A Ticket to the Circus (16 page)
Read A Ticket to the Circus Online
Authors: Norris Church Mailer
When I got back home to Arkansas, I knew my life had already begun to change.
To Barbara Norris:
… Cinnamon Brown, that’s your other female, the tall jaunty slightly mysterious red-headed woman who can’t walk into a bar without turning it on since there’s a sexual voltage comes off you then of which you may even be unaware, and that lady, of course, is a distance away from Barbara who is looking to have one love till she dies and wants to make an art of that love so that she gives strength and gains strength and tenderness passes forward and back. And I, of course, love those ladies because there’s one of them for each of me, Barbara for Norman since he is probably as tender as she is (that is saying a lot) and as much in love with the religion of love which is to make it with
one’s mate and thereby come out to a place very few people visit and you can be true to that idea of love; then another side not so different from Cinnamon, a cold creation full of lust who might just as well have a name like Ace or Duke or some such hard-cock name far from Norman—and yet not a bad side, no worse than Cinnamon, for so much of the action is there, even an instinct for some of the better adventures.
I used to be that way when I was twenty-six; I still am. One past needs to be in love—the other can remain in love only so long as the love keeps changing, and so if it is the same woman, the ante keeps rising. There has to be more and more. Of course one cannot always name what
more
might be—it is rather that one has to believe it is possible. Then the two sides of my nature can come together. I know it is the same with you.
Sometimes I think of everything in the scheme of things which is not designed for us—the physical distance, Matt on your side and all my children on mine, my two years of chronology to each of yours, our cultures—for New York as you will see is a culture—and just as I might not be able to live for long in Arkansas, so might you not be able to endure the East; a cold and competitive place you will find if you live in it long enough, and then there’s all you have to learn, and all I have to remember and to keep from losing, and yet I feel curiously optimistic, as if we will never lose the best part of each other for all those reasons, but only because there is finally not enough magic and/or balls in one of us or the other or both of us together to keep our opposites in that lovely tension which would not cease in Little Rock or Chicago. So I do not worry about our betraying each other… my happiness, and then my optimism is that at last I know a woman who understands love the way I do and has the same kind of confidence and the same respect—it soon becomes fear—that such a love can make in its resonance toward everything about it. This kind of love is dangerous in its essence possibly because its potential harmony is so great that every devil in you and me will be disturbed by it, and the devils in others will hate us. Still we have our chance. We have that lovely balance between us and that fucky imbalance which keeps
us pawing each other and exploring each other and looking to surprise one another—there’s such delight in the surprises, and that funny confidence we each feel where we’re just happy to be with each other.
So I don’t worry. I think we have a little time at least in this happy state and the confidence that if we have it in us truly, nothing will grind it down, and if we don’t, well God we’ve been blessed a little already and I love Cinnamon Brown and Barbara Norris ’cause as you know they’re both divine.
Hey, I miss you
right now,
Norman Kingsley
P.S. How did you know that Kingsley was my middle name? I wonder if I have a use for it at last.
P.P.S. Nope. It’s no better than Ace or Duke. Call me Roger.
I
did call my parents from Chicago, and it was as bad as I’d thought it would be—another round of “How can you do this to us? How can you do this to Matthew?” I was beginning to see that I couldn’t talk to them about any of it. They forced me to sneak around, which made me feel horrible, but finally they began to understand that Norman wasn’t going away in a hurry. He was one year—almost to the day—older than my father, and while they didn’t know many of the particulars of his reputation, they knew enough to be worried for me. I was learning more about him every time we talked. He was certainly candid about his past, but it seemed like the stories he was telling me were about somebody else, maybe an older black sheep brother who’d gotten into pointless fights, had gotten married a lot of times, and had—God forbid—in a drunken, drugged-out bout of psychosis, stabbed one of his wives. I just couldn’t reconcile that wild man with the funny, smart, loving man he was when he was with me. It wasn’t possible he could be capable of that kind of behavior, or at least not anymore. I knew in my gut he was a good man, and my gut had seldom been wrong; whenever I had gone against it I’d always been sorry.
