Nobody Knows My Name (22 page)

And people talked about Norman with a kind of avid glee, which I found very ugly. Pleasure made their saliva flow, they sprayed and all but drooled, and their eyes shone with that blood-lust which is the only real tribute the mediocre are capable of bringing to the extraordinary. Many of the people who claimed to be seeing Norman all the time impressed me as being, to tell the truth, pitifully far beneath him. But this is also true, alas, of much of my own entourage. The people who are in one’s life or merely continually in one’s
presence reveal a great deal about one’s needs and terrors. Also, one’s hopes.

I was not, however, on the scene. I was on the road—not quite, I trust, in the sense that Kerouac’s boys are; but I presented, certainly, a moving target. And I was reading Norman Mailer. Before I had met him, I had only read
The Naked and The Dead, The White Negro
, and
Barbary Shore
—I think this is right, though it may be that I only read
The White Negro
later and confuse my reading of that piece with some of my discussions with Norman. Anyway, I could not, with the best will in the world, make any sense out of
The White Negro
and, in fact, it was hard for me to imagine that this essay had been written by the same man who wrote the novels. Both
The Naked and The Dead
and (for the most part)
Barbary Shore
are written in a lean, spare, muscular prose which accomplishes almost exactly what it sets out to do. Even
Barbary Shore
, which loses itself in its last half (and which deserves, by the way, far more serious treatment than it has received) never becomes as downright impenetrable as
The White Negro
does.

Now, much of this, I told myself, had to do with my resistance to the title, and with a kind of fury that so antique a vision of the blacks should, at this late hour, and in so many borrowed heirlooms, be stepping off the A train. But I was also baffled by the passion with which Norman appeared to be imitating so many people inferior to himself, i.e., Kerouac, and all the other Suzuki
rhythm boys. From them, indeed, I expected nothing more than their pablum-clogged cries of
Kicks!
and
Holy!
It seemed very clear to me that their glorification of the orgasm was but a way of avoiding all of the terrors of life and love. But Norman knew better, had to know better.
The Naked and The Dead, Barbary Shore
, and
The Deer Park
proved it. In each of these novels, there is a toughness and subtlety of conception, and a sense of the danger and complexity of human relationships which one will search for in vain, not only in the work produced by the aforementioned coterie, but in most of the novels produced by Norman’s contemporaries. What in the world, then, was he doing, slumming so outrageously, in such a dreary crowd?

For, exactly because he knew better, and in exactly the same way that no one can become more lewdly vicious than an imitation libertine, Norman felt compelled to carry their
mystique
further than they had, to be more “hip,” or more “beat,” to dominate, in fact, their dreaming field; and since this
mystique
depended on a total rejection of life, and insisted on the fulfillment of an infantile dream of love, the
mystique
could only be extended into violence. No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

But
why
should it be necessary to borrow the Depression language of deprived Negroes, which eventually evolved into jive and bop talk, in order to justify such a
grim system of delusions? Why malign the sorely menaced sexuality of Negroes in order to justify the white man’s own sexual panic? Especially as, in Norman’s case, and as indicated by his work, he has a very real sense of sexual responsibility, and, even, odd as it may sound to some, of sexual morality, and a genuine commitment to life. None of his people, I beg you to notice, spend their lives on the road. They really become entangled with each other, and with life. They really suffer, they spill real blood, they have real lives to lose. This is no small achievement; in fact, it is absolutely rare. No matter how uneven one judges Norman’s work to be, all of it is genuine work. No matter how harshly one judges it, it is the work of a genuine novelist, and an absolutely first-rate talent.

Which makes the questions I have tried to raise—or, rather, the questions which Norman Mailer irresistibly represents—all the more troubling and terrible. I certainly do not know the answers, and even if I did, this is probably not the place to state them.

But I have a few ideas. Here is Kerouac, ruminating on what I take to be the loss of the garden of Eden:

Now, this is absolute nonsense, of course, objectively considered, and offensive nonsense at that: I would hate to be in Kerouac’s shoes if he should ever be mad enough to read this aloud from the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater.

And yet there is real pain in it, and real loss, however thin; and it
is
thin, like soup too long diluted; thin because it does not refer to reality, but to a dream. Compare it, at random, with any old blues:

“Man,” said a Negro musician to me once, talking about Norman, “the only trouble with that cat is that he’s white.” This does not mean exactly what it says—or, rather, it
does
mean exactly what it says, and not what it might be taken to mean—and it is a very shrewd
observation. What my friend meant was that to become a Negro man, let alone a Negro artist, one had to make oneself up as one went along. This had to be done in the not-at-all-metaphorical teeth of the world’s determination to destroy you. The world had prepared no place for you, and if the world had its way, no place would ever exist. Now, this is true for everyone, but, in the case of a Negro, this truth is absolutely naked: if he deludes himself about it, he will die. This is not the way this truth presents itself to white men, who believe the world is theirs and who, albeit unconsciously, expect the world to help them in the achievement of their identity. But the world does not do this—for anyone; the world is not interested in anyone’s identity. And, therefore, the anguish which can overtake a white man comes in the middle of his life, when he must make the almost inconceivable effort to divest himself of everything he has ever expected or believed, when he must take himself apart and put himself together again, walking out of the world, into limbo, or into what certainly looks like limbo. This cannot yet happen to any Negro of Norman’s age, for the reason that his delusions and defenses are either absolutely impenetrable by this time, or he has failed to survive them. “I want to know how power works,” Norman once said to me, “how it really works, in detail.” Well, I know how power works, it has worked on me, and if I didn’t know how power worked, I would be dead. And it goes without saying, perhaps, that I
have simply never been able to afford myself any illusions concerning the manipulation of that power. My revenge, I decided very early, would be to achieve a power which outlasts kingdoms.

