Norman Mailer on Literary Instincts and Ambitions
Sean Scott
 | Abstract: On literary instincts and ambitions, Bill Clinton’s cure for cancer, Madonna’s power, Michael Jordan’s greed, the corporation triumphant, the amateur triumphant, Mailer-knocking feminism triumphant, James Joyce computerized, the blessings of work, and other essential matters on the occasion of the publication of The Time of Our Time, a novel in the form of an anthology/an anthology in the form of a novel, and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his “abominably written” first book, The Naked and the Dead. |
This conversation took place at Norman Mailer’s home in Brooklyn Heights on March 25, 1998.[1]
@random: Given the immensity of the task before us — talking about your career of half a century — think rather than try to follow any particular agenda we ought to simply have a conversation that, to borrow one of your phrases, “veers off like a water bug.”
Norman Mailer: [Laughs] Okay.
@random: But I do want to start with instinct.
Norman Mailer: Well, animal, human, or writer’s instinct?
@random: Your instinct, to start.
Norman Mailer: I think a writer’s instinct is not quite the same as what we think of as instinct. And of course there is a male and a female instinct.
@random: Yes, but how do they play into each other? Because instinct is there in the first pages of your first book. The Naked and the Dead [1948] opens with a card game, a scene that’s all about instinct. This is a constant theme in your work, it seems to me: the play of instinct, of intuition. And when you get to a book like Ancient Evenings [1983], well, it’s absolutely saturated with it. A computer could confirm this, I guess — pass all your books through the scanner and up pops instinct in the number-one position, or very near it.
Norman Mailer: By the way, I get tired of using “instinct.” I usually prefer collateral words like resonance and imminence. But “instinct”: Even as we’re speaking I’m dividing the word into two halves. One half is my passionate working literary instinct. The other is my notion of instinct as a phenomenon that slowly is being extinguished in this century. (And heaven help instinct in the next.)
So we’re talking about two different matters really, and the first is that pagan sense of forces larger than oneself. I think the average pagan, the average primitive — not to say that they’re the same — but in any event let’s say the average primitive, let’s start with that: The average primitive saw himself or herself surrounded by a circle of forces — demons, gods, friendly forces, apathetic forces. If there could ever be a movie of a primitive walking through a forest it might be quite different from the way we think of it. When we go to a forest, if it’s an easy trail we walk, and if it’s bad business, we bushwhack. But the primitive may have stopped before a certain tree and bowed. Before another tree he may have fallen [bangs tabletop] flat on the ground and waved his hand overhead as if a swarm of gnats were attacking him. Where there was familiarity, just a nod of the head as he passed by that particular divine force was all that was necessary — every day he’d pass this tree, so it’s getting a little more casual.
But I think this sort of instinct means that you are not living alone. Which is why consciousness had to be so tremendously different for the primitive. You were a protagonist; your day was heroic. What does it mean to be a hero? It means you’re willing to deal with, you’re even capable of dealing with forces larger than yourself.
@random: This is the average man or woman?
Norman Mailer: Then! Yes, the average man or woman. Of course, there were far fewer people on earth in those days. People wilted and died at an early age. “You know, this is not for me,” they said [laughs]. Well, when you get up to pagan times, of course, by then you have societies. A powerful society like the Romans, for instance, is going to manage all sorts of rituals and relations to these gods. Because, in trying to form a society, you can’t have people going off at every moment to propitiate forces on their own. You let them believe that there’s a central force, society itself, that takes the best care of this propitiation, and so that’s another kind of instinct. Now, if we get over to what literary instinct is, it’s a different matter, totally different.
@random: Has it been your job as a writer to propitiate or conjure invisible forces for the rest of us?
Norman Mailer: Well, I think I’m not alone, obviously, and there are a great many writers who are at it one way or another. I suppose I’ve been as active as any of them in this. There is a buried element in many talented writers that may brood more or less unconsciously on how their work could serve, wittingly or unwittingly, for acts of conjuration or propitiation. Of course, I’m really not sure I can begin to say that. Still, take someone like Joyce. What was Joyce trying to show us from the beginning? We haven’t caught up with him yet. Maybe Joyce is for the twenty-first or twenty-second century. It’s a perilous thought, however. Some bored computer nerds who want some absolutely brand new project might think of analyzing Finnegans Wake. They’ll have work for the rest of their lives, even with the computer.
@random: This is something you’d approve of?
Norman Mailer: I neither approve of it nor disapprove. If you want to use a computer you might as well use it for something extraordinary. No, I don’t think it’s good for literature that the computer may finally engorge Finnegans Wake, not at all. But I don’t think much is good for literature these days anyway.
