Authors: Norman Mailer
Mind of an Outlaw (61 page)
Such an undisturbing view of the making of one’s own literature was, however, soon lost. You must forgive me, but I am now obliged—and inescapably, I fear—to speak of my own works. It is because I am an authority about the particular conditions under which they were written. That is the only matter on which I may be an authority, and if I were to discuss the novels of other authors in the same manner, I would merely be speculating about how they went at it. My own work I do know. I can say, then, that the next book on which I embarked after
The Naked and the Dead
was such a mystery to me that to this day I cannot tell you where it came from. I used to feel as if this second novel,
Barbary Shore
, were being written by someone else. Whereas
The Naked and the Dead
had been put together with the agreeable effort of a young carpenter able to put up a decent house because he is full of the techniques and wisdom of those who built houses before him, the text of
Barbary Shore
often felt as if it were being dictated to me by a phantom in the middle of a forest. Each morning I would sit down to work with no notion of how to continue. My
characters were strangers. Each day, after a few hours of blind work (because I never seemed to get more than a sentence or two ahead of myself), I would find that I had pushed my plot and people three manuscript pages further forward into their eventual denouement. Yet I never knew what I was doing nor where it came from. It is fortunate that I had heard of Freud and the unconscious, or I would have had to try to postulate such a condition myself. An unconscious mind was the only explanation for what was going on. I was certainly left aware, however, of two presences cooperating in a literary work—and the second, foreign to me, had the capacity to take over the act of authorship from the first.
Since then, I have not written a novel which did not belong to one category or the other. Some, of course, shared both. They came out of the deepest parts of my unconscious but were also the results of long, conscious preparation. I see
The Deer Park
and
Ancient Evenings
as fair subscriptions to these two categories, whereas my novel
The Executioner’s Song
was so close to the facts of a real event that many would argue that it was not a novel at all. At the other extreme I find
Why Are We in Vietnam?
That work emerged in a voice not even remotely like my own. When I attempt to read it aloud to audiences, I am in need of an actor with a good Texas accent to step up from the audience and do the job instead. Yet I wrote that book in three happy and bemused months. Some novels take years, and some novels shift the weights and balances of your character forever by the act of writing them, but this work took only three months and passed through me with the strangest tones, wild and comic to an extreme. I used to go to my desk each morning, and the voice of my main character, a highly improbable sixteen-year-old genius—I did not even know if he was white or black, since he claimed to be one or the other at different times—would commence to speak. I had no idea where he came from nor where we were going. Such books make you feel like a spirit medium. I needed only to show up for work at the proper time and—I cannot call him he—
it
would begin to speak. One thinks of such books as gifts, compared with others; one hardly has to work at all.
Sometimes when I am feeling tolerant to the idea of karma,
demiurges, spirits of the age, and the intervention of angels, saints, and demons, I also wonder if being a writer over a long career does not leave you open to more than one source for your work. In a long career one may come forth with many values that are products of one’s skill and education, of one’s dedication, but I also wonder if once in a while the gods do not look about and have their own novels to propose and peer down among us and say, “Here is a good one for Bellow,” or “That would have been a saucy dish for Cheever; too bad he’s gone,” or, in my own case, “Look at poor old Mailer worrying about his job again. Let’s throw him something wicked.”
Who knows? If we are for the most part sturdy literary engineers full of sound literary practice, cannot we also be agents for forces beyond our comprehension? Perhaps our books do on occasion come to us from sources we do not divine. I applaud the idea of that. Given our large and unrequited hungers, it is nice to believe that we can also be handed, in passing, a few gifts we do not quite deserve. How agreeable to feel akin to the force that put paintings on the walls of caves, set stonecutters to exactitudes that would permit Gothic arches, and gave the calculus to Newton’s age. No, it is not so ill to sense that we are also heir to emanations from some unaccountable and fabulous source. Nothing lifts our horizons like a piece of unexpected luck or the generosity of the gods.
American Psycho
“THE COMMUNISTS,”
says someone at a literary party, “at least had the decency to pack it in after seventy years. Capitalism is going to last seven hundred, and before it’s done, there will be nothing left.”
If there is reality to
American Psycho
, by Bret Easton Ellis—if, that is, the book offers any insight into a spiritual plague—then capitalism is not likely to approach its septicentennial, for this novel reverses the values of
The Bonfire of the Vanities
. Where
Bonfire
owed some part of its success to the reassurance it offered the rich—“You may be silly,” Wolfe was saying in effect, “but, brother, the people down at the bottom are unspeakably worse”—Ellis’s novel inverts the equation. I cannot recall a piece of fiction by an American writer that depicts so odious a ruling class—worse, a young ruling class of Wall Street princelings ready, presumably, by the next century to manage the mighty if surrealistic levers of our economy. Nowhere in American literature can one point to an inhumanity of the moneyed upon the afflicted equal to the following description. I think it is best to present it uncut from the original manuscript:
“Listen, what’s your name?” I ask.
“Al,” he says.
“
Speak
up,” I tell him. “Come on.”
“Al,” he says, louder.
“Get a goddamn job,
Al
,” I say, earnestly. “You’ve got a negative attitude. That’s what’s stopping you. You’ve got to get your act together.
I’ll
help you.”
“You’re so kind mister. You’re kind. You’re a kind man,” he blubbers. “I can tell.”
“Ssshhh,” I whisper. “It’s okay.” I start petting the dog.
“Please,” he says, grabbing my wrist, but lightly, with kindness. “I don’t know what to do. I’m so cold.”
