A FOUL-WEATHER FRIEND TO
NORMAN MAILER

THE HIGHEST COMPLIMENT I WAS EVER PAID BY
Norman Mailer was when he called me a "foul-weather friend:’ He grinned as he said it, pleased with himself for the wit and felicity of the formulation. I grinned back, both because I shared his own appreciation of the clever way he had put the compliment and because I knew that, having always stood more steadfastly by him in bad times than in good, I richly deserved it. Our friendship started in what was an especially rough period for him, and it slowly and gradually began to unravel when he was once again riding high. I, on the other hand, was in big trouble at that point, and he did not prove to be a foul-weather friend to me. But there was more—much more—to the story than that, and I would be false to the reality of it if I created the impression that the rise and fall of our friendship was, to borrow from Jay Gatsby, "merely personal:’
    By the time I first met him at Lillian Hellman’s in the late 1950s, Mailer* had written three novels and a few sections of what would

* I more often called him than Norman, feeling self-conscious about our shared first name. He had no such feelings and always called me Norman.

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turn out to be an abortive fourth. The first, The Naked and the Dead, had been a sensation upon its publication in 1948, propelling him at age twenty-five into bestsellerdom and celebrityhood as the author of what the popular press took to be "the best and most definitive novel about World War IV Yet and here is one large measure of how much things would change in the decades ahead—the very success of that book made Mailer as suspect in the eyes of the serious critical community as Lillian’s plays had made her.*
    From what I learned when I came to know him about ten years later, Mailer was shocked to discover that there was a literary world out there whose leading lights were at best dismissive and at worst contemptuous of best-selling books and the people who wrote them. A graduate of Harvard he may have been, but somehow he had managed to get through four years in Cambridge without really coming to understand that in the America of the late 1940s all culture was divided into three parts: highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow; that the highbrows more or less automatically dismissed any best-selling novel as middlebrow or lowbrow and therefore beneath notice; and that this tiny and obscure minority, powerless to command or disburse the worldly rewards of big money and national fame, nevertheless mysteriously enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the power to confer true literary status.
    There were, to be sure, exceptions to the rule that commercial success debarred a writer from highbrow acceptance or acclaim, the main one being Mailer’s god. Ernest Hemingway, whose career had probably been responsible for misleading him on these matters. But even Hemingway was only a partial exception, since he had begun by publishing in what had once been called "little magazines" and had established himself as an important experimental writer (with an imprimatur from one of the cardinals of the avant-garde church, Gertrude Stein herself) by the time he broke through to commercial success. Mailer, by contrast, hit it big with no such prior credentials.
    To make matters worse, he did so with a novel written straight out of the naturalist tradition against which the avant-garde and the
*Their own friendship began when she tried to adapt The Naked and the Dead to the stage. The project failed, but they remained on good terms.

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as one of the aesthetic faces of Stalinism. Thus, Robert Warshow, writing in Commentary a year before The Naked and the Dead appeared, drew a direct line between Stalinism and "the mass culture of the educated classes—the culture of the ‘middlebrow."’ And without making the connection explicit, Dwight Macdonald, who would later become Mailer’s friend and champion, first wrote a devastating expose of Henry Wallace as a dupe of the Communists and then followed it up a few years later with an equally devastating assault on middlebrowism (or, as he renamed it, "midcult”).
   Oddly enough, not even in all the hundreds (or was it thousands?) of hours we spent talking after we became intimate friends did I ever ask Mailer when he first fully understood the importance of the highbrow literary community and, in particular, of Partisan Review. Nor did I ever find out whether the radical change he went through, both as a novelist and in his political orientation, in the three years between the publication of The Naked and the Dead and the appearance of his second novel, Barbary Shore, had anything to do with his newfound determination to win the highbrows over even, if necessary, at the expense of another popular success. There is good reason to believe that the influence over him of Jean Malaquais, a Trotskyist who became his French translator and close friend, played a serious part here. Yet my own guess is that in abandoning both the naturalism and the Stalinism of The Naked and the Dead and producing, in Barbary Shore, a Kafkaesque allegory in celebration of Trotskyism he was making a bid (whether conscious or half-conscious or unconscious I still cannot say) for highbrow approval.
   But if that was what he was up to, he miscalculated badly. Barbary Shore was a flop both with the general public, for whom it was too obscure, and with the highbrow critics, who paid it very little attention. The highbrows ignored it partly because he had already been written off as just another middlebrow, and perhaps also because, even though he had lost (or abandoned) his popular touch, he still remained behind the high-culture curve. By 1951., the modernism of Barbary Shore was beginning to seem as dated as the naturalism of The Naked and the Dead. As for Mailer’s politics, from the point of view of the highbrows, becoming a follower of Trotsky was certainly an improvement over being a Stalinist fellow-traveler, but Trotskyism too seemed old hat by 195I. (As my wife

