The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/On the State of Mailer Studies: A Conversation with J. Michael Lennon

Written by
Phillip Sipiora

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Note: J. Michael Lennon is the author or editor of several books, including A Double Life, the authorized biography of Norman Mailer (Simon & Schuster, 2013). Lennon was a founder of The Norman Mailer Society and has served as President of the Society for most of its existence. His deep, long-term friendship with Mailer has inspired a number of works by Lennon and he is currently co-editing, with Susan Mailer and Jerry Lucas, Norman Mailer’s Lipton’s Journal, a reflective, introspective journal focusing on Mailer’s marijuana experience, written in 1954–1955. Lennon is also writing a memoir, “Getting on the Bus: Mailer’s Last Years in Provincetown,” which chronicles his experiences with Norman Mailer.

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URL: http://prmlr.us/mr13sip

Phillip Sipiora: I would like to begin by thanking you, Mike, for meeting with me and talking about the state of Mailer Studies, which is obviously a critical issue, and not just for Mailer, but of course for all authors, societies and significant writers. So, let me begin by starting with a small question. You knew Norman Mailer for nearly four decades and you served as founding president of the Norman Mailer Society. I’m not aware of anyone alive who knows more about Norman Mailer as friend, major literary figure, and public intellectual. What is your most powerful and lasting memory of him?

J. Michael Lennon: It’s not an easy question. I have so many memories of Norman. But one of the things that has always impressed me about him, right to the very end, is work ethic. Norman was always devoted to the literary arts, which took a toll on other relationships. Yet it was it was something that drove him. For example, when he entered the hospital for his last round of operations and treatments, he brought with him a half dozen books on Adolf Hitler. I was just stunned by that! I thought, oh, my God, when is he going to give it a break? No, he just didn’t give up.

As a writer, he was devoted to the notion that the novel was the art form that had the greatest capacity for understanding society and human psychology. He believed the novel made the world more understandable, made it a better place to live in.

The other issue that comes to mind is his identity as an insider/outsider. Norman knew a lot of famous people, of course, including Muhammad Ali, Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton, John Lennon, and practically every one of his major contemporaries in the United States: Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, the Beats—Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs— Bill Styron, Henry Miller, Lillian Hellman, Bill Kennedy, George Plimpton, Diana Trilling, James Baldwin, Gay Talese, John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, and James Jones (his dearest friend), and Don DeLillo (with whom he had a special kinship), and Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, with whom he had off-and-on friendships with—I could name more.

He also knew many major writers around the world, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Romain Gary, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Günter Grass. But he never really wanted to be a conspicuous part of the literary establishment. He wanted to maintain a modicum of distance from it so that he could criticize it; he was resolute about not losing his independent perspective, and so he backed out of many activities. However, he was president of PEN for a couple of years, and yes, that is certainly the establishment. But he got out of there after only two years. He called it his “church work.” With Norman there was always the sense of “I want to be an outsider. I do not want to be trammeled by my affiliations with any literary, political or what-have-you establishment to the extent that it will dampen my independence, or constrict my perspective.” Norman felt that one must be there to speak to one’s time on the planet. He was also exceptionally devoted to his family and his friends; there had to be at least fifty people who thought of themselves as “Norman Mailer’s best friend.” He had a kind of openness, candor, and generosity of spirit with his friends and his family, a personal magnetism.

PS: Do you feel that this duality of insider and outsider hurt him at times? Did it accelerate tensions or create conflicts that perhaps someone with a more stable identity of either insider or outsider might not encounter?

JML: Oh, I think that there were definitely losses that came from him jumping back and forth across that fence. But, overall, I think that it was a plus. It enabled him to maintain his singular critical perspective. For example, giving up two years of his life leading PEN meant he wasn’t writing much during that time, and he had regrets about that. But once he was in it, he stuck to his commitment, including organizing and hosting the International PEN conference, and rewriting the bylaws of the organization. Gay Talese told me that Norman came in and organized numerous committees, and this required rewriting the bylaws. They were needed, so Norman just sat down and personally re-wrote them. Gay Talese could not believe it. Well, that was Norman; he threw himself right into things.

