The Spooky Art Read online

  SM: How much of a plan did you have for Barbary Shore?

  NM: None. As I indicated earlier, Barbary Shore just birthed itself slowly. The book came out sentence by sentence. I never knew where the next day’s work was coming from.

  SM: You don’t mention [in your description of writing Barbary Shore] anything about politics. Wasn’t your engagement at the time a considerable part of the plan?

  NM: I think it was the unspoken drama in the working up of the book. I started Barbary Shore as some sort of fellow traveler and finished it with a political position that was a far-flung mutation of Trotskyism. And the drafts of the book reflected these ideological changes so drastically that the last draft of Barbary Shore is a different novel altogether and has almost nothing in common with the first draft but the names.

  SM: Did Jean Malaquais [to whom the book is dedicated] have much to do with this?

  NM: He had an enormous influence on me. He’s the only man I know who can combine a powerfully dogmatic mind with the keenest sense of political nuance, and he has a formidable culture which seems to live in his veins and capillaries. Since he has also had a most detailed vision of the Russian Revolution—he was steeped in it the way certain American families are imbued with the records of their clan—I spent a year living more closely with the history of Russia from 1917 to 1937 than in the events of my own life. I doubt if I would even have gone back to rewrite Barbary Shore if I didn’t know Malaquais. Certainly I would never have conceived McLeod. Malaquais, of course, bears no superficial resemblance whatsoever to McLeod—indeed, Malaquais was never even a Communist; he started as an anti-Stalinist, but he had a quality when I first met him which was pure Old Bolshevik. One knew that if he had been born in Russia, a contemporary of Lenin’s, he would have been one of the leaders of the Revolution and would doubtless have been executed at the trials. So his personality—as it filtered through the contradictory themes of my unconscious—inhabits Barbary Shore.

  SM: Would you care to discuss what you mean by the “contradictory themes” of your unconscious? It that related to what you said a little while ago about becoming aware of your unconscious while writing Barbary Shore?

  NM: Barbary Shore was built on the division which existed then in my mind. My conscious intelligence, as I’ve indicated, became obsessed by the Russian Revolution. But my unconscious was much more interested in other matters: murder, suicide, orgy, psychosis, all the themes I discuss in Advertisements. Since the gulf between these conscious and unconscious themes was vast and quite resistant to any quick literary coupling, the tension to get a bridge across resulted in the peculiar feverish hothouse atmosphere of the book. My unconscious felt one kind of dread, my conscious mind another, and Barbary Shore lives somewhere in between. That’s why its focus is so unearthly. And of course the difficulty kept haunting me from then on in all the work I did afterward. But it was a book written without any plan.

  Barbary Shore, however, taught me one thing about myself: I could get up off the floor. The reviews were unbelievably bad. After all, I’d taken myself a little too seriously after The Naked and the Dead. Do that, and the book-review world will lie in wait for you. There are a lot of petty killers in our business. So there it was. My God, Time magazine’s review of Barbary Shore ended by saying, “Paceless, tasteless, graceless, beached on a point of no fictional or intellectual return.” When you realize that it didn’t succeed in draining all your blood, you actually decide you’re stronger than you thought you were. It’s the way a young prizefighter with a promising start can get knocked out early in his career and come back from that to have a good record. The time he was knocked out has become part of his strength. You start writing a novel and think, This could end up badly, but then you shrug: All right. I’ve been down before. It won’t be the end of the world. That’s important. I’m fond of Barbary Shore for this reason—not its in-and-out merits.

  STEVEN MARCUS: What about The Deer Park?