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had been "an expression of the scientific narcissism we inherited from the nineteenth century" and had been motivated by "the rational mania that consciousness could stifle instinct:’
    For Mailer the alternative was not some form of liberalism (as with Lionel Trilling) or democratic socialism (as with Irving Howe) or anarchism (as with Paul Goodman). It was "Hip," which Mailer rather pretentiously described as the American form of existentialism. In the rise of the hipster (who served in this new theory as a kind of substitute for Marx’s proletariat), Mailer detected "the first wind of a second revolution in this century, moving not forward toward action and more rational equitable distribution, but backward toward being and the secrets of human energy:’
    This "second revolution" would not involve political action or the mobilization of masses; it would come about through the pursuit of immediate gratification that was the hipster’s only raison d’être and that Mailer saw as the new wave of the future. Never mind that such a pursuit seemed trivial and was moreover disreputable in the eyes of virtually every moral philosopher from Aristotle to John Dewey: Mailer still cavalierly put himself through many intellectual contortions to ascribe a huge metaphysical significance to it. But the real proof of the theory was supposed to be furnished not by his essay but by his fiction, beginning with his Hollywood novel, The Deer Park, which appeared just before the "The White Negro" in 1956. The Deer Park was a better book than Barbary Shore, but it fell very far short indeed of the enormous claims Mailer made for it, and though it fared better than its immediate predecessor with both the critics and the public, he was left feeling frustrated and disappointed.
    He then decided that something more daring and more ambitious was needed to fulfill his new vision, and he embarked on the production of "the proper book of an outlaw:’ So huge a project was this that it would, he thought, take him ten years to complete. Furthermore, resorting characteristically to a sports metaphor (though boxing rather than baseball was the sport he usually favored whenever he "got into the ring" with other novelists), he announced that it would represent "the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our

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American letters:’ This would be "a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way:’
   All that ever came of this grandiose project, however, was two self-contained fragments. One of them, "The Time of Her Time," caused a furor because of its very graphic erotic passages (culminating in the achievement of the heroine’s first orgasm, when she is forcibly buggered by the hero, with both the active and passive parts of this great event treated with tremendous portentousness by Mailer). The other, "Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out,"* fell almost completely flat in spite of the fact that it was accepted for publication by Partisan Review and might on that account alone have attracted more attention among the highbrows than it did.
   It was shortly after the appearance of "Advertisements," and only a week or so before we first met, that I finished an early draft of my essay on Mailer. Having heard both Philip Rahv and William Phillips speak disparagingly of his work, I had been surprised by their willingness to run "Advertisements," and assuming that they had changed their minds about him, I thought they would now also be glad to publish my piece. But when I sent it to them some weeks later, they seemed reluctant to do so, and only agreed after chiding me for taking him too seriously. Phillips: "Rahv and I had reservations about Podhoretz’s essay, but the situation was complicated by the fact that Rahv didn’t like anybody praised too much. . . . We asked for changes, but we always asked for changes; the particular changes were necessary to mute his praise for Normaef
Up to that point, Mailer had every reason to think of me as a
*Not to be confused with his autobiographical book Advertisements for Myself (1959), in which this "prologue" to the long novel-in-progress was reprinted.
‘Except where otherwise indicated, the quotations in this chapter (including the one from Irving Howe in a footnote above) all come from Peter Manso’s Mailer: His Life and Times (1985), a compilation of interviews with Mailer and practically everyone who ever knew or had anything to do with him, myself among them.