@random: Right. On that note, let’s have something from The Time of Our Time [Random House, May 1998]. Is it okay if I read a few items back to you?
Norman Mailer: You’ll know it’s not okay if I rip the page out of your hand [laughs].
@random: Well then, here goes:
| “ | I feel that the final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate the moral consciousness of people. In particular, I think the novel is at its best the most moral of the art forms, because it’s the most immediate, the most overbearing, if you will. It is the most inescapable. | ” |
Do you still believe that to be the truth?
Norman Mailer: No, not really. It maybe the most moral of the art forms still. I should have said it’s the most subtle of all the art forms, with regard to morality. It’s impossible to read a good novel without having one’s sense of morality altered a bit, but I wouldn’t call it the most overbearing of the art forms. I think movies are the most overbearing. I wrote this a long time ago.
@random: This was 1958.
Norman Mailer: Yeah, yeah. In the sixties we started taking movies seriously. I mean, there’s no need for me ever to repudiate anything I’ve said because I’ve always been so much a — I wouldn’t even say a man of our time. I could say “a creature of our time,” “a victim of our time,” [interviewer laughs] “an activist of our time,” “a respondent to our time.” I could use any one of those terms, they’d all be roughly about as accurate. None of them are accurate. I mean, I lived in my time and I was always keenly aware of it. So I made remarks that were appropriate to me at the time, and I was always trying to affect the time, and now I look at old statements and some of them hold up and some don’t. But that doesn’t bother me. You know, if you’re not ready to make a fool of yourself, you’re never going to get anything done.
@random: Now, about getting something done. Also from 1958. A real zinger:
| “ | I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time. | ” |
Norman Mailer: Yeah.
@random: How do you reflect upon that in 1998?
Norman Mailer: I failed, didn’t I?
@random: [Laughs] How so?
Norman Mailer: At the time I thought I had something to say that no one else had to say and I thought that once I said it (which, of course, I never quite did) everything would be altered, the society would be altered. I had grandiose ideas in those days. But finally, you might say that the things I’ve stood for have been roundly defeated. I think most serious writers might be willing to give their accord to that. Literature has been defeated in the twentieth century. It’s a gloomy remark but the fact is that among the forces that shaped society in the nineteenth century, literature was certainly one of them, and most powerfully. Now, literature’s going, being plowed under. My fear is that in another hundred years the serious novel will bear the same relation to serious people that the five-act verse play does to us today. In other words, it will become a curiosity.
@random: It’s funny, I never think of any writer as having affected his time so profoundly. I always assumed that the average shopkeeper didn’t know he was living through the Age of Johnson. And he, the shopkeeper, preferred it that way.
Norman Mailer: Well, how can you prove a remark like that? I think Dickens had an immense affect upon the mores of the English. Where would England be without Shakespeare? Where would Ireland be without James Joyce? They were mighty men, mighty artists, and they absolutely affected the way people behaved.
@random: Who has that kind of influence today?
Norman Mailer: This is not to be pejorative about it — after all, I wrote about her with some admiration [1994] — but today I’d say the average young girl (maybe not now, but five years ago certainly) was completely influenced by someone like Madonna. She affected the way girls dressed, acted, behaved. So far, she’s had more to do with women’s liberation than Women’s Liberation. I mean, for every girl who was affected by feminist ideology, there must have been five girls who started to live the way they thought Madonna lived and who had their own women’s revolution without necessarily passing through the top garden.
@random: I don’t know about that. The thing that always struck me about her is that she seemed to be a creature of the corporation, some record mogul’s concoction. I never believed in Madonna, anymore than I believed that lip synching is equivalent to performance. You write of Madonna in The Time of Our Time: “She was the premier artist of music video, and it might be the only new popular art form in American life.” And I thought this to be the saddest commentary on our time — my time, let’s say, speaking as someone who can barely remember a time before the Age of Video. But then again I’m hardly the demographic, to employ the record executive’s parlance.
Norman Mailer: Let’s say that there was a collaboration there, if you will. I don’t think Madonna was a creature of the corporation because I don’t know of anyone who’s ever controlled her. I think what the corporation does is they cross themselves every time they do business with this lady. They never know how it’s going to tum out. She terrifies them. It’s true of all popular entertainers that they’re creatures of the corporation. What I fmd much sadder is Michael Jordan becoming such a creature. He’s got the corporate mentality down, and he’s proud of the fact that he’s selling those damn Nikes for a hundred and fifty bucks a pair.
