On Meeting Norman Mailer
A reminiscence on the 96th anniversary of the novelist’s birth.
When I was a kid, my father owned a bar. One of his best friends, Dick Devine, a tough Irishman who was a generation older than my dad and had also been in the bar business, had gotten to know Norman Mailer through the boxer Roger Donoghue (who climbed out of the ring to become a liquor salesman; Donoghue is the guy Mailer acknowledged as the source for the anecdote about Frank Costello which supplied the title for Tough Guys Don’t Dance; but I digress . . .) All this I figured out long after the fact, but the salient (for thirty years, I have been unable to use this word without thinking of The Armies of the Night and NM’s speech about his wife’s “unspoken love for Jesus Christ,” but I digress again . . .) part of this web of friendships is that by the time I was 11 or so, Dick was leading a somewhat transient life and storing some of his belongings in our attic, including a box of books that held, among other forgotten treasures, My Wicked, Wicked Ways by Errol Flynn and a first edition of Advertisements for Myself that Mailer had inscribed as follows: “To Dick, who is never a phony and I guess there’s no greater compliment anyone can give. Norman.”
Since even at that age I already thought of myself as a writer-in-training (under the influence, as I recall, of William Saroyan), this book, signed by a real live famous author and with a table of contents that was puzzling, beguiling, and spellbinding in its intricacy (I wouldn’t make it to the actual prose until some years later) became for me a powerful talisman. I would actually climb up into the attic some days just to pull it out of the box and ponder the inscription.
So, many years later, when Mailer had replaced Saroyan as my prose enchanter, and I had decided against the better judgement of my advisors to devote my college thesis to him, I wrote him a letter relating all of the above with a stylistic bravura which infelicitously wed the sensibilities of James T. Farrell to those of Henry James. The punch line was that I had no desire to interview him, all I wanted to do was buy him a drink (no doubt I pompously invoked his own invocation of Edmund Burke in “In the Red Light” — “I must see the things; I must see the men” — while attempting to rise to the full height of standup-guy-ness). Something in my tale, perhaps just his memory of Dick, must have charmed him, because I had his answer in three days, and an invitation to join him at an upcoming reading.
On the appointed evening, off I went to the 92nd Street Y.
I was standing in the lobby when he arrived accompanied by his mother, a woman whose gnomic proportions gave her son a physical stature he naturally lacked. She looked to be well into her 80s, her body well-wrapped against the cold. Mailer himself was dressed in a three-piece suit trumpeting his burgeoning belly; the suit, combined with his carefully unkempt hair and merry expansiveness, gave him the air of an accomplished Mark Twain impersonator. He sniffed me out from a distance immediately, as old Aquarius was wont to do, and ambled over to greet me: “You’re the fellow from Princeton . . .” When the middle-aged factotum — later introduced as his secretary — who was scurrying after him heard this, and something about my writing about him, she jumped right into the line of fire to protect her boss from any untoward scholarly troublemaking. The great man brushed her off with a hearty, “No, no, it’s not what you think, he’s not one of those . . .” and directed her to locate the Y’s director, or whomever was nominally in charge of the evening. This tall, thin, anxious woman soon came rushing over to attend to her guest of honor’s call, and was clearly made uneasy by his jolly request: “Is there a bottle of scotch around here?” Visions of catastrophe clouding her eyes, she stuttered out that she didn’t think so, and was then directed by Mailer to send out for one while he was reading. Clearly relieved that whatever drinking he was planning was slated for after the scheduled event, she brightened up and ran off to comply with his directive. Telling me to come backstage after he was done, Mailer turned back to his mother and the two toddled off arm-in-arm.
“Anything special you want to know?” he asked. “Not really,” I said, raising my cup in his direction. Another knowing look, as he raised his to me.
I believe that night was the first time he shared in public any passages from Ancient Evenings, and those he chose to read turned out to be stunning in their invention: the embalming scene, told from the corpse’s point of view, that appears near the beginning of the book, and a later passage in which a pool in a palace is described through a child’s eyes; if all of the book, indeed, if any of the rest of it, had been as good as those set pieces, even Robert Lowell, his comrade-in-badinage in The Armies of the Night, would have been forced to throw patrician reserve to the winds and bow down to him as more than the best journalist in America. But alas they proved to be exceptions to that pharaonic tome’s misguided rule.
What was telling to me — and, as it seemed as I watched the audience, only to me — was how apprehensively, almost tenderly, Mailer sent those words out into the world; he was invested in those passages in a way that was protective and not a little diffident. Egypt behind him, he relaxed, seemingly relieved to depart from the preternaturally sentient imaginative world he had evoked; and soon enough he had turned the affair into a raucous town hall meeting by insisting that the audience vote on what he should read next, or on whether he should talk extemporaneously in response to questions from the crowd. The latter course soon set the evening down a muddy path; along the way, he was accused — with surprising vehemence — of all sorts of intellectual crimes, and responded by committing a few others with a (mostly) playful combativeness.
The event at an end, I headed backstage as instructed, and he caught my eye over the heads of the half-dozen young people — his own children, I soon realized — who had crowded into the small green room to embrace and congratulate him (and, for certain, to collect some paternal cash). He sent one of them in search of the bottle of scotch, and the Y’s representative soon appeared to pour its contents into paper cups, and Norman and I stood side by side surveying his progeny, toasting one another, and passing each other knowing looks. “Anything special you want to know?” he asked. “Not really,” I said, raising my cup in his direction. Another knowing look, as he raised his to me.
I spent the next hour observing him sign books and field mostly obnoxious questions from what remained of the crowd (“You portray yourself as such a cool guy, but when I sent you my manuscript you never responded. I have it here, I want you to read it . . .”) with extraordinary, even exemplary, graciousness and good humor. Every few minutes he’d wander over to me and whisper something conspiratorial before heading back into the fray. The evening faded out with nothing much to show for it, but it was — oddly — as much, even more than I could have hoped for.
If I had had the courage of my convictions, I would have used the incident as a springboard for a gloriously imitative approach to writing about him in my thesis. But I didn’t; now that I think of it, it was probably the convictions I lacked, rather than the courage.
—January 31, 2019
