The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“Oohh Normie—You’re Sooo Hemingway”: Mailer Memories and Encounters

Written by
H. R. Stoneback

LOOKING BACK NOW, OVER MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY, it seems Norman was always there. He was there, closer to the center of my cultural and literary formation and experience than I had remembered; and there, too, through the encounters I had with him over the years. And, in one way or another, Hemingway was involved in all of my “Mailer moments.” Yet, after my early twenties, I was seldom consciously aware of Mailer’s presence. And I have not finished any of his works published since the early 1970s, which was the last time I taught Mailer in my college classes. I hold no brief as a Mailer scholar, or even as an enthusiast of Mailer’s complete oeuvre. Thus, when the editor of this journal invited me to submit a piece on Mailer and Hemingway, I begged off, saying I had not done my Mailer homework in decades and I could provide nothing more than anecdotal reminiscences of my encounters with Mailer. Our sage editor persisted, so I have written these remarks. In the course of mining history and inviting my memory to speak clearly, I have come to believe that a book, several rich and nuanced books, should be written on the subject of Mailer and Hemingway. Surely the special Hemingway-Mailer issue of this journal will constitute a significant step in the direction of that necessary goal. But all I have to offer here is anecdote. Not literary memoir—this is not the place to recount my conversations about Mailer with Mary Hemingway and Gregory Hemingway and Valerie Hemingway. Just personal anecdotes involving Mailer. And if this is taken as a sign that I am approaching my anecdotage, so be it.

I first read The Naked and the Dead when I was fourteen years old. I was in the ninth grade then, in 1955, and my pantheon of great artists at that moment included Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Lord Byron, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, and Fats Domino. We did not read The Naked and the Dead in school, but I read it at the same time that we were reading A Tale of Two Cities in my ninth-grade English class. I think I may have ranked Mailer higher than Dickens in my ninth-grade literary pronouncements. And I read Mailer immediately after the summer vacation when I read For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea in my grandmother’s attic in our summer place near Atlantic City. I do not remember whether I preferred Hemingway over Mailer then but I do remember the smell of my grandmother’s bookcases and the unpainted tongue-and-groove wainscoting of that attic, and the smell of the row-house outside Philadelphia—especially the basement where my father had to keep his copy of The Naked and the Dead. And the feeling that reading both Hemingway and Mailer evoked is all mixed up with the scents of that season of reading. My father had to keep Mailer in the basement with certain other books next to his collection of 10,000 jazz records (78s of course) because my mother did not approve of Mailer and certain other authors having a place in the glass-fronted barrister’s bookcases in our dining room. Only one Hemingway—The Old Man and the Sea—was allowed in those bookcases with the complete works of Cooper, Irving, Scott and other classics, a generous assortment of Bibles and scriptural commentaries, and inscribed copies of books by a famous young evangelist named Billy Graham, who was my mother’s personal friend.

The next writing by Mailer that I remember reading was his celebrated and controversial essay, “The White Negro.” I was with my father in a used book and record shop when he purchased a soiled copy of the summer issue of Dissent for a nickel. Although my father was a factory worker then, in the fall of 1957, he had been in the 1920s and 1930s a publishing poet and jazz pianist of some reputation; he had been, for example, the only white musician and sideman on some “race records” vintage 1930. Thus he was interested in what Mailer had to say in “The White Negro.” And since I had long since announced (in the third grade) that I was going to be a writer and a singer, a novelist and a singer-songwriter, and I had long thought of myself as an outsider and a rebel, and I too was interested. By the end of 1957 I was reading The Village Voice whenever I could get hold of a copy and I had made my first hitchhiking trip to Greenwich Village to sing in coffeehouses. By the time I read and reread Advertisements for Myself in late 1959 I had hitchhiked to Greenwich Village several times and spent some time singing in the streets and in whatever places would give me ten or fifteen minutes on stage. I also sang with all the other folksingers in the famous gatherings in Washington Square. In spite of all the time I spent singing and playing guitar and writing songs in those high school years, I still thought of myself as primarily and primordially a writer; so I was well aware all during that time of how frequently Mailer’s name was linked with Hemingway’s—by English teachers, by the press, by anyone near my age who pretended to be a writer and to know something about the contemporary literary situation.

