The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer: Stupidity Brings Out Violence in Me

Written by
Lawrence Grobel

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Abstract: A veteran interviewer of several decades explores a range of issues in his interview with Norman Mailer, including morality, personal development, the experience of being a writer, the challenges of success, fiction vs. nonfiction, American writers, and a number of other topics.

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Note: This interview originally appeared in Endangered Species: Writers Talk About Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001).

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URL: https://prmlr.us/mr08grob

What can one say about Norman Mailer that he probably hasn’t already said about himself? I grew up on Mailer. His great journalism in Esquire; his incredible gift of metaphor; his surehandedness when it came to writing about taboos, superstitions, and excrement; his knuckleheaded foray into the brave new world of women’s lib. And his supreme self-confidence, focusing so superbly on himself in a book he audaciously and precisely titled Advertisements for Myself and later in Pieces and Pontifications. And, of course, his fiction, which, until recently (and even still ...) he always believed would earn him a Nobel Prize, those purely Mailer novels beginning with The Naked and the Dead when he was just 25, and then Barbary Shore, The Deer Park, An American Dream, Why Are We in Vietnam?, The Executioner’s Song (history as novel), Ancient Evenings, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Harlot’s Ghost, The Gospel According to the Son.

Of all the interviews in this book, this one needed the least editing. With Mailer, conversation flows and you can chart his own comfort and discomfort zones. I had prepared many more questions than I had time to ask and he did insist that a portion of our talk concentrate on the novel he had then wanted to promote, Ancient Evenings. That wasn’t a problem for me, I read and enjoyed that long, often daring novel, and admired how he managed to get so many of his Maileresque themes into the narrative.

The Brooklyn born, Harvard educated National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning larger-than-life father of eight and co-founder of the Village Voice has survived six marriages, public feuds with Gore Vidal, William Styron, and leaders of the Women’s Movement, two New York mayoral campaigns, and a Mike Tyson-like battle with Rip Torn biting open a piece of the actor’s ear during the making of Mailer’s movie Maidstone, which he wrote and directed. He’s been at the forefront of anti-war demonstrations, he’s covered such icons as John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, Muhammad Ali, and Madonna, has poked his nose into the mysterious lives of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jesus Christ, and spent seventeen days under observation in Bellevue for stabbing his second wife at a party.

He’s been described as both a radical and a puritan; as pugnacious and gentle; as anti-establishment and part of the establishment; as a fool and a serious writer. His early success led to his alienation, which he has called a 20th century condition. He believed from the very start that a writer of the largest dimension can alter the nerves and marrow of a nation and was determined to be that kind of writer. He’s also called himself one of the most wicked spirits in American life. As far back as 1954 he claimed that marijuana was more important to him than any love affair he ever had. He called drugs a “spiritual form of gambling,” experimented with LSD and said he tasted the essence of his own death, and wrote that a man must drink until he locates the truth. As for sex, he believes that masturbation cripples and leads to insanity, considers fellatio a weakness, raises the orgasm to the ultimate act of self-realization, defines great sex as that which makes you more religious, and gives the nod to William Burroughs for changing the course of American literature with one sentence: “I see God in my asshole in the flashbulb of orgasm.” Civilization will enter Hell, he’s suggested, when no more good novels are written.

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Grobel: Whenever there’s a brief introduction about you what’s usually included is that you ran for mayor of New York twice, stabbed your wife, and won two Pulitzer Prizes.

Mailer: That’s because there was a worm of a publisher with a hard-on who put out an ad in the New York Times listing my achievements and stuck wife stabber in the middle of ’em. Since then it’s been open season.

Grobel: How would you prefer to be introduced?

Mailer: The inimitable Norman Mailer [chuckles].

Grobel: You’ve said that you don’t consider yourself moral at all, but as a man who lives in an embattled relationship to morality. What do you mean by that?

Mailer: Morality is always on my mind. I’m always saying to myself: Am I doing the right thing or the wrong thing? I may often decide on the latter and still go ahead and do it. But there are people who are free of morality, they just never question their acts—they’re animals.

Grobel: Are you usually aware when you’re doing wrong?

Mailer: No. Wrong is often a matter of context. As that great remarker Sherwood Anderson said, ‘There is the truth of passion, the truth of virginity, the truth of violence, the truth of gentleness...’ he goes on to list all the truths there are. There’s a moment in one’s life when it’s right to be one thing or another. But you have to get into the nature of authenticity, which is a complex philosophical matter. There’s no way to go near these questions without diving deep into philosophy.

Grobel: Another thing you’ve said is that you’re so rarely true to your own code that it’s hard to maintain self-respect. What is that code?