  NORMAN MAILER: For The Deer Park I didn’t have much of a method. It was agony; it was far and away the most difficult of my three novels to write. The first and second drafts were written with the idea that they were only the first part of an eight-part novel. I think I used that enormous scheme as a pretext to get into the work. Apparently, I just couldn’t sit down and write a nice modest Hollywood novel. I had to have something grandiose, in conception, anyway. I started The Deer Park with “The Man Who Studied Yoga.” That was supposed to be a prologue to all eight novels. It went along nicely and was done in a few weeks. And then I got into The Deer Park and I forget what my methods were exactly; I think they varied. In the revisions of Barbary Shore, I had started working in longhand; as soon as I found myself blocked on the typewriter, I’d shift to longhand. By the time I got to The Deer Park I was writing in longhand all the time. I’d write in longhand in the morning and type up what I’d written in the afternoon. I was averaging about four–five pages a day, I think, three days a week; about fifteen pages a week. But I found it an unendurable book to write because I’d finish each day in the most profound black mood; as I found out later it was even physical. I was gutting my liver.

  SM: It wasn’t alcohol?

  NM: No, I wasn’t much of a drinker in those days. The liver, you see, is not unlike a car battery, and I was draining mine. I was writing with such anxiety and such fear and such distaste, and such gloom and such dissatisfaction that …

  SM: Dissatisfaction with what?

  NM: Oh, everything. My work, my life, myself. The early draft of The Deer Park was terrible. It had a few good things in it, but it was slow to emerge, it took years, and was stubborn.

  For those who are interested, a long and detailed description of the anxiety, ambition, confusion, and fury that went into the rewriting of The Deer Park now follows.

  THE LAST DRAFT OF

  THE DEER PARK

  In his review, Malcolm Cowley said it must have been a more difficult book to write than The Naked and the Dead. He was right. Most of the time, I worked in a low mood; my liver, which had gone bad in the Philippines, exacted a hard price for forcing the effort against the tide of a long depression, and matters were not improved when nobody at Rinehart & Co. liked the first draft of the novel. The second draft, which to me was the finished book, also gave little enthusiasm to the editors, and open woe to Stanley Rinehart, the publisher. I was impatient to leave for Mexico now that I was done, but before I could go, Rinehart asked for a week to decide whether he wanted to do the book. Since he had already given me a contract that allowed him no option not to accept the novel, any decision to reject the manuscript would cost him a sizable advance. (I later learned he had been hoping his lawyers would find the book obscene, but they did not, at least not then, in May 1954.) So he really had no choice but to agree to put the book out in February, and gloomily he consented. To cheer him a bit, I agreed to his request that he delay paying me my advance until publication, although the first half was due on delivery of the manuscript. I thought the favor might improve our relations.

  Now, if a few of you are wondering why I did not take my book back and go to another publishing house, the answer is that I was tired, I was badly tired. Only a few weeks before, a doctor had given me tests for the liver, and it had shown itself to be sick and depleted. I was hoping that a few months in Mexico would give me a chance to fill up again.

  But the next months were not cheerful. The Deer Park had been done as well as I could do it, yet I thought it was probably a minor work, and I did not know if I had any real interest in starting another book. I made efforts, of course; I collected notes, began to piece together a few ideas for a novel given to bullfighting, and another about a concentration camp; I read most of the work of the other writers of my generation (I think I was looking for a level against which to measure my third novel), went over the galleys when they came, changed a line or two, sent them back. Keeping half busy I mended a bit, but it was a time of dull drifting. When I came back to New York in
October, The Deer Park was already in page proof. By November, the first advertisement was given to Publishers Weekly. Then, with less than ninety days to publication, Stanley Rinehart told me I would have to take out a small piece of the book—ten not very explicit lines about the sex of an old producer and a call girl. The moment one was ready to consider losing those lines, they moved into the moral center of the novel.* It would be no tonic for my liver to cut them out. But I also knew Rinehart was serious, and since I was still tired, it seemed a little unreal to try to keep the passage. Like a miser, I had been storing energy to start a new book; I wanted nothing to distract me now. I gave in on a word or two, agreed to rewrite a line, and went home from that particular conference not very impressed with myself. The next morning I called up the editor in chief, Ted Amussen, to tell him I had decided the original words had to be put back.

