Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist

167 Pages·1979·16.636 MB·English

by  Jennifer Bailey (auth.)

NORMAN MAILER: QUICK-CHANGE ARTIST
NORMAN MAILER
QUICK-CHANGE ARTIST
JENNIFER BAILEY
© Jennifer Bailey 1979
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1979
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1979 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Associated companies in Delhi
Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos
Melbourne New rork Singapore Tokyo
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bailey, Jennifer
Norman Mailer, quick-change artist
1. Mailer, Norman-Criticism and interpretation
I. Title
813'.5'4 PS3525.A4152Z/
ISBN 978-1-349-04159-6 ISBN 978-1-349-04157-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-04157-2
This book is sold subject
to the standard conditions
of the Net Book Agreement
For David
and Brian
Contents
Acknowledgements IX
Introduction
1 'The Peculiar Megalomania of a Young Writer' 7
The Naked and the Dead
Barbary Shore
The Deer Park
Advertisements for Myself
2 'The Existential Hero' and the 'Bitch Goddess'
The Presidential Papers
Cannibals and Christians
An American Dream
3 'A Frustrated Actor' 68
Why Are We in Vietnam?
The Armies of the Night
Maidstone
4 The Novelist versus The Reporter 101
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
St George and the Godfather
A Fire on the Moon
5 'Faceless broads' and 'angels of sex'
129
The Prisoner of Sex
Marilyn
Genius and Lust: A Journf:Y through the Major Writings of
Henry Miller
vii
Vlll Contents
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
The author and publishers wish to thank the following who have
kindly given permission for the use of copyright material:
Jonathan Cape Ltd for the extracts from Barbary Shore (I 95 I) by
Norman Mailer;
Andre Deutsch Ltd for the extracts from The Naked a:nd the Dead
(I948), The Deer Park (I955), Advertisements for Myself (I959), The
Presidential Papers (I963), An American Dream (I965) and Cannibals
and Christians (I966) by Norman Mailer;
Grosset and Dunlap Inc for the extracts from Marilyn (I973) by
Norman Mailer;
Scott Meredith Literary Agency Inc for the extracts from Deaths for
The Ladies ( I962), Maidstone: A Mystery ( I97 I) and StGeorge and the
Godfather (I 972) by Norman Mailer;
Scott Meredith Literary Agency Inc and Grove Press Inc for the
extracts from Genius and Lust: A Journey through the Major Writings of
Henry Miller (I976) by Norman Mailer;
Weidenfeld (Publishers) Ltd. for the extracts from Why Are We in
Vietnam? (I 967), Miami And The Siege ofC hicago (I 968), The Armies of
the Night (I 968), A Fire on the Moon (I 970) and The Prisoner of Sex
(I 97 I) by Norman Mailer.
Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright-holders but, if
any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be
pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.
ix
Introduction
One of the major obstacles to a proper understanding of Norman
Mailer's work is his series of pronouncements on the nature of his
ambitions. If these remarks are taken quite literally then Mailer's
achievements can easily be distorted. Dotted throughout his writing
since 1959, when Advertisementsjor Myself was published, is a thinly
veiled longing to embody the conflicting currents of thought in the
twentieth century just as Melville did in the nineteenth. The
response to this has often been to regard Mailer's novels as noble but
failed efforts and to settle for his journalism as a frequently brilliant
but comparatively second-class literary activity. His forays into
politics, poetry, biography, literary criticism, the theatre and film
making are then relegated to the amateur efforts of a versatile man.
This kind of pigeonholing tends to miss the essentially innovatory
nature of Mailer's talent.
In The Armies of the Night ( 1 968), Robert Lowell makes the same
mistake when he assures Mailer, "'I really think you are the
best journalist in America".' Mailer irritably replies, '"Well,
Cal, ... there are days when I think of myself as being the best
writer in America" .'1 The point is that throughout his career,
Mailer has attempted to transgress and transform the boundaries
between literary genres in order to realise and maintain a major
premise first defined in Advertisements for Myself 'one may even
attempt to reshape reality in some small way with the "fiction" as a
guide'.2
In order to see how a writer like Mailer engages with these
polarities, it is useful to turn to the analysis by Richard Poirier, in his
book A World Elsewhere, of the relationship between self and
environment in the American imagination. Poirier considers that
the categorisation of American writing into genres tends to obscure
the more important issues. 'The crucial problem for the best
American writers is to evade all such categorizations and to find a
language that will at once express and protect states ofc onsciousness
that cannot adequately be defined by conventional formu-
Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist
2
lations ... .'3 By means of a richly metaphorical language, Mailer
has maintained the premise, formulated in Advertisements for Myself,
that 'There is finally no way one can try to apprehend complex
reality without a "fiction"'.( 181)
Mailer declares his aesthetic artifice even as it is reaching for a
reality that threatens it. But he also wants to demonstrably exercise
a control over that reality-to 'reshape' it. The development of
Mailer's use of metaphorical oppositions in his writing reflects a
movement towards an effective appropriation of the external world
in his radical 'fictions'. In his early novels, Mailer opposes politics
and history4 in order to distinguish between collective and in
dividual power. But as yet, this individual power is seen to be
impotent, even though General Cummings in The Naked and the
Dead ( 1948) hints at its subversive possibilities: '"politics have no
more relation to history than moral codes have to the needs of any
particular man"' .5 Mickey Lovett, the narrator of Barbary Shore
(1951) puts this notion into a literary context. His projected novel
must give the duplicitous social reality a historical meaning. Yet this
historical meaning is, as yet, uncertainly defined. In 'The White
Negro' ( 1957), civilised history is opposed to the personal history, or
the new nervous system of the existential hipster. The essay defends
the individual's independent choice to act against a society of
'conformity and depression' .(271) To stress the force ofthis radical
rebellion, the act is always described as violent in a murderous or
sexual sense. Because these actions are socially subversive, the
hipster is entering an unknown realm and creating a causality to his
actions that is distinct from the causality of impersonal 'civilized
history ... '(270)
The status of the hipster's personal time or new nervous system,
which is the precondition of this subversive action, is uncertainly
figurative in the context of the essay. But in suggesting that the
psychopath (and Mailer argues that the hipster possesses a
psychopathic personality) seeks love that is 'Not love as the search
for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic
than the one which preceded it ... ' (279), Mailer first develops a
metaphor which describes the method by which the individual
searches for an independent and therefore creative means of self
expression. By employing the sexual metaphor, Mailer can re
linquish the term history as representing everything beyond the
individual's control. The forces that threaten the creative act are
found within a metaphor that is restricted to the creative life of one