@random: Still, I can separate his athletic performance from that more than I can separate anything out of Madonna’s persona.
Norman Mailer: Well, it’s not a bad thing as far as his own art goes. Obviously he’s one of the greatest athletes that America’s ever had; maybe there are four or five athletes you can name in the same breath with Michael Jordan. But how I wish that he had some social ideas or a little more elevated sense than, “Hey, it’s a great way to make a lot of money, man, and I’m making my billions and maybe you can too. (Yeah, maybe you cannot.)” [Laughs]
@random: Heroes like that reduce our own chance at heroics — speaking of your average primitive man or woman. We who pay attention to these people and put our stock in them — buy the shoes, be the hero — are being lessened. Wauld you agree with that?
Norman Mailer: Couldn’t agree with it more, in fact. I’ve said this more than once in different ways. You know, when I first went over to the Soviet Union in ’84 I was struck with how crude their propaganda was for the young. I thought, They’ve had all these years since 1917, sixty-seven years, and they haven’t learned a thing about propaganda. The young in the Soviet Union hated it, all that obvious oppression and bullying. Compare the Soviet style to the American corporation when it comes to brainwashing the young. The subtle bullying that goes on in American life makes me as close to despair as anything I can think of. What a job of brainwashing the corporation’s done! You have kids walking around bearing the logo of a company from whom they bought their T-shirt. It’s shattering. They’re paying for the T-shirt twice.
@random: Along these lines, I suppose — and I think that there’s a connection here, I just haven’t been able to find it yet — I was knocked over in re-reading this passage in your account of the second Clinton campaign [1996], in which you describe him as “part rogue, part god”:
| “ | To the crowd he was all but luminous, one had to go back to the pharaohs to comprehend such worship. The dean [Mailer’s moniker for himself in the reporters’ pool] recollected a story of how Ramses II, at the climax of the year’s largest religious festival in Thebes circa 1250 B.C., lifted his short white robe to reveal to 300,000 Egyptians a mighty phallus. It was erect. Ramses II is probably the star of all time. Those 300,000 souls cheered. Their pharaoh was mighty; Egypt would prosper. | ” |
We are civilized, even corporatized but our enthusiasm may still go back to that root.
Recently we’ve had, in fact, President Ramses’ phallus revealed to us.
Norman Mailer: Warts and all [laughs].
@random: Well that’s just the problem, isn’t it? Warts and all. “Egypt will not prosper” is what this warty exposure is saying to me. This is not a viable seduction, for one, this groping of Mrs. Willey. The pathetic nature of this revelation speaks to famine and pestilence. And yet the public’s reaction, at the moment, speaks to quite the contrary.
Norman Mailer: They’re happy that they’ve got this stud. I think that under everything in all of this is the idea that a lot of people are secretly pleased and wouldn’t even admit it, and this could be true of a lot of starchy little old ladies, even. They think, Well, you know, he is a randy old goat, that’s good, that’s good — I’ve lived too long with people who weren’t randy enough. There’s a certain rebellion in American life against the absolute corporatization of everything. Because one of the things about the corporation that’s totally unpleasant is that they’ve thought of it before you have. You see, in the course ofmaking your life so comfortable they’ve analyzed your life and now they’re doing it all for you.
@random: So Clinton’s randiness is a way of resisting the corporation, of living an independent life?
Norman Mailer: [Laughs] Resisting! I’ll get obscene about where his tongue is in relation to the corporation. [Laughter] No, it’s his way of resisting cancer.
@random: Good, I’m glad you brought this up, because this is another notion of yours that runs through The Time of Our Time: How one may sense a cancer coming on and kill it through promiscuity, aggression, by acting on a crazy dare. Honestly, it’s an idea that’s always bothered me. For one thing, it places an undue burden on the cancer sufferer, doesn’t it? A strange kind of moral burden. “Had I but taken the crazy dare. . .”
Norman Mailer: It’s not a happy idea for someone who’s suffering from cancer, no. But, you know, listen, I wrote it with the full knowledge that if I write about these things, I must have intimations in myself that possibly I can — that could hit me. And I began to feel that that’s one of the gambles in how we live our lives. I think almost every time that we don’t take some dare that our deep instinct, call it instinct, feels we must take, and we don’t do it and we feel shame and humiliation afterward, I think we’re deepening the potentiality for cancer. I work on the assumption that everyone has cancer within him, just as we have everything within us, but that we have cancer cells that just don’t get anywhere. They’re like little malcontents that get nowhere in society. It’s the way in which we lead our life that enables us to avoid cancer.