At the small church college I attended from 1959–1961 in Kentucky—first because I had fallen in love with the Kentucky River and then because I thought I was in love with a girl at that college—Mailer was not present on the list of authors who were talked about openly. His books were not in the college library. By the time I went to New York during the Christmas season of 1960 I had heard that Mailer had stabbed his wife, had spent some time at Bellevue, and had only managed to avoid prison time because his wife would not press charges. Some people that I talked to then held Mailer up as the prime example of a great talent laid waste by drink and drugs. I did not know if this were true. I was in Brooklyn for the Christmas season to sing with the Salvation Army on the streets, and to dress up as Santa Claus and ring the bell for donations. I couldn’t find any other Christmas break employment and the Sallies offered room and board. And I wanted to be in New York City. When my Santa Claus gig ended I moved from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village where I slept wherever I could find folks hospitable to young folksingers and would-be writers. There was so much hospitality that I had to get away from it for a few days, so I stayed at the old run-down Broadway Central Hotel because I’d read that Thomas Wolfe stayed there.It was so cold that winter that there wasn’t any singing outdoors in Washington Square, but I sang in some coffeehouses, the Café Wha?, the Gaslight and other joints, and I sang at the Monday night hootenanny at Gerde’s Folk City. At those hoots, we all got our fifteen minutes on stage. Even a kid named Robert Zimmerman, who was already calling himself Bob Dylan, although his name meant nothing at the time, only got fifteen minutes on stage in those days. The Village coffeehouses swarmed with winos and leftover Beats and some good kid-singers and older jazzmen and Uptown folks slumming and I suppose I saw many well-known writers that I did not recognize. I did not really care about meeting any writers although it would have been nice to see Kenneth Patchen who was, in my book then, in a league by himself. But I knew he could not be there in his wheelchair. One night somebody pointed out Allan Ginsberg to me. I liked Howl when I read it in the tenth grade, the year it came out. People said that they sometimes saw Mailer in the jazz and folk joints in the Village but if I ever saw him there I did not know it. But it was due to my momentary spell of infatuation with folksinging in Greenwich Village that I first saw Norman Mailer.

Because of the girl back in Kentucky that everybody but me thought of as my intended, I went back belatedly to attend the college winter quarter. Then, either during spring break or on one of my week-long hitchhiking trips AWOL from college, I was in the Village again in early April. The cops were harassing folksingers in the streets and tension was building over the singing in Washington Square. We sang “We Shall Not Be Moved” and made up words about Mayor Wagner and other city officials. I was lucky not to be in the Square the day the cops cracked down on the folksingers and hauled wagonloads away to jail. I was in the Library up on 42nd Street trying to read all the way through Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees. Word of the crackdown and assault spread like wildfire and I was still in town a few days later when the protests and right-to-sing meetings started. I went to a few of these gatherings including one that was a kind of protest party in somebody’s place near the Judson Memorial Church.

At that event, more party than protest, there were many Village luminaries present, standing around talking in little circles with drinks in their hands, doing what I then regarded disdainfully as their dismal Prufrockian dance. A few of us proudly authentic kid-folksingers were singing in a far corner of that large warehouse-like room. During a break between songs, a tweedy, pipe-smoking professorial-looking older man that I talked to about being a writer said: “That’s Norman Mailer over there.” He gestured with his pipe toward the far side of the crowded room. “Mailer thinks he’s Hemingway but he doesn’t really know who Hemingway is, and he doesn’t write anything like him. And besides, Hemingway’s very sick now.” I remember staring at his lizard-lidded eyes behind thick black rectangular glasses and thinking what do you really know about Mailer and Hemingway but I said nothing. I put down my guitar to head over and introduce myself to Norman Mailer. I knew it was Mailer from all the pictures I’d seen. On my way across the large room I stopped at the outer fringe of one circle of talkers, the circle where Moe Asch—head of Folkways Records—held forth. He was the real reason I had come to that gathering, having heard he’d be there. More than anything, I wanted Moe Asch to offer me a recording contract with Folkways. Just like every other kid-folksinger in the room, in the Village, in the entire country—that’s what I wanted then. (Years later, I had a chance to make a Folkways album with Asch but I was too busy writing about Faulkner and Hemingway to take time off from my promotion-and-tenure quest.) That night in 1961 I listened to Asch talk about the record business for a few minutes, and when I turned to make my way through the crowd toward Mailer I saw his shoulders and the back of his head going through the door, leaving the gathering. I was a little disappointed I didn’t get to talk to him but I wasn’t going to chase him down the steps and into the street. So that was when I first saw Mailer. I went back to the singing corner and played guitar and sang some more. That night some girl gave me a copy of The Old Man and the Sea, inscribed to me and my “future great writings.”

