The Spooky Art (5 page)
I think it might be interesting to talk about
The Naked and the Dead
as a best-seller that was the work of an amateur. Of course, as best-sellers go, it was a good book, and the author who began it at the age of twenty-three and completed it in fifteen months had already written more than a half million words in college and so could be considered a hardworking amateur who loved writing and was prepared in the way of a twenty-four-year-old to fall on his sword in defense of literature.
He was naïve, he was passionate about writing, he knew very little about the subtle demands of a good style, he did not have a great deal of restraint, and he burned with excitement as he wrote. He hardly knew whether he should stand in the shadow of Tolstoy or was essentially without talent. He was an amateur.
He was also a writer of what soon became a big best-seller. Indeed,
The Naked and the Dead
was his only prodigious best-seller. It had a good story that got better and better, it had immediacy, it came out at exactly the right time, when, near to three years after the Second World War ended, everyone was ready for a big war novel that gave some idea of what it had been like—it thrived on its scenes of combat—and it had a best-seller style. The book was sloppily written (the words came too quickly and too easily), and there was hardly a noun in any sentence not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly available adjective
—scalding
coffee and
tremulous
fear are the sorts of things you will find throughout.
The book also had vigor. This is the felicity of good books by amateurs. They venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.
The Naked and the Dead
took chances all over the place and more of them succeeded than not. It was rightly a best-seller; it fulfilled one of two profiles of such a category—for invariably these books are written by bold amateurs or by niche professionals, who know more about a given subject than they ought to.
All this said, one may now ask the professional what virtue he might ascribe to the work he did as an amateur. The answer is that he had the good luck to be influenced profoundly by Tolstoy in the fifteen months he was writing the opus back in 1946 and 1947—he read from
Anna Karenina
most mornings before he commenced his own work. Thereby, his pages, through the
limited perceptions of a twenty-four-year-old, reflect what he learned about compassion from Tolstoy. For that is the genius of the old man—Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say that we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful. In any case, good or bad, it reminds us that life is like a gladiators’ arena for the soul and so we can feel strengthened by those who endure, and feel awe and pity for those who do not.
That fine edge in Tolstoy, the knowledge that compassion is valueless without severity (for otherwise it cannot defend itself against sentimentality), gave
The Naked and the Dead
whatever enduring virtue it may possess and catapulted the amateur who wrote it into the grim ranks of those successful literary men and women who are obliged to become professional in order to survive—no easy demand, for it would insist that one must be able to do a good day’s work on a bad day, and indeed, that is a badge of honor decent professionals are entitled to wear.
STEVEN MARCUS:
What methods did you pursue in your second novel?
NORMAN MAILER:
Well, with
Barbary Shore
, I began to run into trouble. I started it in Paris about six months after I finished
The Naked and the Dead
and did about fifty pages. It was then called
Mrs. Guinevere
and was influenced by Sally Bowles in Isherwood’s
Berlin Stories. Mrs. Guinevere
never went anywhere. It stopped, just ground down after those first fifty pages. I dropped it, thought I’d never pick it up again, and started to work on another novel. Did all the research, went to Indiana to do research.
SM:
On what?
NM:
On a labor novel. There was a union in Evansville with which I had connections. So I stayed for a few days in Indiana, and then went to Jamaica, Vermont, to write the novel. I spent four to five weeks getting ready to begin, made a great push on the beginning, worked for two weeks, and quit cold. I didn’t have the book. I didn’t know a damned thing about labor unions. In desperation (I was full of second-novel panic) I picked up
Mrs. Guinevere
and looked at it. And I found something there I could go on with. So I worked on it all through
the spring of 1949, and then moved out to Hollywood for the summer. I finished the second half in Hollywood.
Barbary Shore
is really a Hollywood novel. I think it reflected the impact of Hollywood on me in some subterranean fashion. Certainly the first draft is the wildest draft of the three; it’s almost insane, and the most indigestible portions were written in the first couple of months I was in Hollywood. I never knew where the book was going; I had no idea where it would be by tomorrow. I’d wake up and work the typewriter in great dread, in literal terror, wondering when this curious and doubtful inspiration was going to stop. It never quite did. It ground along at the rate of three pages, three difficult pages a day. I got a first draft done and was quite unhappy with it; it was a very bad book at that point. When I rewrote it later, in Provincetown, a summer later, again it went at the rate of three pages a day. The revision was different from the first draft, and I think much better. But working on
Barbary Shore
, I always felt as if I were not writing the book myself but rather as if I were serving as a subject for some intelligence which had decided to use me to write the book. It had nothing to do with whether the work was good or bad. I just had to make do with the fact that I had absolutely no conscious control of it. If I hadn’t heard about the unconscious, I would have had to postulate one to explain this phenomenon. For the first time I became powerfully aware that I had an unconscious, which seemed to have little to do with me.
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 DEER PARK
I
n 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.