@random: So, this is a literal cancer, not just a metaphorical cancer. But what a strange way to combat it — promiscuity, aggression, a crazy dare. Why are these the cures? Why not piety (I mean genuine piety, if there can be any), virtue, virtu, the cultivation of tranquility, Zen, that sort of thing?
Norman Mailer: These were ideas that obsessed me all through the fifties and the sixties. I spoke as an amateur, totally, with no medical knowledge as such, but one of the things I’ve learned about experts is that they tend to blind themselves to interesting possibilities. They live in their own marketplace and tend to talk only to each other. One of the reasons that I think I became a reasonably interesting journalist is because I noticed when I started covering events that reporters would get together and exchange stories and arrive at a consensus of opinion.
Covering the Kennedy campaign in ’60 in Los Angeles, it was obvious that they didn’t understand Kennedy. I knew more about him than they did, I realized. So after that I felt like a triumphant amateur. If you come into a situation or event as an amateur and your senses are open, you can learn more than professionals and experts on that day. So I had the confidence, which I’ve had before, that I didn’t have to pay attention to what doctors were saying about cancer; they obviously didn’t know the cause of it. So, I was entitled to speculate. And it seemed to me that cancer came from the tyranny of habit, and that its strength was the deepening of the self into more and more habits that were essentially not agreeable. That cancer was a disease of the soul, if you will. The soul began to say: “It’s not worth continuing, I’ve lost the right to continue as a soul.” Therefore, crazy activities very often shook up the system so much that my notion behind it, if you want to talk in physiological terms, was that more cancer cells were killed than healthy cells via these crazy acts.
And I still think it’s the best explanation for what Clinton’s doing. My God, to be president and have to support the immense phoniness of being a president. Always having to say things to please people all the time; think of that immense hypocrisy. Of course such a man has to be in danger of cancer, more in danger than the average person. He’s drowning in putrid habits of hypocrisy. And it’s a more dangerous job now, being president, than it ever was.
@random: How so?
Norman Mailer: Because of the media, those village elders pissing all over the chief all the time. I mean, they really are a bunch of vinegary little pussies. Look, I was one of the people who worked for years to reduce the concept of the presidency. I wanted people to say “Fine, he’s just a man.” But now the media are running the large part of the show, and they’re furious that they can’t knock him out. Well, the point is that people are responding to something in Clinton. You look at him, this big handsome man who has a certain love of life and who has a certain warmth and a certain decency. This is what appears to be there. How much of that is real, who knows? But certainly a president is entitled to a swindle concerning his own personality. Every president’s evolved a personality that will work for him. Ronald Reagan is the arch example of that. Ronald Reagan, who never had an idea in his life and who [pause] came home to [pause] — I’m going to say something terribly cruel — I think Reagan came home to Alzheimer’s as quietly as a ship slips into port on a calm sea in evening.
@random: A beautiful sentence.
Norman Mailer: Well, believe it or not I never uttered that sentence before [laughter].
@random: Well, I guess all that makes sense, but it also makes me more depressed. Because it seems to me that Clinton’s attempts to kill his cancer deepen our risk of contracting something vile. Rather, our knowledge of his attempts deepens our risk. Whether what happened with these women is true or not, the fact is that it lives in public consciousness and it seems to me that an inappropriate response, shrugging it off, or disingenuously waxing philosophical about the truth — what is the truth? — how can we know the truth? — propels us deeper into the maw of the corporation. Because we are willing now to dispense with notions that we once held dear, we are losing ourselves a little more.
Norman Mailer: Are you saying that the presidency should be more esteemed?
@random: Well, I’m saying that the presidency is not a place for . . . for this kind of activity, if I may assume the voice of Miss Watson for one second. Whatever moral position you want to take on it, the fact that we know about this event may be even more troubling than the event itself.
Norman Mailer: I wouldn’t argue with that.
@random: Forget about whether it’s true or not. But each time something like this is even implied we are sent stumbling deeper into what you call the smog, into inattention and smug apathy, into an insensitivity to the heroic, let alone a yearning for it in ourselves. And I think there’s a correlation between the reduction of the presidency and the troubles we’ve been having trying to figure out what’s culturally valid and what isn’t, beginning with whether or not Shakespeare should be part of a standard English curriculum. I’m not for an imperial presidency, but my entire 401K is in Shakespeare.