  “Well, fine,” he said, “fine. I don’t know why you agreed to anything in the first place.”

  A day later, Stanley Rinehart halted publication, stopped all promotion (he was too late to catch the first run of Publishers Weekly, which was already on its way to England with a full-page ad for The Deer Park), and broke his contract to do the book. I was started on a trip to find a new publisher, and before I was done, the book went to Random House, Knopf, Simon and Schuster, Harper’s, Scribner’s, and unofficially to Harcourt, Brace. Someday it would be fine to give the details, but for now little more than a few lines of dialogue and an editorial report:

  BENNETT CERF: This novel will set publishing back twenty years.

  ALFRED KNOPF TO AN EDITOR: Is this your idea of the kind of book which should bear a Borzoi imprint?

  The lawyer for one publishing house complimented me on the ten lines, word for word, which had excited Rinehart to break his contract. This lawyer said, “It’s admirable the way you get around the problem here.” Then he brought out more than a hundred objections to other parts of the book. One was the line, “She was lovely. Her back was adorable in its contours.” I was told that this ought to go because “the principals are not married, and so your description puts a favorable interpretation upon a meretricious relationship.”

  Hiram Hayden had lunch with me some time after Random House saw the book. He told me he was responsible for their decision not to do it, and if I did not agree with his taste, I had to admire his honesty—it is rare for an editor to tell a writer that kind of truth. Hayden went on to say that the book never came alive for him even though he had been ready to welcome it. “I can tell you that I picked the book up with anticipation. Of course I had heard from Bill, and Bill had told me that he didn’t like it, but I never pay attention to what one writer says about the work of another.…” Bill was William Styron, and Hayden was his editor. I had asked Styron to call Hayden the night I found out Rinehart had broken his contract. One reason for asking the favor of Styron was that he sent me a long letter about the novel after I had shown it to him in manuscript. He had written, “I don’t like The Deer Park, but I admire sheer hell out of it.” So I thought to impose on him.

  Other parts of the account are not less dreary. The only generosity I found was from Jack Goodman. He sent me a photostat of his editorial report to Simon and Schuster and, because it was sympathetic, his report became the objective estimate of the situation for me. I assumed that the book when it came out would meet the kind of trouble Goodman expected, and so when I went back later to work on the page proofs I was not free of a fear or two. But that can be talked about in its place. Here is the core of his report.

  Mailer refuses to make any changes. [He] will consider suggestions, but reserves the right to make final decisions, so we must make our decision on what the book now is.

  That’s not easy. It is full of vitality and power, as readable a novel as I’ve ever encountered. Mailer emerges as a sort of post-Kinsey F. Scott Fitzgerald. His dialogue is uninhibited and the sexuality of the book is completely interwoven with its purpose, which is to describe a segment of society whose morality is nonexistent. Locale is evidently Palm Springs. Chief characters are Charles Eitel, movie director who first defies the House Un-American Committee, then becomes a friendly witness, his mistress, a great movie star who is his ex-wife, her lover who is the narrator, the head of a great movie company, his son-in-law, a strange, tortured panderer who is Eitel’s conscience, and assorted demimondaines, homosexuals, actors.

  My layman’s opinion is that the novel will be banned in certain quarters and that it may very well be up for an obscenity charge, but this should of course be checked by our lawyers. It it were possible to recognize this at the start, to have a united front here and treat the whole issue positively and head-on, I would be for our publishing. But I am afraid such unanimity may be impossible of attainment and if so, we should reject, in spite of the fact that I am certain it will be one of the best-selling novels of the next couple of years. It is the work of a serious artist.…

