The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/From Monroe to Picasso: Norman Mailer and the Life-Study

Written by
Michael K. Glenday

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Abstract: Mailer found an authority of visual presentment in the Picasso’s work that gave a new imperative to his own culture-readings. In his relationship with the lives of Marilyn Monroe and Pablo Picasso, Mailer gives us an example of what he has sometimes referred to as “an imaginary memoir.” Readers will either find them legitimate, or will accept, even relish the prospect of encountering not just the memoir, but also the vitality of interaction between Mailer’s imagination and his subject.

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URL: https://prmlr.us/mr08glen

1.“What I have to say about Picasso may not be so dull.” Readers of Norman Mailer’s Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography(1995) are in the Preface directed to one of the book’s main sources, Mailer’s 1966 essay collection Cannibals and Christians. There, in the quirky, sometimes amusing “imaginary dialogues” that give form to such pieces as “The Political Economy of Time” and “The Metaphysics of the Belly”(from which latter dialogue the opening quotation above is taken), those readers will find an early indication of what was to become a lifelong concern with Picasso. “The Metaphysics of the Belly” was published in The Presidential Papers(1963), where, in Appendix B, Mailer tells us that it “is part of a longer manuscript on Picasso which was worked on in June and early July 1962, in Provincetown. It was never submitted for publication”(308). Contracted by Macmillan in 1962 to write a biography of the artist, Mailer in his Preface to Picasso yet offers little in the way of an explicit rationale for his eventual failure to complete the project at that time. For though he acknowledges that both of the above dialogues were “done consecutively as two chapters of a projected book on Picasso”(Cannibals 261), that book was not to be completed for a further three decades. One main reason may well be that exposure to at least fifteen thousand of Picasso’s artworks in the “eight happy weeks”(Picasso xi) he spent in the library of the Museum of Modern Art was an experience so radical in its effects upon his own imagination that Mailer found it difficult to achieve any biographical “distance” from his subject.So much, at least, is suggested by the results of that exposure: “my mind was left one hair unhinged”(Picasso xi). If this description suggests the typology of the wild artist,as exemplified by the visionary of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” with “his flashing eyes, his floating hair,” then we may not be surprised to find that having absorbed the thirty-three volumes of Christian Zervos’s Pablo Picasso, Mailer was indeed released into a fundamental reappraisal of his own relationship with reality: “after such immersion, one can hardly sustain one’s previous view of existence”(Picasso xi). The life-studyist was forced to study his own life. Washed clean and able to achieve that frank reorientation, he suddenly felt absolved of any biographical responsibility, even seeming to recollect “giving back my advance to Macmillan”(Picasso xi). Yet the new balance sheet had little reciprocity about it, since although “the ambitious dialogues”(Cannibals 261) in both The Presidential Papers and Cannibals and Christians owe much to the stimulating influence of Picasso’s art, still they “contain hardly a word about Picasso.... [O]ne had insights into the extremities of one’s own thinking but few biographical perceptions about him”(Picasso xi).

Perhaps not, but the writer found an authority of visual presentment in the artist’s work that gave a new imperative to his own culture-readings. Although he may not at that time have produced any extensive biographic study of Picasso, his writing of those years undoubtedly begins to express a very similar response to reality.In his essay “Eros and Idiom”(1975), George Steiner cites the work of Mailer, along with that of William Burroughs and Jean Genet, as expressions of “the political character of the age”(125). Such writers “have said that the bestialities recounted in their work mirror the crisis of inhumanity through which we appear to be living since 1914. A literature which failed to reflect modern barbarism, the widespread return of torture in political life, the programmatic degradation of the human person in concentration camps and colonial wars, would be a lie”(125). Steiner is right, and in the broken limbs and fractured forms of Guernica and Picasso’s autopsical portraits Mailer found more than a glimpse of that dark vision, paintings imbued with what he described as “a sense of their authority and our horror”(Picasso 27). His writing would soon begin to build upon a similar idiom. If he saw in Picasso’s art a determination to “tear apart the world of appearances and leave us with a secret fear that the soul behind the face of each person we meet is more hideous than any tale told by his features”(Picasso 243), then in “The Metaphysics of the Belly” he would also testify that “the modern condition may be psychically so bleak [...] that studies of loneliness, silence, corruption, scatology, abortion, monstrosity, decadence, orgy and death can give life, can give a sentiment of beauty”(Cannibals 269). In the honesty of Picasso’s explorations into the “fair and dark psyche”(Picasso 255) of humanity — such as appeared in “the great dichotomy”(Picasso 260) of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon — Mailer could still find a statement of hope and possibility.

Yet if the biographer, like the critic, must maintain the capacity to be both within and without his subject, then Mailer’s role as Picasso’s biographer was at that time seriously compromised. By his own admission he was “not ready to write about Picasso”(Picasso xi). Instead, in those years Picasso became the eminence gris in Mailer’s own creative life. But this admission leads us to a crucial consideration: must it be that such readiness to write about an artist as complex and powerful as Picasso is dependent upon the biographer feeling himself to be free from active influence by his subject? If so,does this only apply to biographers who are themselves practicing artists? It is a moot point as to whether Mailer was ever able to achieve that balance between the within and the without, and in any case it may be that writing a life-study ought to be a life-changing experience, involving risk to oneself and one’s beliefs.While we do not find anything like the cool objectivity of a Penrose or a Richardson in the life of Picasso that Mailer did eventually produce, as is sometimes the case with the work of artists who write biographies or appreciations of other artists (Randall Jarrell’s wondrous appreciation of Whitman in his Poetry and the Age would be a case in point), there are gratifications of a different order, such as a double helping of genius. In his relationship with the lives of Marilyn Monroe and Pablo Picasso, Mailer gives us an example of what he has sometimes referred to as “an imaginary memoir”(Of Women and Their Elegance 293). Readers of those memoirs will either find them legitimate, and will accept, even relish the prospect of encountering not just the memoir, but also the vitality of interaction between Mailer’s imagination and his subject, or on grounds of illegitimacy they will refuse him admission into the academy of biographers.

Works Cited

• Brassaï (2002). Conversations with Picasso. Translated by Todd, Jane Marie. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
• Bremner, Charles (17 May 2003). "French Saw Picasso as an Enemy of the State". The Times. p. 16.
• Flam, Jack (1986). Matisse: The Man and His Art 1869-1918. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
• Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam.
• — (1965). Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial.
• — (1973). Marilyn: A Biography. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.
• — (1980). Of Women and Their Elegance. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• — (1995). Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
• — (1963). The Presidential Papers. New York: Putnam.
• — (2003). Lennon, J. Michael, ed. The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing. New York: Random House.
• — (1959). "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster". Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam: 337–358.
• — (2003). Why Are We at War?. New York: Random House.
• Manso, Peter (1986). Mailer: His Life and Times. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.
• Mills, Hilary (1982). Mailer: A Biography. New York: Empire.
• Poirier, Richard (1972). Mailer. London: Fontana.
• Steiner, George (1980). On Difficulty and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford UP.