Norman Mailer: You know, there are always those periods in one’s life when one has more answers than at other times, and at this point I have more questions. In my darkest moods I begin to think that what we’re seeing is the reduction of the human soul on a mass collective basis. Everything is being reduced. Shakespeare came out of a vast process of civilization. If you have countries in Africa that don’t have a literature equal to Shakespeare, fine, their turn may yet come, but let’s not try to have equality at all costs in every situation right now.
Then sometimes I think, Well, you know, you’re getting old, Mailer, and you’re beginning to cut slits in your sneakers [laughs]. Yes, you’re that old. And you’d better recognize something — that there may be a process going on that’s much larger than anything you ever dreamed of. Maybe everything has to fall into the middle, and mediocrity must prevail for a period in order that equality can be built, the necessary equality upon which you’ve constructed your hopes for so long: your belief that humankind was worthy of equality and that great things would come once it was achieved. Because I’ve always felt that when you have too much injustice, then you have too much rage for society to function well. There’s a vitiation of our collective pool of human souls with too much injustice. Marx was not much of a genius for predicting the future, but if his criticism of capitalism is profound, it is because what Marx was saying is that money finally becomes a force to vitiate, eat out, and leech out all other values. Jesus was saying the same thing. Which is, parenthetically, one ofthe reasons I probably got into writing that book about him [The Gospel According to the Son, 1997]. My feeling is that a real dynamic hope for the future will come only out of some form of Judeo-Christian socialism. Stalinism failed utterly because it did not have a religious core. You can’t ask people to continue to be nobler than they essentially are, unless there’s a certain fear of God and a certain love of God in their motivation.
What we are witnessing now is either part of the breakdown of American values or the beginning of a new sense that we have been depending too much upon presidents and the people who lead us — to return to your point — and finally we have to do our own work. We have to have our own society. If you want to have a good society you have got to work for that society, you have to be a part of it. Most people don’t look for that. What they want is something or somebody who’ll take care of things, and not get in their way too much. That’s selfish, that’s greedy, and if that’s where we really are now (and that may be exactly where we are now), then we can’t complain.
But of course the presidency after Clinton will be reduced, and probably reduced even more if you get someone in there who’s pretty clean, like Al Gore. “Clinton,” we’ll be saying some years from now, “was interesting at least.”
@random: What does it take today to incite a response to anything, though? Forget about Bob Dole’s call for outrage. Can we even manage a little anger?
Norman Mailer: There’s an anger in people now that comes out of this huge anxiety that they have more money than they feel they have properly earned.
@random: Interesting.
Norman Mailer: That creates a free-floating anxiety and that, in turn, creates anger. Whenever we feel dislocated, we’re as angry as we dare to be.
@random: A kind of perversion of what the sociologists and the political scientists call “the revolution of rising expectations,” whereby, if an oppressed people’s circumstances improve a little, that’s when all hell breaks loose.
Norman Mailer: Absolutely — rising expectations do create a revolution, but the point is, has the rise been earned or not? When you have a small peasant revolt and they get more power, then they begin to look for more and more power because they’ve earned it. But I think people are now looking for more and more of what I call passive power, which is one reason for the huge excitement about the computer. The computer gives you passive power. You never have to leave your house, but if you’re bright enough maybe you’ll end up running the world, or destroying the world. When you get up to those giddy heights it hardly matters whether you plant a flag on the mountain or jump off into empyrean cyber-space.
@random: On that note, let’s return to the large matter of this book, which is some book I’m carrying around — almost 1300 pages [Mailer laughs]. This is quite a statement. Despite all that we’ve just said about being buried alive by corporate creature comforts, this is quite a hopeful object, isn’t it? I mean, hopeful for literature. That you, and we, would publish such a book. It’s iconic. And you have to admit that the Dark Ages aren’t going to start on Tuesday if it’s still possible for a writer like Norman Mailer to collect his life’s work in this way.
Norman Mailer: Well, I don’t want to characterize it as a collection of my life’s work.
@random: Right, I understand that.
Norman Mailer: Because after all, I don’t feel that this is my best writing, and now you don’t have to read anything else of mine. After all, I could put out two more collections equal to this — I won’t, my publishers wouldn’t let me [laughs]. But if you’ve written as much as I have over the years then obviously you have thousands of pages that are worth reproducing — you hope so, certainly. No, I wanted this to be a new kind of book a little bit. I wanted it to be, ideally, a novel — U.S.A. by John Dos Passos was my model while I was putting it together. U.S.A. is a wonderful collective novel. Very few people, unfortunately, still read it, but if there’s anything that ever came close to being the great American novel it was U.S.A. by John Dos Passos.