He lost a lot of time, however, doing things like that. Another example was running for mayor of New York with Jimmy Breslin. He gave away a big chunk of time in 1969 on that campaign He said that, if elected, he would give up writing. I think he must have had his fingers crossed when he said that. All of these forays, including filmmaking, cost him a great deal of lost time and he had regrets. But, on the other hand, there was a part of him that rebelled against the grind of writing six hours a day, six days a week, and felt the need to get out in the world and get roughed up. Right to the end he was seeking new experience, which he once called “the church of one’s acquired knowledge.”

As a novelist, he was an ethnographer, and studied the ethos of a society, the main currents and obscure corners of its identity. That was something that he never stopped doing. He felt the need to out there, get immersed, and get roughed up, and then he’d jump over the fence, hide away and write. If you look at all the places where he lived, you see that New York City was always his primary residence. But he also had Provincetown, Vermont, New Hampshire, Stockbridge, and Bucks County, country places to which he could retreat when New York was driving him crazy with all the demands for him to appear on talk shows and go to social events. At a certain point he would get sick of that scene, and had to get away to get some work done. The insider-outsider identity was something that he cultivated. When he was living in Stockbridge, in western Massachusetts, with his fifth wife, Carol Stevens, he would get bored and say, “I have to go to New York City. I need some action.” Consequently, he moved fairly regularly between New York City and quieter, bucolic places, where he could write in peace. For a writer of his sensibilities and ambition, this alternation was a wise strategy.

PS: The past few years have surely been pivotal for Mailer Studies. After the publication of A Double Life, you and your wife, Donna Pedro, returned to Works and Days, a groundbreaking resource that not only chronicled what Mailer said and did from the beginning of his creative life, but also cataloged commentary on him and his work, as well as his numerous appearances. You published the first edition in 2000 (Sligo Press) and then, in 2018, you, Donna and Jerry Lucas brought out an expanded, revised edition. But let me go back in time. How did you become acquainted with Norman?

JML: At first, it was an epistolary relationship. In December 1970, I wrote to him after he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show where he had his infamous encounter with Gore Vidal and also interacted with Janet Flanner (and Cavett, of course). I wrote him a long letter about the show, and about the ideas in the dissertation that I was then writing, and right away I received a long letter back. I was very surprised that he answered me so quickly. That led to a series of letters with him before I actually met him in the flesh in October 1972 (parenthetically, the same month he first met Larry Schiller), when he was on a speaking tour during the McGovern-Nixon campaign. He was speaking at Western Illinois University, and I was teaching at the University of Illinois, Springfield, about 100 miles away, so I took my Mailer seminar up there to hear him speak. I met him, and he remembered our correspondence. After he spoke, we spent the whole evening at a bar talking and closed the bar down about 1:30 in the morning. That meeting established our relationship. In the summers after that, when my wife and my family would go back to New England, we would visit him either in Maine or in Provincetown. This went on for many years until finally in 1997 we bought a condo in Provincetown So, our relationship began in a scholarly way, with my writing about Vidal and Cavett, and about my ideas about the shift in his writing to what we now call creative nonfiction. Over time, it grew into a personal relationship, a friendship.

PS: How did your scholarly interest and then your personal relationship with Norman evolve into archival work, which you have been known for over many decades?

JML: Well, I’d never thought of myself as an archivist. I never knew much about what it entailed. But I found myself, even before I met Norman, collecting virtually every reference to him that I ran across. At first, I bought all the scholarly books and essays in journals that I could find. But then, it dawned on me that a lot of the most interesting things he was saying were spoken in public forums, and in interviews and profiles, a lot of it spontaneous, candid, and playful. His 1963 Paris Review interview with Steve Marcus is still crucial for understanding how he became the kind of writer he was. He said much in that interview that still resonates, his comments about E.M. Forster and the architecture of the novel, for example.