The next day I hitchhiked back to Kentucky, where I put my new copy of The Old Man and the Sea on my dorm room bookshelf next to my wellthumbed copy of Advertisements for Myself. My Kentucky girl didn’t approve of Mailer but she thought Hemingway was OK. And even though she was from Patchen-Country she wouldn’t even look at his work. As for my writing I think she liked best the stuff that sounded like bad Byron or Keats or Whitman or Wordsworth that I’d written in the eighth grade. Sometime in May I heard from a country singer hitchhiking through Lexington that Mayor Wagner had just lifted the ban on folksinging in Washington Square. That was in a bar in Lexington where the rules of my college forbade me to be and Hank Williams was playing loud on the jukebox and I had just learned that my girlfriend was pregnant. There wasn’t any way we could get married and in those days in that place nobody even thought about abortion. When that term of college ended I was informed that I was expelled from college due to “accumulated demerits,” excessive absence from class and required chapel, and “general bad attitude.” Maybe I was a better student of Mailer than I realized.

Sometime after I’d heard about the lifted ban on folksinging, I had read about it in the newspapers in the college library. I was happy for my folksinging buddies in the Village but by then I already knew I wasn’t going back there. I’d had enough of the Village. So I’d just have to wait to talk to Norman Mailer. I cleaned out my dorm room and threw whatever possessions I had in a duffel bag and slung my guitar over my back, hitting the road, hitchhiking from Kentucky to Northern Michigan. The toughest decision I had to make was which books to give away and which to carry with me on the road. The choice was generally determined by weight but still I packed Advertisements for Myself with The Old Man and a few other books along with my notebooks filled with poems and stories in the burlap feed-sack that I tied on to my guitar with baling twine. I had a job for the summer up in Hemingway-Country at a resort not far from Petoskey. My job title was Assistant Social Director, and my duties included singing every night, organizing shows and entertainment, playing guitar at square dances (sometimes even doing the calling, under the tutelage of the regular 70-year-old caller), and generally keeping the tourists—maybe 70% women—happy.

It was mostly a good summer there in Hemingway-Country. That’s not the way I thought about Northern Michigan then and even though I was fishing and canoeing his streams and hanging out in places where he had lived and written I rarely thought about Hemingway at all. Until that day came in early July and the news of Hemingway’s death filled the airwaves, the newspapers, and all the conversations at the resort and in the nearby towns. Regardless of what the initial press releases said, everybody in that country said from the first that it was suicide.

I remember a heated discussion that lasted for hours one night at El Rancho—the name of the resort where I worked—that occurred a few days after Hemingway’s death. One of the debaters was my co-worker, a six-foot-four man who weighed about 400 pounds and everybody called “Tiny,” who was a big fan of both Mailer and Hemingway. He had borrowed my copy of Advertisements for Myself and was reading and rereading it all summer. I had borrowed his copy of The Deer Park but I was having trouble getting through it, partly because there wasn’t much time to read and partly because I hadn’t liked any writing about Hollywood since I read Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust a few summers before. The other debaters were tourists or visitors to the ranch. I was mostly a silent listener, in a rare act of deference to my elders. When Tiny repeatedly asserted that up until then the twentieth century, in a literary sense, had belonged to Hemingway, but now Mailer was Hemingway’s only true heir and the rest of the century belonged to Mailer, one of the ranch visitors vehemently disagreed. He maintained that Mailer was nothing like Hemingway, that he had no clue regarding Hemingway’s code or vision. And Mailer’s sentences, his form, were nothing like Hemingway’s. Some of the tourists in the bar that night, the majority of them, agreed with him. His argument was compelling, citing chapter and verse from the works of both writers. He also said that the worst thing about Mailer was he had no compassion. I was very young, just a kid-folksinger who wanted to be a writer, so I wasn’t sure what I thought about the argument that night. I was just happy that it occurred, that people were taking writers and writing seriously, that they argued for hours about Mailer and Hemingway instead of about movie stars or sports or politics. But I did say, during a lull in the heated debate, that the very act of writing was itself an act of compassion. I had believed that for a long time and I had a deep respect for all writers, for anyone who was truly driven to write. When the girl from North Dakota was through working in the kitchen and came into the bar, I went off with her and we canoed across the lake. We could hear their voices, still arguing, echo across the lake. Although she was a big Hemingway fan she had never heard of Mailer. But we did not talk about writers and writing. Not that night.