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literary and ideological enemy. I had never reviewed or otherwise written about any of his novels before, but I had taken a very hard swipe in print at his celebration of the hipster ("The White Negro" of his title) and of what Mailer himself described as the hipster’s psychopathic personality. Like many early readers of "The White Negro," I was fascinated by the sheer intellectual and moral brazenness it displayed, but I was also disturbed by it. I knew that Mailer was not connected either personally or in his literary style and manner with writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and yet in their "beatniks" and his hipsters I saw the same pernicious cultural and political implications, and I spelled them out in my attack on the Beats in "The Know-Nothing Bohemians."
    In the concluding section of that piece, I quoted Mailer’s suggestion about the "second revolution" that would move "backward toward being and the secrets of human energy." Without quite saying it in so many words, I in turn suggested that this kind of talk was reminiscent of fascism ("History, after all—and especially the history of modern times—teaches that there is a close connection between ideologies of primitive vitalism and a willingness to look upon cruelty and blood-letting with complacency, if not downright enthusiasm"). I then went on to charge flat out that the spirit of hipsterism was very close to that of the Beat Generation and that it was this same spirit which animated the "young savages in leather jackets" who had been running amok in recent years with their switchblades and zip guns.
    What, I wondered, did Mailer think of those "wretched kids" who were responsible for a veritable epidemic of violent juvenile crime (or "delinquency" in the parlance of the social workers of the I950s) that seemed to emerge out of sheer malignancy disconnected from the usual motives of robbery or revenge? What did he think of the gang that had stoned a nine-year-old boy to death in Central Park in broad daylight a few months earlier or the one that had set fire to an old man drowsing on a bench near the Brooklyn waterfront one summer’s day or the one that had pounced on a crippled child and orgiastically stabbed him over and over again even after he was already dead? Was that what he meant by the liberation of instinct and the mysteries of

being? There were, I said, grounds for thinking so, as the following passage from "The White Negro" demonstrated:
It can of course be suggested that it takes little courage for two strong eighteen-year-old hoodlums, let us say, to beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper. . . . Still, courage of a sort is necessary, for one murders not only a weak fifty-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown.
I called this one of the most "morally gruesome ideas" I had ever come across and a clear indication of where "the ideology of hipsterism" could lead.
    In spite of these powerful misgivings, "The White Negro" had aroused my curiosity about Mailer’s novels, which I had (youthful highbrow snob that I was) never bothered reading before. Yet even if I had not been propelled by "The White Negro" into reading them now, I would have found it necessary to do so anyway: I had been toying with the idea of undertaking a book about the postwar American novel that would go beyond John W. Aldridge’s After the Lost Generation of 1951, and in any such book a consideration of Mailer’s work would have to be included. And so I went carefully through the three he had so far published and astonished myself by concluding, as I would soon put it in my essay (intended as a chapter of the book I now was more than ever determined to write), that he was "a major novelist in the making."
Unaware of what I had in the works about him, Mailer eyed me with a leer that mixed menace with irony when we encountered each other in Lillian Hellman’s living room, and he immediately assumed the boxer’s crouch that I was to learn he loved to affect whenever an argument of any kind threatened to erupt. This was the first time he had ever seen me in the flesh, but I had seen him once before, when he was the featured speaker at the rally in support of Henry Wallace’s campaign for the presidency that was held on the Columbia campus in 1948; I was

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then eighteen and he was twenty-five. A newly minted celebrity and still inexperienced as a speaker, he did such a terrible job (as he would so often do even after a thousand performances on public platforms) that if not for the inclusion on the program of the veteran Communist folksinger Pete Seeger, the occasion would have been a total flop. Looking him over now, I noticed that the skinny young man of 1948 had in the ensuing years gained a fair amount of weight, along with a commensurate increase in self-assertiveness. All traces of the nervousness and the diffidence that had tied his tongue at the Wallace rally seemed to have been replaced by an insistent and dominating presence.
   If I had not been armed with the secret of my forthcoming article, I would almost certainly have tried to steer clear of Mailer that evening. The reason was that at a very early stage in my career as a critic, and even before my night with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, I had already discovered how unpleasant a face-to-face confrontation could be even with the friends of an author whose work I had panned, let alone with the author himself. Back in 1953, for instance, I had written (for Commentary) one of the few negative reviews of Saul Bellow’s novel The Adventures of Augie March, and though I was lucky enough not to meet Bellow himself until many years later (by which point he had still not forgiven me, and never really would), I did have the misfortune shortly after the piece had appeared to run into the poet John Berryman, who was one of Bellow’s most ardent boosters. Staggering drunkenly over to me at a big party in the apartment of William Phillips, he snarled, "We’ll get you for that review if it takes ten years."*
   In the case of Bernard Malamud, with a rather critical review of whose first novel, The Natural, I made my debut in Commentary, also in 1953, things turned out differently. When I met him a bit later, he was extremely cold, but as soon as he realized that I was a great admirer of
*Not that Bellow himself remained silent. When my editor, Robert Warshow, who disagreed with my judgment of the book, sent a galley of the review to Bellow, he shot back a long letter, with copies to about a dozen people, denouncing "Your young Mr. P," dismissing Warshow’s avowal of admiration for the book, and ending with an admonition from Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

