In the New York Times of November 28, 2014 Dwight Garner called Norman Mailer’s letters ‘mostly low-wattage, a rolling brownout. . . . Working on them made him feel slack and etiolated.’ Mailer wrote five letters to me between 1983 and 1991. Two of them (unlike the ones reviewed by Garner) are exceptionally interesting, the other three illuminate his character. His incisive and well-wrought letters are even more remarkable because they were written to a complete stranger.
I knew that Mailer was acquainted with Hemingway’s mentally unstable son – they sometimes had public head-butting contests – and asked him about Gregory when I was writing Hemingway’s biography. On April 26, 1983 Mailer replied, trying to establish the exact truth, from Columbia Heights in Brooklyn:
I’m not certain I can help you in any thorough-going fashion. I know Gregory a bit, and have had a few nights of drinking with him over the years, but I can’t pretend to know him well or even to understand him in part. He’s an odd, quirky man, with unex- pected veins of warmth, crossed by starts of unfriendliness that could be suspicion or I don’t know what. We’ve never been close. I like him but, I repeat, can’t say I know him well at all. I can, however, tell you, that if he hates his father (which seems to be the message you’ve picked up from other people) it would not be in any simple or monolithic fashion, for I recollect in general, (unfortunately not in sufficient detail to tell you and have it make any historical sense) of occasions when he did things to irritate his father and spoke of them now, years later, with a touch of ruefulness in which I felt – it may have been no more than my own impression – considerable affection for his parent. I will say all of this is in [Gregory’s] Papa, and one reason I like the book so much is that it captured for me the spirit of the stories he had told me up to then about Ernest, all of which are in his book, and I know one time he told me in considerable detail about how he knocked a man out at a party because the fellow was bad-mouth- ing him about his famous father. I know this is all too general for your purpose, but really, the point to this letter is to confirm Papa as a source. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the stories in it, but will for the emotional truth that underlies them, at least so far as I comprehend Gregory. At any rate, good luck in finding him in Montana, and if you do, please pass on my regards.
Two years later, when I was editing D. H. Lawrence and Tradition, about his influence on modern writers, I got back in touch with Mailer and asked what Lawrence meant to him. He emphasized Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was privately printed in Florence in 1928. After a sensational trial, the first unexpurgated American edition was finally published in 1959. On February 6, 1985 Mailer described its profound influence on his life and work:
Lawrence’s main influence for me was Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I had the privilege of reading it back in 1941 in the unexpur- gated edition. That was in the Treasure Room of Widener Library. Harvard, in those days, used to have its perks and one was precisely that you could read the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In any event, it changed my sex life, or rather, accelerated it into a direction it had been proceeding on nicely by itself. I accepted Lawrence’s thesis about untrammeled and illimitable rights and liberties and pleasures of sexual love and the union between the two. I don’t think anyone had ever before, whether in literature or personal life, had stated it so forcefully for me, that one could not have sex without love, or love with- out sex, period. Now, as I know from the other side of 40-plus years, that is an extraordinary thesis, and can be half-right, or all wrong, as well as absolutely so. For this reason, Lawrence’s hypothesis has lived with me as my own, with all the excitement of an ongoing hypothesis that you can never quite confirm or deny (hypotheses are so much more life-giving than obsessions!). At any rate, such is my essential debt to Lawrence. His other works I admire, and think he was a great writer, but Lady Chatterley changed my life.
As for the rest, you may be interested in a chapter I once wrote about Lawrence in my book, The Prisoner of Sex [1971]. I think it’s one of the better pieces of literary criticism I’ve done, and you might find it useful to your purposes.
In June 1986 I asked Mailer’s permission to reprint fourteen pages from Armies of the Night in my collection Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs. I’d been paying contributors only $50 and, realizing the absurdity of my request, offered to pay him a triple but still inadequate fee. He answered in a handwritten note, ‘ – by all means, pay me at the going rate, not more. Cheers – Norman Mailer.’
After I’d sent him my essays on ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls as Contemporary History’ and ‘The Nobel Prize and Literary Politics,’ Mailer took the trouble to send ‘Just a line to tell you that I read the pieces you were kind enough to send on to me, and enjoyed reading them a good deal. How often can one say that of work which has as much forthright research and serious critical penetration?’
When I learned that Mailer was going to read at a bookstore in Berkeley, I invited him to stay with me afterwards and see a bit of the Bay Area. On the night of the reading the mob of people waiting to hear him stretched out of the store and down Telegraph Avenue. He put on an impressive performance and berated the audience for not asking more stimulating questions. Most people would not have replied to my letter. But on December 4, 1991, after he’d returned to New York, he wrote: ‘I’m afraid we didn’t get to see each other at Cody’s but then I didn’t receive your letter until I came back from the trip or I would have been much more on the alert for you. In any event, some other time, perhaps. It was generous of you to offer your hospitality.’
Mailer was often said to be misogynistic, boorish and violent. But in our brief dealings he revealed a very different character: not only intelligent and perceptive, but generous, encouraging and gracious.