Don Carpenter, June 1, 1964

NORMAN MAILER’s Letters

142 Columbia Heights

Brooklyn 1, New York

June 1, 1964

Dear Don,

A thousand congratulations, and I’m glad that you’re now in the same boat with me, one of those high-paid, please-the-public, fink low-brow prostitutes. Wait until you see what awful things happen to your ego when you realize that more people read magazines than novels. Of course, nobody I know reads the Saturday Evening Post. Wha’dya do, sell a piece of your cock, schmuck? But down with Lenny Bruce, have a good summer.

I’m just about done with An American Dream. There were times when I began to wonder a little, but the seventh installment’s pretty good, and the eighth has a bing-bang ending. You didn’t think I was going to be squeezing the last drops off my cock at the end, fellow-racketeer—no, I gave them the spatty bit bit spatty be-deet from my old tommy gun. Now we go to Provincetown and I to collapse. The only bad thing about writing a novel in eight months is having to show it once a month. It’s like giving a hot fuck to your beloved, and having to pull your cock out eight times for her to inspect it.

If you and your wife are going to work your way through the Kama Sutra backwards, you had better read a few companion volumes: 1) Art is a Schmuck, and 2) Hard as a Hammock. So dot’s my koan for today, Clappinger, I mean Don.

Best,

Norman

This page is part of
An American Dream Expanded.