@random: Well, how did you go about selecting for The Time of Our Time?
Norman Mailer: I began to see all sorts of themes and notes in my writing that were curious — for instance, certain people reappeared almost like characters in a novel. If you think of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which was a work of twelve more or less connected novels, he’d have certain characters who would appear in book three and then only reappear in the seventh book. I felt that there was an element of that in my work, that certain people did reappear. Sometimes they were real people and sometimes they were fictional characters, but you could use them to put together a sort of narrative. I’ve always been fascinated with form, and I wanted to fmd something slightly new in the form of the anthology. I didn’t want this just to be an anthology. To me, anthologies are like a bed of clams [interviewer laughs].
@random: It’s oddly — I guess I should say unexpectedly — chronological. Can you explain that choice?
Norman Mailer: The book is chronological not in the order in which I wrote things but in historical order. For example, Harlot’s Ghost, which came out in 1991, is featured prominently in the early part of The Time of Our Time. The underlying notion is that it’s interesting to look at what authors write about a given year, whether they write about it in the same year or twenty years later.
@random: But given that, how were the selections actually made? What determined the individual choices?
Norman Mailer: You know, finally this is a show-off book, let’s not pretend. I’m trying to say to people, “Look, a lot of you have a bad opinion of me and you don’t realize how good I am. I’m now going to show you I’m pretty good and I dare you to read this.” One of the things I’ve believed for years is that no one ever accomplishes anything large at all unless their best motive and their worst motive are both having an interest in what you’re doing. Basic capitalism. So if you’re producing goods and making a profit from it, your worst motive is you’re greedy and you want to make a lot of money, and your best motive better be that you make the best products possible and not a deluge of schlock.
All right, by the same token my worst motive in this is that I wanted people to realize how good I am. My best motive: I want to do something a little new in the nature of anthologies; I wanted to take my own work and shake it up a little and see if I could still make it fresh for myself. So, for example, one of the pieces that a lot of people think is one of the best things I ever wrote in terms of magazines articles is “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” [a long essay about John F. Kennedy, 1960]. But I read through it and I thought, You know, it’s really sort of long-winded. There are places it just doesn’t hold up. It bores me here; I find it interesting there; it’s very good here; disappointing in this couple of pages. I thought, I’m going to take out what I don’t like in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” and I’m going to put in pages from Harlot’s Ghost, where one of the characters in it, a girl named Modine, is having an affair with Jack Kennedy, and I’m going to put them into the middle of “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” and sort of interpolate the passages and see if that freshens both pieces up and brings a new vitality to old images of mine.
@random: Wonderful. Now, then, on the point about wanting people to know how good you are, let me highlight a few things I’m surprised to fmd here, if that’s really your motive. But let me preface this by saying that I’ve always had good relations with women. I feel it necessary to make that declaration. I’ve rarely chalked up a misunderstanding to some sexual difference, but when the subject comes around to literature and when I say I like, among the Americans, Roth, Updike, and Mailer, the long knives are out in a flash — and especially on Mailer. So here’s one randomly-selected sentence from An American Dream [1964] that, you know, is just one of those sentences of your many sentences that send women, whether they call themselves feminists or not, around the bend: “Ruta was crying not for Deborah, not even quite for herself, but rather for the unmitigatable fact that women who have discovered the power of sex are never far from suicide.”
Norman Mailer: I find it interesting.
@random: I have to say, I don’t get it.
Norman Mailer: I mean, I wrote it at the peak of certain dangerous insights and what I thought of immediately when you read that now is that, I would counter by saying that men who climb rock faces without a rope are always in danger of a mortal accident. When women have discovered the power of sex, if they’re bold, they adventure upward to get the best man they can possibly get with that extraordinary power. And if that fails, and it often does, yes, they’re very close to suicide. It’s not only battered women who commit suicide, it’s very often beautiful women, and there are astonishing, startling, frightening suicides among beautiful women. Or the attempt — very often it’s more the attempt than the act.
@random: Because sex has failed them?
Norman Mailer: Yeah. Because they were very much in love with someone who betrayed them, in effect. How many beautiful women are there who have tried at least once to slash their wrist, which is usually the form it takes? They may make an attempt to slash their wrist, not necessarily wholly seriously, and they may have a faint nick on their wrist and they may call a friend after they slash the wrist and so forth and so on. I’m not being merely mean and snide here but I’m saying that, yes, I would subscribe to that remark still. It’s equal to saying to a professional football player, or to any young athlete, “You know, you have a wonderful talent and you’re going to go very far with this talent, and you have to recognize that the price you may pay is to have a broken body by the time you’re thirty-five.” Now, that’s a fair remark, isn’t it? Well, I think the other is equally fair. Women don’t like individual insights. I don’t want to make a huge generalization. Most women do not like individual insights because it leaves them too exposed. Women do have that tribal power, which the scientists have lately discovered I gather.