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his short stories, he relented a bit; and when I subsequently expressed this admiration publicly in an article in Partisan Review, our relations became very cordial. (Until, that is, he too turned into an ex-friend when I broke ranks in the late 1960s with the Left. Malamud was no leftist himself and was less interested in ideological politics of any kind than any writer I knew, but he had a keen sense of literal)) politics and must have felt—accurately—that maintaining an association with me after I had become a persona non grata within the literary community would do his career no good.)
    Yet even if I had tried to avoid Mailer that night at Lillian’s, it would have availed me naught. Having figured out who I was even before we were introduced, he accosted me—skipping the social pleasantries and getting right down to business—with the inevitable charge of having misunderstood and misrepresented him. I have no clear memory of what I said in my own defense, but I do remember cutting the argument short by telling him that I was working on a long article about his whole body of work and that maybe he ought to hold his fire until he had had a chance to read it. He snorted something to the effect that there was no need for him to wait since he already had a pretty good idea of what a piece by me about him would say. "You wanna bet?" I grinned, resorting to the lingo of the Brooklyn streets from which we both came. "I’ll bet you ten bucks:’
    Now, Brooklyn once was (and possibly still is) a real place with a distinctive culture of its own that left its mark on everyone who grew up there. Indeed, throughout my entire life, whenever I have found myself developing an instant rapport with someone I have just met, it usually turns out that he (or she) also stemmed from Brooklyn. So it was with Mailer. He was from Crown Heights, an economic step up from the Brownsville of my youth but governed by exactly the same street culture, and we had even attended the same high school. Like me, and practically every Brooklyn boy I had ever known, he was direct and pugnacious and immensely preoccupied with the issue of manly courage.
    This "macho" obsession in Mailer has often been attributed to the influence of Hemingway, but it was much more the product of the Brooklyn boy’s code of honor and his terror of being thought a