In return for telling me about his foibles, he wanted to hear stories of my past, especially the boyfriends—it seemed to turn him on—but I frankly didn’t have all that much to tell him, and when he kept insisting on more, I made up a couple of affairs that never happened and embellished the ones that had. Later I was sorry I had done that, and finally confessed I had made some of it up, but at the time he was so disappointed that I had nothing else to tell him, and I wanted to please him. Maybe he didn’t want to believe how young and naïve I was.
My first act of rebellion had been to marry Larry, but when we divorced, that was bad, too. My parents’ generation was of the era that believed “You made your bed. Now you have to lie in it.” Forever. You married the first person you went to bed with, as a matter of course. The principal fear that kept you in line was “What will people say?” Well, people in that small town said plenty. When word got out that I
was seeing Norman Mailer, I was the center of gossip, and when I actually quit my job and moved to New York to live with him, that is all anyone talked about. (The reactions were pretty mixed between the people who felt sorry for me and the people who felt sorry for him.)
One older woman whom I knew only slightly gave out the word that I was putting Matthew up for adoption, which really hurt me. I don’t know what was worse, the stupid gossips or the friends who raced to tell me everything that was said. For some people, there is a perverse pleasure in the pain of friends. As our old friend Gore Vidal famously said, “It isn’t enough to succeed; your friends must fail.” Even my dearest friends thought I had lost my mind and that I would stay in New York awhile and then come to my senses and move back to Arkansas.
After Chicago, Norman called almost every day and wrote wonderful letters several times a week. We exchanged a lot of pictures, and a huge box of his books arrived. I dutifully set out to read them all in order, starting with
The Naked and the Dead
, and for the most part succeeded, which was a big mistake in a lot of ways, as I was in no way ready to have that plethora of ideas and bombast of language thrust into my brain all at once. I absorbed as much as I could, though, enough to know whom I was dealing with a little bit better. I liked
The Naked and the Dead.
It was a good war story that had funny, true moments. I laughed out loud in some places. (“What is this stuff?” one of the soldiers in the chow line says. “Owl shit,” answers the tough mess cook, giving him the evil eye. “Okay,” the soldier says. “I just thought it was something I couldn’t eat.”)
The Prisoner of Sex
struck me as humorous, but he didn’t write it that way. “Those feminist bitches have destroyed my credibility with women,” he said. I could see how people could take a lot of what he said in a bad way, as he never thought of the consequences. He just said what he thought was the truth at the time. To me, the humor and irony was inherent, but you can’t transfer the twinkle in the eye to the page, so a lot of people treated everything he said as perfectly serious, like his famous comment that women should be kept in cages. Who would think he was serious about that? But feminists saw it as him making fun of them. He didn’t help his own cause a lot of the time. I always told him I was a feminist. I had run across gender abuse myself, and was
certainly for a woman’s right to have the same salary as a man and all the rest of it—rights he supported, as well—but he never accepted that he had to be serious with the subject. He didn’t couch his language at all; he threw it out there with force. I could understand his frustration.
Once I overheard two women talking about him in the bathroom of a theater where we were watching a play, and they were calling him a sexist pig and a misogynist and other bad things. I usually just ignored things like this, but they were right in my face, putting on lipstick, so I interrupted them and said, “Do you know Norman Mailer?” They said no. “Have you ever read anything he’s written?” I asked. Again they said no. I said, “Well, I’m married to him, and if you are going to call someone names like that, you should at least know what you’re talking about.” They just stared at me, and I walked away, I was so angry.
After we were married, Gloria Steinem said in print that anybody who would marry Norman Mailer couldn’t be healthy, well adjusted, conscious, or aware, because for such a woman Norman was unmarriable, which I totally resented, since she knew nothing about me and had, in fact, been friends with him. Close friends. Germaine Greer, who almost had an affair with him (I’m a little fuzzy on the details), and who was his nemesis in the famous debate at town hall, was quite nice to me the one time we met in London, and even gave me a copy of her book about women painters, as I was a painter. I sympathized with the fact that these painters had never gotten any credit, but it didn’t make them more interesting to read about. “She was a decent painter, even a good painter; she was ignored; she died.” End of story.