I began to realize that these public utterances were just as important to understanding Norman’s work as the analyses of his work in professional journals. I realized that if you wanted to understand Mailer, you had to hear him, see him up close, and observe his public speaking off the cuff, where he revealed himself in a way that was quite profound. And so I began collecting all those resources, which came at the same time I developed a friendship with his then-authorized biographer, Robert Lucid, a University of Pennsylvania professor. I began helping Bob collect manuscripts and materials that were piling up in Mailer’s study, his basement, and in his mother’s house.

Donna and I would go down to New York with our station wagon, fill it up with manuscripts, and take them over to the storage vault in New York City. We did that for a long time, beginning in the late 1970s. That storage facility, a big steel locker, was about four feet high and ten feet long, and it was completely packed. When we didn’t know what to do with all those manuscripts, galleys, letters, research materials, I suggested that we leave the primary resources in storage, and I’d take all of the secondary materials, the reviews and interviews and magazines containing pieces on him, quite a pile. The primary materials were obviously the most important, including manuscripts that had not been published, marked up galleys, and things like that. And Norman’s letters! Boxes of them containing every incoming letter of any consequence he’d received from the time he was at Harvard, and carbons of all his outgoing letters. We left the correspondence and all of primary manuscripts and I took everything else, which was a substantial trove. For example, Mailer regularly spoke at colleges and universities, and many other symposia and conferences. He would speak on a campus and then the college newspaper would write a story on it, usually with pertinent quotations. They would mail a copy to him and he would throw it in a pile and it would wind up the archive. Initially, I took all of those materials in order to make room, but, really, I wanted to examine, preserve, and mine this material as well. In effect, we solved two problems. We began to collect records of the public presence of Norman Mailer from local magazines and newspapers around the country, and we also created new space for his ever-burgeoning primary collection. So, little by little, I became an archivist.

As I collected, I began to categorize things and organize them chronologically and thematically, putting documents into archival boxes. I was basically feeling my way and creating my own referential system. But I didn’t know what I was doing. As an aside, I would note that most Ph.D. programs in that era offered little in the way of archival instruction. All I knew is that I didn’t want to discard these resources, and I wanted to use them in my writing. The first journal article on Mailer I published, back in 1977, in Modern Fiction Studies, was a survey and analysis of his presence in popular media. Along the way I learned, by hook or by crook about archival and bibliographic methods. The first book that I did with Mailer grew out of his archive, a 1982 book called Pieces and Pontifications, which I first suggested to Norman in 1977. It took five years to put it together, and my part was selecting and editing 20 interviews with him, which was a great experience. Perhaps, I thought, we should also include, in addition to the 20, excerpts from a number of minor interviews in a kind of montage. I argued for doing that for a while, and Norman gave it some thought. We finally threw it out the window.

But then Norman decided to add a dozen essays that he had written over the previous decade. He came up with a number of titles, one of which I remember: “After the White Negro.” But after he read the entire manuscript he supplied the final title, which I’ve always thought to be wickedly clever. In1982, Pieces and Pontifications became my first book, and that propelled me into me collecting materials of all sorts: invitations to publication parties, sample dust jackets for his books (Mailer designed many of these), audio interviews, and videos of television appearances, reprints of various essays and stories in obscure publications, promo materials from his publishers, etc., etc. This was really the beginning of Works and Days, which grew as a manuscript through the 1980s and 1990s. Donna and I completed it during my sabbatical in 1998, and it was published in 2000. Norman liked it, having forgotten so much, and contributed a short preface.

I’m an archivist, but not because when I was a young man I said, “I’m going to grow up to be an archivist.” I just fell into it, and then I found that it was a suit of clothes that fit me pretty well.

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