Norman Mailer by the Decade: An Epistolary Slant

An Epistolary Slant

by J. Michael Lennon

The literary production — quantity, quality and diversity — of Norman Mailer, like that of some other prolific writers, varied considerably over the course of a long life. He moved from genre to genre, rotating his crops, so to speak, from the 1940s to the 2000s, and published 40 major books over six decades. While he began and ended as a novelist, and by aspiration and achievement always described himself as one, only eleven of his books are novels. The other 29 run the gamut from nonfiction narrative (of several varieties, some of which he invented; this is the largest category), to plays, screenplays, poetry, essays of every stripe, short stories, biographies, interviews, sports reportage, literary criticism, and a book of line drawings, interspersed with poems. The only prose form he did not attempt was autobiography; he believed writing one would be a tombstone, the end of his literary career.

I'm currently editing Mailer's letters and after six years of work am nearing completion. It occurred to me that it might be interesting if I gave a brief overview of Mailer's literary output in each of the six decades, and punctuated my comments on each with a characteristic letter (or an excerpt) from the decade in question. Here goes.

The 1940s

Mailer had written a fair amount of juvenilia, mainly adventure stories, from the ages of 8–12, and then nothing much until he arrived at Harvard in September 1939. In each of his four years, he signed up for elective writing courses and wrote approximately sixty short stories or vignettes. He published three of these in the Harvard Advocate, and one of them, "The Greatest Thing in the World", won a national college contest sponsored by Story Magazine, where it was published in September 1941. Buoyed by this achievement, and still at Harvard, he turned first to drama and wrote a play about his experience working in a mental institution, titled "The Naked and the Dead", and then wrote a novel based on a hitchhiking trip he had taken, titled No Percentage. It has never been published, and shouldn't be, Mailer felt. He started another novel, A Transit to Narcissus, based on the mental institution experience, which he finished shortly after graduation and before being inducted in the army in March 1944.

While he was in the service, a combat novella he wrote at Harvard, "A Calculus to Heaven", was published in an anthology, but the most important work of the 1940s was, of course, The Naked and the Dead, which he wrote after his discharge in May 1946. Based on his experience during the Luzon campaign of early 1945, the novel was published in May 1948. Large slabs of it were taken wholesale from the letters he wrote home to his first wife Bea from the Philippines.

The 1950s

This was the toughest decade for Mailer as a writer. He was celebrated but felt disorientated and depleted; he didn't know what to write about next. He started novels about a concentration camp and a labor union and both fizzled. While in Paris in 47–48, he had met an intellectual, Jean Malaquais, who had tutored him on Marxism and Russian history. Malaquais was one of the most important influences of his life and they remained lifelong friends. Mailer decided to re-cast his conversations with Malaquais into a complex dialogue between an FBI agent and a former Communist, set in a Brooklyn rooming house similar to the one where he had written NAD. The conversations comprised the greater part of the novel; they were half-brilliant and half-tedious and the resulting claustrophobic novel, Barbary Shore, was panned by almost all reviewers.

Mailer was depressed and worried about his future as a writer. He had lived in Hollywood and worked for Warner Brothers (1949–50) writing scripts for part of the period he wrote BS, and decided to write a novel about the movie business. The Deer Park was to be his comeback novel. After being turned down by seven publishers, it finally appeared in the fall of 1955, and received both very favorable and very negative reviews, a division that persisted, with a few exceptions, over his entire career. His writing program shifted radically after DP; he began writing a newspaper column for The Village Voice (which he named and co-founded), and writing essays for a variety of periodicals, mainstream and marginal. He also wrote several short stories and began work on a dramatic version of DP, a project that he labored on for over a dozen years.

He also started getting involved in public events and speaking put on political and social matters, slowly at first but by the end of the decade regularly and enthusiastically. He was creating the template for a new kind of public intellectual, not a conventional academic intellectual, but an independent, rambunctious and unpredictable Left Conservative, as he described himself. His essays, speeches, reviews, columns and short stories, including his manifesto for existentialism and the urban adventurer, "The White Negro", were collected into a 1959 omnibus miscellany, Advertisements for Myself. The individual pieces were stitched together by italicized commentaries, a series of frank, edgy, self-reflective advertisements where readers could observe Mailer creating a new literary self, shaping and re-shaping himself as the collection progressed. It is the watershed book in his career, although at the time he felt it might be a terrible mistake.

The 1960s

AFM was not a best seller, and the reviews were mixed, but the intelligentsia loved it, young writers adored it and Mailer began to be seen as the house intellectual of the Beat Movement. He flirted with both the Beats and the New York literary establishment, but finally kept to his own territory, one that he enlarged as the 1960s progressed.

He began it with a book of poems and then shifted to essays on politics, The Presidential Papers. And then a novel, written as a serial, month by month in the manner of Dickens and Dostoyevsky, in Esquire, the hip magazine of the decade. An American Dream was the big comeback novel and the energy of new success liberated Mailer to try other narrative modes, as well as the dramatic version of The Deer Park: A Play, which ran for over four months on an off-Broadway stage. He also made three experimental movies in the 1960s, films that are now enjoying a revival. In addition, he wrote a scatological novel, a real tour de force, Why Are We in Vietnam? and Cannibals and Christians (1966), another collection of essays, many of which dealt with the ongoing Vietnam War. The collection was dedicated to President Lyndon Johnson, the man, Mailer said, who had caused young people to cheer for him in public, over 10,000 people at University of California, Berkeley in April 1965 where he gave a rousing anti-war speech.

Mailer was now poised for a breakthrough and he went for it with vigor, writing in quick succession three nonfiction narratives on the divisive issues of the day, Armies of the Night (1968), Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), and Of a Fire on the Moon (1971). All three, and Why Are We In Vietnam?, were nominated for the National Book Award. AON won one and a Pulitzer to boot and people were now saying that an American event had not really occurred unless readers had the opportunity to observe Mailer observing the event. His books of this period became pillars of the New Journalism and established him as the most important literary figure in the country. The 1960s was Norman Mailer’s decade, as he himself often said.