Mailer: My code years ago used to be never take any crap from anyone. My god, I’d get into eighty fights a day if I were to take no crap at all. So you finally decide that there are probably worse things in the world than taking a little unintentional bullshit from time to time. If it comes your way without truly ill intention, then ignore it. That’s just one aspect of the code. I used to have much more of a macho code than I do now. I would take every dare that came my way. But you get to the point where finally, every time you’ve made a moral decision—that you mustn’t stand up when “The Star Spangled Banner” is being played because we’re at war in Vietnam and it’s an immoral war—you recognize after a while that you’re not going to go to any public place where there’s a chance they’ll play “The Star Spangled Banner” because it takes too much out of you sitting down when 3,000 people are standing up. So it’s a terribly demanding code. It doesn’t mean you think the code is wrong, you just decide the code is more of a man than you are.

Grobel: When you say it’s hard to maintain your self-respect, do you find that you often don’t respect yourself because of that?

Mailer: Most of us have an on-going professional life where we’re not looking to walk around with a vast amount of self-respect; I just want to walk around with enough so I’m not truly depressed. Once you get too down on yourself it’s hard to do anything, it’s hard to get out of it, and there’s a pit in depression. So you try to keep enough self-respect so you’re viable.

Grobel: Have you fulfilled your own idea of yourself?

Mailer: Half. That half’s enough to keep you going.

Grobel: José Torres said that you have the kind of immense ego of a fighter, that you don’t like people to be too comfortable when you’re around. Why?

Mailer: I love to keep complacent people off balance. I can’t bear their complacency. Stupidity brings out violence in me, because I consider stupidity a choice. There’s a great difference between people who are stupid and people who are dumb. People who are dumb have been injured and there’s something soft and tender about their brain. If it’s permanent, it’s touching, it’s pathetic. People who are stupid made one wise decision in their lives, because if you’re stupid and you remain stupid, people have to come to you, have to deal with you; you’re the center of a great many energy transactions that you haven’t earned. If you can take the abuse, it’s a way of life. But it’s a way of life that poisons everything around you. So stupid people bring out my most unpleasant reactions and emotions. I will needle stupid people to the best of my ability.

Grobel: Are there a lot of stupid writers?

Mailer: Most writers are stupid at their level. You can be one of the world’s greatest writers and still be stupid in that you’re not as good as you want to be. I’m sure Dostoevsky thought himself stupid because he wasn’t able to write the Life of the Great Sinner. And that probably was an act of cowardice.

Grobel: Do you, then, like to needle writers?

Mailer: Less than I used to, because when I was younger it was a great deal of fun giving them a hard time. But I’ve recognized over the years that we may be an endangered species, so I’m a little gentler with other writers now.

Grobel: How old were you when you started writing?

Mailer: Seven or eight. Two short stories. Then I wrote a really short novel about going to the moon, or Mars, when I was eleven. I had a genial, mad scientist on this spaceship called Dr. Hoor. It was a takeoff on Buck Rogers, Dr. Huer. I didn’t write again until I got to Harvard.

Grobel: Did your mother save those early writings?

Mailer: Yeah, yeah. It’s a wonder my mother didn’t save my fingernails.

Grobel: What kind of woman is your mother? There are those who say that the foundation of your ego is really based upon your mother. Someone made a comment that of all your wives, the real Mrs. Mailer is your mother.

Mailer: The person who made that comment is an ex-wife, and she was looking to make a rotten remark. No, I never wanted to be married to my mother. She’s fine as a mother, but I wouldn’t have wanted her as a wife because she’s a very opinionated woman. Strong minded and narrow minded. We’ve had many arguments over the years. I got one thing from her that not everybody gets from their mothers: I had an undivided, uncritical loyalty. It kept on, looking back on it, to almost comical proportions. To this day, if I were to shoot up some housing development with a tommy gun and slaughter twenty people and they came to my mother with this news, she would say: “What could they have possibly done to Norman to make him act that way?” In that sense there was this unquestioning loyalty and it does give you an ego source. It’s a mother-fed ego, which produces all kinds of problems when you get out in the world and start knocking around. Half the Jewish men on earth suffer and are benefited by that kind of ego that they get from their mothers.

Grobel: And what did you get from your father?

Mailer: He was a classy gent and a bit of a gambler. He was a dapper fellow with marvelous manners. He had trouble with jobs because he was a dreamer. He was a bit, not much, of a writer. When he’d write me a letter he’d spend eight pages of a twelve-page letter telling me about his difficulty in writing to his son who was a writer. That sort of thing. Terribly courtly man. Exact opposite of my mother.