  The eighth house was G. P. Putnam’s. I didn’t want to give it to them. I was planning to go next to Viking, but Walter Minton kept saying, “Give us three days. We’ll give you a decision in three days.” So we sent it over to Putnam, and in three days they took it without conditions, and without a request for a single change. I had a victory, I had made my point, but in fact I was not very happy. I had grown so wild on my diet of polite letters from publishing houses who didn’t want me that I had been ready to collect rejections from twenty houses, publish The Deer Park at my own expense, and try to make a kind of publishing history. Instead I was thrown in with Walter Minton, who has since attracted some fame as the publisher of Lolita. He is the only publisher I ever met who would make a good general. Months after I came to Putnam, Minton told me, “I was ready to take The Deer Park without reading it. I knew your name would sell enough copies to pay your advance, and I figured one of these days you’re going to write another book like The Naked and the Dead,” which is the sort of sure hold of strategy you can have when you’re not afraid of censorship.

  Now I’ve tried to water this account with a minimum of tears, but taking The Deer Park into the nervous system of eight publishing houses was not so good for my own nervous system, nor was it good for getting to work on my new novel. In the ten weeks it took the book to travel the circuit from Rinehart to Putnam, I squandered the careful energy I had been hoarding for months; there was a hard comedy at how much of myself I would burn up in a few hours of hot telephone calls; I had never had any sense for practical affairs, but in those days, carrying The Deer Park from house to house, I stayed as close to it as a stage-struck mother pushing her child forward at every producer’s office. I was amateur agent for it, messenger boy, editorial consultant, Machiavelli of the luncheon table, fool of the five o’clock drinks. I was learning the publishing business in a hurry, and I made a hundred mistakes and paid for each one by wasting a new bout of energy.

  In a way there was sense to it. For the first time in years I was having the kind of experience which was likely to return someday as good work, and so I forced many little events past any practical return, even insulting a few publishers en route as if to discover the limits of each situation. I was trying to find a few new proportions to things, and I did learn a bit. But I’ll never know what that novel about the concentration camp would have been like if I had gotten quietly to work when I came back to New York and The Deer Park had been published on time. It is possible I was not serious about such a book, it is also possible I lost something good, but one way or the other, that novel disappeared in the excitement.

  The real confession is that I was making a few of my mental connections those days on marijuana. Like more than one or two of my generation, I had smoked it from time to time over the years, but it never had meant anything. In Mexico, however, down in my depression with a bad liver, pot gave me a sense of something new about the time I was convinced I had seen it all, and I liked it enough to take it now and again in New York.

  Then The Deer Park began to go lik
e a beggar from house to house and en route Stanley Rinehart made it clear he was going to try not to pay the advance. Until then I had had sympathy for him. I thought it had taken a kind of displaced courage to be able to drop the book the way he did. An expensive moral stand, and wasteful for me; but a moral stand. When it turned out that he did not like to bear the expense of being that moral, the experience turned ugly for me. It took many months and the service of my lawyer to get the money, but long before that, the situation had become real enough to drive a spike into my cast-iron mind. I realized in some bottom of myself that for years I had been the sort of comic figure I would have cooked to a turn in one of my books, a radical who had the nineteenth-century naïveté to believe that the people with whom he did business were 1) gentlemen, 2) fond of him, and 3) respectful of his ideas even if in disagreement with them. Now I was in the act of learning that I was not adored so very much; that my ideas were seen as nasty; and that my fine America, which I had been at pains to criticize for so many years, was in fact a real country which did real things and ugly things to the characters of more people than just the characters of my books. If the years since the war had not been brave or noble in the history of the country, which I certainly thought and do think, why then did it come as surprise that people in publishing were not as good as they used to be, and that the day of Maxwell Perkins was a day which was gone, really gone, gone as Greta Garbo and Scott Fitzgerald? Not easy, one could argue, for an advertising man to admit that advertising is a dishonest occupation, and no easier was it for the working novelist to see that now were left only the cliques, fashions, vogues, snobs, snots, and fools, not to mention a dozen bureaucracies of criticism; that there was no room for the old literary idea of oneself as a major writer, a figure in the landscape. The day was gone when people held on to your novels no matter what others might say. Instead one’s potential young readers waited now for the verdict of professionals.