Adeline Lubell Naiman, November 5, 1963
| NORMAN MAILER’s Letters |
- 142 Columbia Heights
- Brooklyn 1, New York
- November 5, 1963
Dear Lub,[1]
Your letter came just as I finished dictating a long series of letters this morning. It was a pleasure to read, almost as if I’d been given a reward for working so hard at so dull a task through the morning. I’m in a curious situation now which makes me accumulate my mail for a month or more, then answer it in a day. I’ve always done this, but now it takes on the sterner forms of discipline, because I’m engaged in a break-neck venture. I got into trouble financially and was in debt, and decided the only way out of it which would give me some kind of modest luxury—like spending $20 on a dinner for two without thinking about it, or buying theatre tickets when I felt like it—was to write a novel in serial for Esquire, eight installments of ten thousand words each, and then sold the book before a word was written to Dial and Dell for $125,000 bucks. It seems that I am finally hot again as a property. For this next year I’m in the soup because this novel’s got to be fairly good or I’ll be ambushed by more crossfire than anybody I can think of in recent years, and indeed will deserve to get the worst, so I am off and writing. I’ve finished the first installment which is sheer cliff-hanger, and the second installment, which is sheer cliff-hanger. Can I keep it up? Also my personal life has taken quite a turn. I’ve been living with a blonde actress named Beverly Bentley since last March, and she is now pregnant, which we desired, and we’ll be married if and when I get a divorce from Jean[2]. For Campbell is being cute and difficult about it all. I won’t tell you anything more about Beverly for I’d rather you meet her and decide for yourself. I have a feeling you may like her.
When I last heard from you, the baddies had Lucky[3] over a barrel. What has happened since? You make no mention of that in your letter. Give me the details if you have the chance. I’m curious.
Finally I have a new book. It’s called The Presidential Papers, and will be out in about ten days, and I’ll send you a copy this week—just so soon as I get some from the publisher. There’s only one important piece of writing in it, the last piece, which I think is pretty good. As for the rest, if you’re bored and want some top-flight intellectual action, why don’t you look up [Jean] Malaquais[4], who’s now living in Wellesley. His address is 1 Horton House, Washington Street.
And forgive the flatness of this letter. It doesn’t mean I have no feeling for you, it just means I’m bored to death with writing letters. The trouble is I still enjoy receiving them.
- Love,
- Norman Mailer
- Love,
An American Dream Expanded.
Notes
- ↑ A college friend of Mailer’s sister Barbara, Lubell (1927-) met Mailer in 1946. In 1947, as an editor at Little, Brown, Naiman argued unsuccessfully against Bernard DeVoto for the acceptance of The Naked and the Dead, published a year later by Rinehart.
- ↑ Mailer married his third wife, Lady Jean Campbell (1930-) in April 1962; they were divorced in December 1963.
- ↑ Lucky is Adeline’s husband, Mark Naiman.
- ↑ Jean Malaquais (1908-1998) was one of Mailer’s closest friends and his intellectual mentor. They met in Paris in 1947. The “last piece” in The Presidential Papers referred to in the penultimate paragraph is The Metaphysics of the Belly, a long, philosophical self-interview about art, digestion, disease, Hemingway, Picasso, technology and the soul. Mailer liked it enough to reprint it in Cannibals and Christians (1966), along with a new, companion self-interview, The Political Economy of Time.