I ask him, “Do you know how bad you smell?” I whisper this soothingly, stroking his face. “The
stench
. My god …”
“I can’t …” he chokes, then swallows, shaking. “I can’t find a shelter.”
“You
reek
,” I tell him again. “You
reek
of …
shit
…” I’m still petting the dog, its eyes wide and wet and grateful. “Do you know that? Goddamnit Al, look at me and stop crying like some kind of
faggot
,” I shout. My rage builds then subsides and I close my eyes, bringing my hand up to the bridge of my nose which I squeeze tightly, then sigh, “Al … I’m sorry. It’s just that … I don’t know, I don’t have anything in common with you.”
The bum’s not listening. He’s crying so hard he’s incapable of a coherent answer. I put the bill slowly back into the other pocket of my Luciano Soprani jacket and with the other hand stop petting the dog and reach into the other pocket. The bum stops sobbing abruptly and sits up, looking for the fiver or, I presume, his bottle of Thunderbird. I reach out and touch his face gently, once more with compassion and whisper, “Do you know what a fucking loser you are?” He starts nodding helplessly and I pull out a long thin knife with a serrated edge and being very careful not to kill the bum push maybe half an inch of the blade into his right eye, flicking
the handle up, instantly popping the retina and blinding him.
The bum is too surprised to say anything. He only opens his mouth in shock and moves a grubby, mittened hand slowly up to his face. I yank his pants down and in the passing headlights of a taxi can make out his flabby black thighs, rashed because of constant urinating in his pantsuit, the stench of shit rises quickly into my face and breathing through my mouth, on my haunches, I start stabbing him below the stomach, lightly, in the dense matted patch of pubic hair. This sobers him up somewhat and instinctively he tries to cover himself with his hands and the dog starts barking, yipping really, furiously, but it doesn’t attack, and I keep stabbing at the bum now in between his fingers, stabbing the back of his hands. His eye, burst open, hangs out of its socket and runs down his face and he keeps blinking which causes what’s left of it inside the wound to pour out, like red, veiny egg yolk. I grab his head with the one hand and push it back and then with my thumb and forefinger hold the other eye open and bring the knife up and push the tip of it into the socket, first breaking the protective film so the socket fills with blood, then slitting the eyeball open sideways and he finally starts screaming once I slit his nose in two, spraying me, the dog with blood, Gizmo blinking trying to get the blood out of his eyes. I quickly wipe the blade clean across his face, breaking open the muscle above his cheek. Still kneeling I throw a quarter in his face, which is slick and shiny with blood, both sockets hollowed out, what’s left of his eyes literally oozing over his lips, creating thick, webby strands when stretched across his screaming open mouth. I whisper calmly, “There’s a quarter. Go buy some
gum
you crazy fucking
nigger
.” Then I turn my attention to the barking dog and when I get up, stomp on its front paws while it’s crouched down ready to jump at me, its fangs bared, and immediately crunch the bones
in both its legs and it falls on its side squealing in pain, its front paws sticking up in the air at an obscene, satisfying angle. I can’t help but start laughing and I linger at the scene, amused by this tableau. When I spot an approaching taxi, I slowly walk away.
Afterwards, two blocks west, I feel heady, ravenous, pumped-up, as if I’ve just worked out heavily, endorphins flooding my nervous system, my ears buzzing, my body tuning in, embracing that first line of cocaine, inhaling the first puff of a fine cigar, sipping that first glass of Cristal.
Obviously, we have a radioactive pile on our hands. Canceled by Simon & Schuster two months before publication at an immediate cost to the publisher of a $300,000 advance, picked up almost at once by Vintage Books, and commented upon all over the media map in anticipation of Christmas, although the book will now not come out much before Easter, we are waiting for a work with not one, not two, but twenty or thirty scenes of unmitigated torture. Yet the writer may have enough talent to be taken seriously. How one wishes he were without talent! One does not want to be caught defending
American Psycho
. The advance word is a tidal wave of bad cess.
The Sunday
New York Times Book Review
took the unprecedented step of printing a review, months in advance, on December 16. In the form of an editorial titled “Snuff This Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” it is by Roger Rosenblatt, a “columnist for
Life
magazine and an essayist for ‘The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour,’ ” who writes in a style to remind one of the critical bastinadoes with which
Time
magazine used to flog the ingenuous asses of talented young writers forty years ago.
American Psycho
is the journal Dorian Gray would have written had he been a high school sophomore. But that is unfair to sophomores. So pointless, so themeless, so everythingless is this novel, except in stupefying details
about expensive clothing, food and bath products, that were it not the most loathsome offering of the season, it certainly would be the funniest.… Patrick Bateman … is a Harvard graduate, twenty-six years old, is single, lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, nurtures his appearance obsessively, frequents health clubs by day and restaurants by night and, in his spare time, plucks out the eyes of street beggars, slits the throats of children and does things to the bodies of women not unlike things that Mr. Ellis does to prose.…
But his true inner satisfaction comes when he has a woman in his clutches and can entertain her with a nail gun or a power drill or Mace, or can cut off her head or chop off her arms or bite off breasts or dispatch a starving rat up her vagina.
The context of these high jinks is young, wealthy, hair-slicked-back, narcissistic, decadent New York, of which, one only assumes, Mr. Ellis disapproves. It’s a bit hard to tell what Mr. Ellis intends exactly, because he languishes so comfortably in the swamp he purports to condemn.