When I finally saw Norman again, I was beginning to suspect daylight at the end of my long tunnel, it was a summer day, I was on my way back to Paris, and I was very cheerful. We were at an afternoon party, Norman was standing in the kitchen, a drink in his hand, holding forth for the benefit of a small group of people. There seemed something different about him, it was the belligerence of his stance, and the really rather pontifical tone of his voice. I had only seen him, remember, in Malaquais’ living room, which Malaquais indefatigably dominates, and on various terraces and in various dives in Paris. I do not mean that there was anything unfriendly about him. On the contrary, he was smiling and having a ball. And yet—he was leaning against the refrigerator, rather as though he had his back to the wall, ready to take on all comers.

Norman has a trick, at least with me, of watching, somewhat ironically, as you stand on the edge of the crowd around him, waiting for his attention. I suppose this ought to be exasperating, but in fact I find it rather endearing, because it is so transparent and because he
gets such a bang out of being the center of attention. So do I, of course, at least some of the time.

We talked, bantered, a little tensely, made the usual, doomed effort to bring each other up to date on what we had been doing. I did not want to talk about my novel, which was only just beginning to seem to take shape, and, therefore, did not dare ask him if he were working on a novel. He seemed very pleased to see me, and I was pleased to see him, but I also had the feeling that he had made up his mind about me, adversely, in some way. It was as though he were saying, Okay, so now I know who
you
are, baby.

I was taking a boat in a few days, and I asked him to call me.

“Oh, no,” he said, grinning, and thrusting that forefinger at me, “
you
call me.”

“That’s fair enough,” I said, and I left the party and went on back to Paris. While I was out of the country, Norman published
Advertisements for Myself
, which presently crossed the ocean to the apartment of James Jones. Bill Styron was also in Paris at that time, and one evening the three of us sat in Jim’s living room, reading aloud, in a kind of drunken, masochistic fascination, Norman’s judgment of our personalities and our work. Actually, I came off best, I suppose; there was less about me, and it was less venomous. But the condescenion infuriated me; also, to tell the truth, my feelings were hurt. I felt that if that was the way Norman
felt about me, he should have told me so. He had said that I was incapable of saying “F--- you” to the reader. My first temptation was to send him a cablegram which would disabuse him of that notion, at least insofar as one reader was concerned. But then I thought, No, I would be cool about it, and fail to react as he so clearly wanted me to. Also, I must say, his judgment of myself seemed so wide of the mark and so childish that it was hard to stay angry. I wondered what in the world was going on in his mind. Did he really suppose that he had now become the builder and destroyer of reputations,

And of
my
reputation?

We met in the Actors’ Studio one afternoon, after a performance of
The Deer Park
—which I deliberately arrived too late to see, since I really did not know how I was going to react to Norman, and didn’t want to betray myself by clobbering his play. When the discussion ended, I stood, again on the edge of the crowd around him, waiting. Over someone’s shoulder, our eyes met, and Norman smiled.

“We’ve got something to talk about,” I told him.

“I figured that,” he said, smiling.

We went to a bar, and sat opposite each other. I was relieved to discover that I was not angry, not even (as far as I could tell) at the bottom of my heart. But, “Why did you write those things about me?”

“Well, I’ll tell you about that,” he said—Norman
has several accents, and I think this was his Texas one—“I sort of figured you had it coming to you.”

“Why?”

“Well, I think there’s some truth in it.”

“Well, if you felt that way, why didn’t you ever say so—to me?”

“Well, I figured if this was going to break up our friendship, something else would come along to break it up just as fast.”

I couldn’t disagree with that.

“You’re the only one I kind of regret hitting so hard,” he said, with a grin. “I think I—probably—wouldn’t say it quite that way now.”

With this, I had to be content. We sat for perhaps an hour, talking of other things and, again, I was struck by his stance: leaning on the table, shoulders hunched, seeming, really, to roll like a boxer’s, and his hands moving as though he were dealing with a sparring partner. And we were talking of physical courage, and the necessity of never letting another guy get the better of you.

I laughed. “Norman, I can’t go through the world the way you do because I haven’t got your shoulders.”

He grinned, as though I were his pupil. “But you’re a pretty tough little mother, too,” he said, and referred to one of the grimmer of my Village misadventures, a misadventure which certainly proved that I had a dangerously sharp tongue, but which didn’t really prove anything about my courage. Which, anyway, I had long ago given up trying to prove.

I did not see Norman again until Provincetown, just after his celebrated brush with the police there, which resulted, according to Norman, in making the climate of Provincetown as “mellow as Jello.” The climate didn’t seem very different to me—dull natives, dull tourists, malevolent policemen; I certainly, in any case, would never have dreamed of testing Norman’s sanguine conclusion. But we had a great time, lying around the beach, and driving about, and we began to be closer than we had been for a long time.

It was during this Provincetown visit that I realized, for the first time, during a long exchange Norman and I had, in a kitchen, at someone else’s party, that Norman was really fascinated by the nature of political power. But, though he said so, I did not really believe that he was fascinated by it as a possibility for himself. He was then doing the great piece on the Democratic convention which was published in
Esquire
, and I put his fascination down to that. I tend not to worry about writers as long as they are working—which is not as romantic as it may sound—and he seemed quite happy with his wife, his family, himself. I declined, naturally, to rise at dawn, as he apparently often did, to go running or swimming or boxing, but Norman seemed to get a great charge out of these admirable pursuits and didn’t put me down too hard for my comparative decadence.