@random: How so?
Norman Mailer: Through pheromones — heard about the pheromones?
@random: Oh, yes.
Norman Mailer: Where women who live together tend to have their periods together. Marvelous, marvelous — one’s known that always instinctively, hasn’t one? I don’t mean about periods, I mean about women: that they have a tribal accord and they don’t like being separated from the tribe. Certain men, on the contrary, pride themselves by saying in effect: “If I can’t be the chief of the tribe then I’m going to separate myself from the tribe.” I think that’s much less true of women. Look, one of the things I want to say is one has the right to generalize about the other sex; they don’t have a lock on understanding their own gender. Some of the most interesting things we can learn about ourselves we learn by the perceptions of women about us. How would we ever know how crude and stupid and ugly and piggish we can be unless we have women writing about it rather well? And we have the same right to do that to women if they’ll only recognize it, but they won’t, they won’t.
@random: You’ve said that you do interviews in part to clarify your positions on such matters.
Norman Mailer: It was a great shock to me that women were actually able to affect how people read me, and therefore a lot of people were not reading me. Probably two-thirds to three-quarters of women who are reading novels these days won’t read me, and that means that maybe a third of the men won’t read me either because it gets to be too much of a hassle. The wife might say, “What are you reading him for?” And most husbands and wives don’t need one more fight. So I thought, All right, let me do interviews. Maybe I can straighten out the issue, maybe I can’t. But if my literary reputation is buried prematurely, I’ll tip my hat to the women. They’ve done it again [laughs].
@random: I want to talk about The Naked and the Dead, published on May 6, 1948, and considered pretty much universally to be the greatest novel of World War II, and among the greatest war novels ever written. I think you said once that your books are like your children, and on a given day you love one more than the other.
Norman Mailer: The way I answer usually is, I wouldn’t choose a favorite because I might change my mind the next day.
@random: I see, right. Okay, I won’t ask you if you love The Naked and the Dead more, given this grand anniversary, but let me ask you then about how you found your voice. I can hear the Mailerian voice in this first book of yours — at least, I think I can — and, as I said earlier, instinct, that great theme, is there in the card game among Wilson, Croft, and Gallagher. So how did your writer’s instinct lead you to your voice?
Norman Mailer: The idea that we have of ourselves is not necessarily always accurate. But it’s operative. When I wrote The Naked and the Dead, I thought, I owe so much to James T. Farrell and John Dos Passos, to Tolstoy, perhaps to Dostoevsky, so forth, so on. One of the themes I had, the fear I had, is that I was still writing absolutely in their shadow. I didn’t mean that I was as good as they were, or would ever be as good as they were, but that I was writing under the influence. Barbary Shore [1951] was a book that was much influenced by latter-day reading after The Naked and the Dead. I was interested in the French novel at that point, I was interested in Gide, I wanted to write a novel that was full of surprises and relatively formal. In The Deer Park [1955], I began to find a voice because I had to rewrite it, and in the course of doing that, I began to learn not only what style was, but that style was more important, almost, than what you had for material in the book. It was the style that reached the reader and not the material. On the one hand that seems self-evident, on the other hand, most bestseller writers never discover this. They figure you get the good, hot material and that’s all you need. And in fact that’s what most publishers believe right now: “Author, just give me the hot material and I don’t care how it’s written.”
@random: “We’ll build the book around it.”
Norman Mailer: Yeah. “We’ll bring in a couple of people if necessary [laughs].” “Just bring us the facts [laughs].” Publishing has gotten down to the level of Jack Webb in Dragnet [laughs]. Most people don’t even know about style. Other people have a feeling for it from the day they begin reading. Serious readers know intuitively. I had to discover it for myself, the real impact of the meaning of style. So by the time I was writing Advertisements for Myself [1959], I began to recognize how curious it was to write in the first person. In other words, I approached it as someone who might say, “Gee, the terrain on — Mars is very different from Earth. I’m happy to be the first explorer here” [interviewer laughs].
