The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/Introduction to Taschen Edition of Superman Comes to the Supermarket: Difference between revisions

{{byline|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael|abstract=An introduction to the recent Taschen book-length version of Norman’s Mailer’s classic 1960 ''Esquire'' essay on JFK, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.”|url=https://prmlr.us/mr15lenn}}

Mailer told Mrs. Kennedy that he was troubled by her husband’s disapproving, bellicose comments about Fidel Castro, who had just seized power in Cuba, but would nevertheless vote for him because “it is more important than ever that he win.” It was the first vote Mailer had cast for a president since 1948 when he campaigned for third-party candidate, Henry Wallace, who ran a distant third to Harry S. Truman and Thomas E. Dewey. The Kennedy mystique drew Mailer back into mainstream politics, and his essay became one of the earliest exemplars of the “New Journalism” (along with the work of Joan Didion, Gay Talese, and Tom Wolfe, among others), a new kind of writing that moved the observer onto the stage of the story. During the previous decade, Mailer had eschewed any part in conventional politics in favor of a frenetic, controversial role in the New York ''demimonde'', where he extolled marijuana, jazz, sexual freedom and celebrated the disenthralled lifestyles of African Americans in magazine essays and columns in the ''Village Voice'', a weekly Greenwich Village newspaper that he co-founded and named. Bored and depressed by the kneejerk patriotism and family pieties of the tranquillized Eisenhower era, and oppressed by “the corporations, the FBI, the CIA, and the Mafia . . . working in an overt and covert association,” Mailer saw Kennedy’s election as “the hairline split in the American totalitarianism of the fifties.” With the 43-year-old president and his elegant, cultured wife in the White House, politics had become exciting. In his speech accepting his party’s nomination, Kennedy spoke of America as a “new frontier,” a place of “unknown possibilities and perils.”

“Superman Comes to the Supermarket” was the brainchild of one of the top editors at ''Esquire'', Clay Fleker, who later founded ''New York'' magazine. He and another editor, the brilliantly irreverent Harold Hayes, as well as the magazine’s co-founder and publisher, Arnold Gingrich (a fishing/drinking chum of Hemingway’s), were properly impressed by the edgy, self-conscious style Mailer displayed in the prefatory “advertisements” to his 1959 omnium-gatherum, ''Advertisements for Myself''. Nevertheless, they believed that their magazine, which was rapidly emerging as the best place for the brightest literary talents of the new decade to publish, was elevating Mailer’s name as much as he was lofting the name of the magazine. A contest of egos ensued. Gingrich decided that the last word in the title of Mailer’s JFK essay should be “Supermart,” not “Supermarket,” and made the change before publication. Mailer protested, and was assured by Felker that restoration would be made. But it wasn’t, and in an angry letter Mailer resigned from the magazine. “You print nice stuff, but you gotta treat the hot writer right or you lose him like you just lost me. When I’m mayor, I’ll pay you a visit and see if you’ve cleaned the stable.” In later years, when admirers asked Mailer to sign a copy of the magazine containing his essay, he invariably crossed out “Supermart” and replaced it with the original word.

Mailer was not joshing about his ambition to become mayor of New York. Bloated by the success of his essay, he decided to run in the September 1961 mayoral primary elections — but not on the Democratic Party ticket. Instead, he planned to run on the ticket of the Existentialist Party, which at that time (and ever after) did not exist. His temper of mind, he wrote later, was “Napoleonic.” His friends listened to his plans, but with no enthusiasm. Mailer expected them, and his family, to rally around him the way the Kennedy clan had worked for JFK. Mailer’s family thought the idea was crazy, and his wife, Adele, was terrified by the possibility of becoming the first lady of the nation’s largest city. He intended to announce his candidacy at a large party at their Manhattan apartment on November 19, 1960, two weeks after Kennedy’s victory. Drunk and stoned on marijuana (which he believed unseated unhealthy repressions), a frazzled and belligerent Mailer got into fist fights with several of his guests at the crowded party. The worst was to come. At around five A.M. on the 20th, he stabbed his wife with a penknife after she delivered a taunt about his manhood. She almost died of the thrust, which nicked the sac surrounding her heart, the pericardium. Mailer received a suspended sentence and was placed on probation after Adele refused to testify against him. They divorced soon afterwards. His literary career was also suspended, and his political career seemed over.