Some of Norman’s political writings I frankly skimmed, and while I thought they were brilliant, it was just too much to take in all at once.
An American Dream
was disturbing, in light of the incident with his second wife, Adele, and his violent history with Lady Jeanne, his third wife. I found
The Deer Park
unbelievable. I didn’t like any of the characters; they didn’t seem real to me; every woman was, or wanted to be, a prostitute. I found
Why Are We in Vietnam?
to be just about unreadable, although it had some beautiful writing about Alaska and a lovely passage about a long train ride in it. I never thought dialogue was his strong suit. I once pointed out that people didn’t talk like he wrote, and he said they did, so we were at an impasse. I do believe that no one else can write like him, sentence for sentence, with brilliant passages such as
the descriptions of Provincetown and Maine in
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
and
Harlot’s Ghost.
And no one can say he doesn’t use wonderful, unusual metaphors, but we had long arguments about the need for plot. “There’s no need for a plot,” he would argue. “Life doesn’t have a plot. Life is existential. You never know from one minute to the next what is going to happen, and there are no clear endings.”
“That’s exactly why a book needs a plot,” I would answer. “Nobody wants to read a book to get real life. You want to
escape
from real life when you read. You want to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You want there to be a conclusion, where the guy gets the girl, or the house is sold, or the murderer is caught.” But he was unmoved by my arguments.
Slowly over the years I’ve reread the volumes, and they seem like entirely different books from that first green reading. I’ve come to have more respect for his work. One of the reasons Norman was attracted to me—or so he once believed—was that I had never read his work when I met him, and I liked him for himself. As I used to tell him, I would have fallen for him if he had been a truck driver. He would ask, “But would you have married me?” And I’d say, “Of course not. The hours are too long, and you would be away too much. There would be too much temptation on the road to cheat.” He liked the dishonesty of that.
The first time I met Ethel Kennedy, the first thing she asked was, “Would you be with him if he weren’t Norman Mailer?”
I thought for a minute. “Well, I know a whole lot of people who aren’t Norman Mailer, and I’m not with any of them, so I guess not.”
It’s a silly question. If I had weighed three hundred pounds, or had looked like Groucho Marx, would Norman have been with me? If he hadn’t been the writer-celebrity and personality he was, he would have been someone else entirely, and I might have been attracted to him, but probably not. Interesting puzzle. In my memory, that’s where Ethel’s and my conversation stopped. There was nothing else to say. So funny, how women reacted to me when I first came to New York. Lizzie Hardwick, a writer who had been married to Robert Lowell, took me aside when we were first introduced and, with that croaky little giggle she had, said, “Now, don’t let that man make you pregnant!” Bella Abzug gave me her home phone number and told me to call her, at any hour of the night, if I needed to get away from him, and she would come
and get me. I just stared at them. I had no idea what they were talking about.
Before I met Norman, I had been toying with the idea of going back to school to get my MFA in art and teach in college, preferably at Arkansas Tech. My ambition at the time was such that I didn’t want to move away. I just wanted to be able to work more seriously with older students and have more pay. I loved living in Russellville with my son, I loved my little house with the murals on the walls, my water bed, my orange shag carpet, my parents and my friends, but for some inexplicable reason, I checked out schools in the East. I had written to the Rhode Island School of Design and MassArt in Boston for applications to their MFA programs. I had filled some parts out but hadn’t yet sent the applications off. I was also thinking of going to the University of Arkansas, which made a lot more sense, but that would have been my last choice. I was drawn to go east. If I did go to one of the Eastern schools, I would have to get loans and scholarships or a working fellowship, and find a place to live for myself and Matthew, day care for him. It was a huge undertaking. I, of course, discussed it with Norman.