Grobel: You didn’t enjoy high school and felt deprived for thirty years afterwards. Why was high school so bad for you?

Mailer: High school’s that place, that country, where you get laid for the first time; you have marvelous memories and you go around with a girl, you go to the prom, dance with her. I went to a boy’s high school, there were no girls there. I was a year-and-a-half ahead of my class, as far as age went. I graduated when I was sixteen-and-a-half. So I didn’t have a high school life and I think it is a form of deprivation. If I’d had a happier high school life I might not have been a writer, so you take what you get.

Grobel: Were you competitive as a teenager?

Mailer: Moderately competitive, not highly. I wasn’t that good in anything. I never sunk to Marty’s level—us dogs must stick together—but I was always looking for some girl to say, “You’re fantastic, you’re wonderful, you’re marvelous.” They never did.

Grobel: When did girls start telling you that?

Mailer: Not until I was in college and writing. And it wasn’t that dramatic. Probably after The Naked and the Dead came out is when it started.

Grobel: You achieved huge success at 25 with that novel. Did you mishandle it?

Mailer: Yeah, but I don’t brood on it. There’s no way in the world I ever could have handled it well. If you were to be made manager of a big league baseball team tomorrow, you wouldn’t expect to do that well for a while, would you? It would be almost impossible; you’d have to make huge errors. I went from obscurity into being a well-known author overnight. I wasn’t even an average 25-year-old when it happened.

Grobel: In describing how you came to know the officers you wrote about in The Naked and the Dead, you said you generally operate on hate, which is the best aid to analysis. That still hold?

Mailer: We can get into that, but it’s tricky. If you feel the kind of hate that just burns a red haze in front of your eyes, you’ll do anything. If you’ve got a quiet anger—that is, without getting pious or pompous, a righteous anger—you feel that something is unjust in the scheme of things, that can fuel a lot of very good writing. In fact, most good writing is done with a critical edge. There are many more good critics around than there are good fiction writers. The reason is that a critic can get into something he doesn’t like and what someone else is doing and he can do it with a firm sense of self-righteousness. Which is why critics are keeping literary standards alive. And they can write well, so anger definitely is a tool; it’s that grindstone that just sharpens the cutting edge or your instrument. But too much anger just wipes you out. Since you can’t really control it, to keep that nice balance, a lot of it is luck. When you get in a period of your life where you’re full of energy and you’ve got an anger that’s usable, then you can write well. I was very angry at the Army when I got out. And that anger was immensely useful for writing The Naked and the Dead, because it wasn’t just a crazy anger. It was a true anger. The book is true and was kind of funny as a result. It had its separation from what was going on. I also had the good literary instinct to pick on officers even though I hated officers. There couldn’t have been a simpler enlisted man than I was. I just hated all officers when I was in the Army. But by the time I got out I had enough sense to pick an officer who was halfway sympathetic, and that kept the book from being a parody. You can never do good work in writing if the hate takes over, it’s gotta be balanced by irony, at least. Or detachment.

Grobel: After that initial success, did you feel that the critics were going to be out to get you for the next few books, or do you feel the criticism of those books were deserved?

Mailer: I’ve always been an optimist. I had no idea that they were waiting for the second book. I used to joke about it, “Well, I guess the reviews won’t be as good as The Naked and the Dead,” shifting uncomfortably as I just did. It gave me a huge reputation I didn’t know what to do with. It was only three years later when I began to realize what it is to lose your reputation—not to be taken seriously. I began to sense that people were saying, “Poor Norman, he wrote one book, The Naked and the Dead, and he’ll never write another like it.” Then my true anger began to come out.

Grobel: Did that anger stay with you throughout your next novel, The Deer Park, or did it last until your next big success, which was with nonfiction?

Mailer: That anger stayed with me for many years. It was all uphill after the first book. I wrote The Deer Park, which was a damn good book, one of my two or three best novels, and that got slaughtered. There were eighteen major reviews at that time, seven were favorable, eleven unfavorable—that’s enough so you don’t forget.

Grobel: Did all that early criticism propel you to write more and more?

Mailer: I wasn’t prolific in those years. My powers to be prolific are in direct response to needing money. Balzac was immensely prolific. Zola was. Dickens. They earned their living. It helps if you have to earn your living from your pen; you discover that you can push yourself. It’s analogous to what athletes do very often, where they’ll go through hideous procedures, they’ll eat steroids in order to get more strength in their muscles; they’re into all sorts of things that are, ultimately, damaging, not only to their bodies but to their souls. But they’ll do it in order to set records, because they’ve gotten into a set where they truly want to break that old record, whether it’s theirs or someone else’s. We do the same thing as writers. You can force yourself to write much more than you want to write. And yet the writing will not necessarily deteriorate. People think you’re going to end up a bad writer if you do that. You won’t end up a bad writer, you may end up with a bad liver, or with a shortened life, but you go for transcendence too. Sometimes working much harder than one wants to work can liberate energy. It doesn’t always defeat it.

