerald have the kind of imagination that makes legend of experience. In An American Dream we meet an old woman who “had the reputation of being the most evil woman ever to live on the Riviera.” In The Deer Park there was Don Beda, “married at different times to an actress, a colored singer, a Texas oil heiress with a European title-that had been a particular scandal-and to the madam of what was reported to be the most expensive brothel in South America.” The most expensive brothel in South America, the most evil woman ever to live on the Riviera. What is the echo, the rhythm there? “The man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”

They share a couple of other things, Mailer and Fitzgerald. The notoriety, the devastating celebrity which is probably in the end at least as nourishing as it is destructive. The immense technical skill, the passion for realizing the gift. The deep romanticism. And perhaps above all the unfashionableness, the final refusal to sail with the prevailing winds. Fitzgerald was “frivolous,” and Mailer is “superstitious.” Philip Rahv has spoken for the rationalist establishment: An American Dream lacks “verisimilitude.” Rojack “hears voices.” His suicidal thoughts seem induced by the moon, and “appear to have nothing to do with guilt-feelings or remorse.” Mailer is entangled with “the hocus-pocus of power.” Had Mailer not been so “entangled” he might have sent Stephen Rojack not to that telephone booth on the desert (not a “credible experience,” Rahv chides) but to a good Morningside Heights analyst. Had Fitzgerald not been so “frivolous” he might have gone not to Hollywood but to Spain, and written For Whom the Bell Tolls. If only. Mailer thought to preface The Deer Park with this line from Gide: Please do not understand me too quickly. There seems little danger of that, and the loss is entirely ours.