Now, many, many, many writers good and bad had been living in the first person for centuries before I came to this remarkable discovery that the first person is not a routine nor automatic way to write. It’s a very interesting and exciting mode of literary being, with huge limitations, and you really do have to begin to understand it as such. Especially if you’re writing about yourself. Nothing is more difficult than to write about oneself in the first person. It’s highly unnatural. Because “I” is only about a third of us. “I” is the ego, if you will. And so you get into all sorts of places where you want to use “one” to talk about the other aspects of one’s self. Or you get pushed over in later years into the third person, as I did in The Armies of the Night [1968]. Using the third person for oneself may be a special condition, but it’s legitimate because there is a part of us that feels superior to ourselves, the person who observes us even as we’re doing things. And that person is always saying: “Oh, not too good again today, are we?” That person is a wonderful voice. Because it enables you to treat yourself as one more character in a field or a nest of characters. And that produces lively effects.
So I did keep looking to discover my voice. What I didn’t realize, perhaps, is all the while, as you’re saying, I had a voice. Yes, I had a voice. But that wasn’t what I was aware of. What I was aware of was how much I didn’t have one and that I was still looking. So we don’t have to know ourselves entirely as we go along. You could certainly be right in declaring that the stuff I wrote in later years fits very comfortably into books I wrote in early years. With the notable exception of The Naked and the Dead, which is the only book I’ve written, I’d say, that is abominably written — I’m obviously fond of it, and, indeed, many people still say it’s my best book, but it is not well-written. It has a bad style. A real bestseller style. It’s a good book with a bad style. There are major writers like that — Solzhenitsyn, for example, at least in translation: Solzhenitsyn has many powerful things to write about and certainly carries his major load, but he often writes in a bad style.
@random: What kind of work habits have made all this possible, finding a style, writing thirty-one books?
Norman Mailer: A lot is genetic. My mother was capable of a great deal of very hard work. And she was a marvelously disciplined woman. I say marvelously disciplined because it wasn’t one of those cold disciplines that chilled everyone around her. She was a warm woman and, you know, we were just two children, my younger sister and myself. And we felt beloved, if you will. We didn’t have an unhappy family life. My father was a sport. His work habits were decent at best. People think of me as being a wild man, but finally, what was that? Five or ten percent of my nature. The other half was all work. I like work. I remember Elia Kazan one day at the Actor’s Studio saying, “Here at the Studio we’re always talking about the work, the work. We talk about it so piously. We talk about it, we say, ‘The work, the work.’ Well, we do work here, and let’s get it straight: Work is a blessing.” He said this, glaring at every one of us. And I thought, He’s so right, that’s what it is. Work is a blessing. Yes. If l tell myself l’m going to my desk tomorrow, then I consider it a point of honor with myself to go to work in the morning. Whatever my mood is. Because I’ve found that you can go from a bad mood to a good mood if you force yourself to sit down at the desk and write. And whenever I give advice to a writing class — I’ll talk to them once every couple of years — I’ll say that the only rule that I think applies to all young writers and all older writers as well, the one rule that is not individual, is that you have a relation to your unconscious as a writer. The unconscious has to trust you, and if you tell yourself that you’re going to write the next day, then you’d better do so. Because if you don’t, you’re leaving all those troops out in the rain [laughs] .
@random: Speaking of the wild man, people say to me, “Oh, you’re going to interview Mailer!” As if they may never see me again. And I say, “Actually, folks, he’s the last gentleman.” And I have a very simple test for a gentleman, which most men fail: does he help you, another man, on with your coat? [Laughter] But the wild man, what happened to him?
Norman Mailer: Well, he finally ran into a woman who was exactly his equal, which I think is very important. People only get domesticated when they meet their equal. Someone who’s as good and as bad as they are.
@random: Do you feel any need to write your memoir?
Norman Mailer: I’m not sure there’s a need. I’m not sure I want to. I’m not sure I will. If I had a choice between writing a good novel and writing a memoir, I’d do the novel. For I don’t know how many books I have left, you know.
@random: The time is better spent with a novel.
Norman Mailer: Well, it’s more exciting. I’m a little bored with myself right now. I’ve written about my inner condition so much over the years that really, I have a feeling, enough of him. Let the work be separated from the man. That’s probably my wish right now. And that, by the way, is one of the motives here — you notice I’m not in The Time of Our Time except where I’m there because of the subject matter. It isn’t like Advertisements for Myself, where I discuss each piece and my state at the time I was writing it. The main motive, the main good motive behind this book was my desire to let people separate my work from myself. Let them see the job I’ve done. My hope is that they will be reading my work in fifty years, rather than talking about my life and my person.