Grobel: Many critics consider you a better nonfiction than fiction writer.

Mailer: They could be right, they could be wrong. I couldn’t care less. I think that I’m good at fiction, but there’s no reason they have to share my opinion. The only important piece of nonfiction that I wrote was The Armies of the Night. Miami and the Siege of Chicago is a good piece of reportage. Of a Fire on the Moon is a very good book. Marilyn is a good biography, but tainted to a degree. Where’s all the great nonfiction? Mohammed Ali is interesting. The novels are much better. The critics very often have these opinions but they don’t stop and make a count. You need a body count on books.

Grobel: Which of your books do you think you’ll be remembered for?

Mailer: I can go through them in order. The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park, An American Dream, The Armies of the Night, Marilyn, Why Are We In Vietnam?, The Executioner’s Song, and Ancient Evenings. Those will probably be the ones.

Grobel: Is it true you need to make $350,000 a year just to break even?

Mailer: That’s right, yes. With inflation the figure’s gone from $200,000 to $350,000 over the last ten years.

Grobel: Do you consider yourself a rich man?

Mailer: No, I’m certainly not. I live on a reasonable scale. I own my own apartment and a car, but that’s all. I don’t have houses. Money’s always a problem; we really live from month to month.

Grobel: In the past you looked forward to writing about the inner states of men like Hitler and Napoleon, Lenin and Castro. Yet you wound up with Marilyn Monroe, Mohammed Ali, Gary Gilmore. What happened along the way?

Mailer: How about Ramsey II? He’s kind of the equal of Alexander, Hitler and Napoleon. He’s a man of immense proportions who saw himself as a god. I could still write about Napoleon if I was willing to do the research. It doesn’t appeal to me. As you get older you realize that to do truly good work on any given subject you’ve got to put in the hours, the years. The amount of research it would take to do something good about Napoleon gives me pause. But the psychology of Napoleon doesn’t. I feel I understand him to a degree. Now, you can be wrong about it. I thought I understood Gary Gilmore very well, that’s why I began that book. But as I began to do the research I came to the conclusion I didn’t understand him at all. So, you can start with the premise that you’re on top of it and discover you’re not.

Grobel: In the end, did you feel you understood Gilmore?

Mailer: He was a very complex man to me. On the one hand he was virtually a mediocrity and disappointing. His mind was not that remarkable; he had a lot of ordinary ideas and small-minded prejudices. But he was at least as complex as I was and that was curious and humbling. The thought of people being so simple that you can comprehend them and deal with them is depressing. If all of us are complex, it will be that much harder for machines to take us over.

Grobel: You believe that in Hemingway’s time there were great writers like Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, and, of course, Hemingway. But that’s not true today. Why not?

Mailer: We’re getting to questions that are too large to answer. It’s probably because of the prevailing currents of the age. Hemingway and Faulkner between them captured profound elements in the American soul. At that time, reading was the most profound way to deepen your knowledge of existence. So writers were respected more. They were more important. We’re moving from writing into electronic circuitry, television, computers. Print, as such, is going to disappear. It’s a long way from going away, but there is a point where the act of reading a book may become a rare luxury, equal to eating Russian caviar. People now read off word processors on screens where not only are the letters abominable but the image is full of flickering. If you could normally read a hundred pages without stopping, will you be able to read ten or fifteen under those conditions? It’s as if the very sensuous qualities of reading are being taken away from us. In other words, reading’s become an effort, equal to, say, having a pair of uncomfortable plastic earphones on, the sort they give you in an airplane, where it hurts your ears and your head and the sound’s not very good. So you’ve got to work for the movie that you’re seeing.

Grobel: Of the writers in your time, who are the most important?

Mailer: Borges and Marquez. After that, take your pick, there are about forty of us. I say forty because I don’t know enough about foreign writers. I’m thinking ten American writers and I’m concealing my ignorance by hiding behind thirty writers from other countries.

Grobel: In the early stages of your career you were obsessed with being the number one writer in America. Have you rethought that?

Mailer: You could have writers who are first in the people’s mind but I don’t know if that has any literary value. If you had an election tomorrow there would probably be five of us who would be in contention, and you could have a runoff. The results wouldn’t matter because each of us would walk away thinking, “I was the best.” I don’t think it’s important.

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