A FOUL-WEATHER FRIEND TO NORMAN MAILER    I 9 I
would be coming out in Partisan Review that it cemented a friendship already growing deep.
    What Mailer liked most was arguing with me about ideas, especially his own ideas, which I continued to find wrongheaded and often foolish even after I had come to admire the power and boldness of his writing. To me this Harvard graduate seemed strangely uneducated (what on earth had they taught him there?), sounding like one of those autodidacts who used to roam around Greenwich Village spouting their big and usually conspiratorial theories. It was no secret to him that this was how I felt, but he never seemed bothered by it in the slightest: he just kept trying to persuade me that I was being too ‘`establishment,” too rigid and conventional, in my thinking.
    Besides, for all my criticisms of his ideas, he knew that I regarded him as a man who had to go his own way and discover things for himself, and that this necessity was one of the engines of his talent as a novelist. I was someone who could learn from books or from the experience and mistakes of others, but not Mailer: if it did not register directly on his own pulses and in his own nervous system, it was not for him. He was absolutely determined to do everything for himself, to invent the world anew, and because I thought this admirable and courageous, I was careful not to judge him too quickly.
    On the other hand, I could not abide his antics: the arm-wrestling contests to which he was always challenging everyone around him, the sudden putting on of accents (especially Irish or Southern) for no immediately discernible reason, the readiness to get into fist fights. (A striking instance came at the famous masked ball Truman Capote threw at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1965 to celebrate the great triumph he was then enjoying over his "non-fiction novel," In Cold Blood. I was sitting at a table with Lillian Hellman and McGeorge Bundy, the former Harvard dean who was now Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser, when Mailer, clearly in his cups, came by. I introduced him to Bundy, who was gracious in his patrician way, but within minutes Mailer invited him outside to settle their differences over Vietnam. When Bundy, declining this invitation to a fistfight, told him not to be so childish, Mailer spat back, "I paid you too much respect:’)
Yet he was very careful never to lapse into this kind of thing when
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we were alone together, perhaps because he, nothing if not perceptive, realized that I would never tolerate it and that it might drive me away. Thanks in part to this self-restraint, our friendship was relaxed, not competitive.* We were drinking buddies, we exchanged intimate confidences, and we generally read each other’s writings hot off the typewriter, sometimes aloud. Though I was not exactly the "intellectual conscience" to him that Edmund Wilson had been to F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s, Mailer did pay close attention both to what I said in conversation and to my critical writings (the title he wanted me to give my first collection was Hanging Judge but I thought it the better part of prudence to use Doings and Undoings instead), and in this way I did occasionally serve as a brake on some of his more extreme flights of fancy.
   Moreover, as the critic who had in effect brought him into the Family and given him the imprimatur of what the novelist Terry Southern memorably called the "quality lit biz,"f I felt a certain proprietary interest in Mailer—he was my tiger. Not only that, but I believed something larger was riding on his back. I once ventured the proposition that there was a sense in which the validity of a whole phase of American experience—the move in the I950s away from "alienation" and toward self-acceptance as an American—was felt to hang on the question of whether or not Saul Bellow, who was in effect enacting that development in his work, would turn out to be a great
*For whatever it may be worth, Mailer’s longtime secretary Ann Barry saw it differently: "There seemed to be a kind of jousting between them, intellectual jousting. Competitive. Little ripples. Posturing, rooster behavior. Not only intellectual, though, but mixed up with the personal. I knew the two Normans were very close, and they would do funny things together. . . . They’d get involved in little projects, and there’d be lots of telephone calls, arguments about someone misunderstanding or not having the right interpretation or not taking the correct line. . . . Podhoretz was considered a heavy hitter in those days, and I got the sense that Norman considered him in no way his inferior. My impression was that their relationship had to do with discussing the nature of what is a Jew, what is a radical, what is a political person, a writer, an artist:’
tThe cartoonist Jules Feiffer put the same point in somewhat less colorful terms: "Norman Podhoretz. . . . played a very important role for Mailer in terms of the literary community; he legitimized him, made him okay to the Partisan Review crowd because Mailer was the outlaw. Podhoretz had his credentials as a Trillingite, and then, of course, he wrote about Mailer and was one of the first to do so."

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novelist. In this same sense, Mailer was the anti-Bellow, and the viability of the new radicalism, which he was testing out in his work, might conversely depend on whether he would turn out to be a great novelist.
Mailer’s antics apart, there were two other problems between us. One was his entourage. Like many famous people, Mailer liked to surround himself with a crowd of courtiers, many of whom had nothing to recommend them that I could see other than their worshipful attitude toward him. A few of them I grew to like well enough—Roger Donoghue, an ex-boxer turned beer salesman; Mickey Knox, a blacklisted minor actor; Bernard Farbar, a magazine editor and aspiring writer. But even in the company of these, Mailer was always at his worst, and with the other hangers-on, who came and went and sometimes stayed, he could be positively intolerable—posing, showing off, bumping heads (another of his favorite sports), bullying, ordering about, and, underneath it all, flattering.
   The flattering was especially in evidence with women, not only or even primarily as a means of seduction but mainly as a way of romanticizing and thereby inflating the significance of everything that came into his life. He would inform some perfectly ordinary and uninteresting girl that she could have been a great madam running the best whorehouse in town or that she had it in her to be a brilliant dominatrix, and once the initial shock wore off, she would be delighted. Or he might with similar effect tell some equally vacuous young man that he was a general at heart or a bullfighter or that he had the evil makings of a corporate president.
   Mailer’s wives especially got this kind of treatment. For example, he decided that Adele (who was born in Cuba and had Peruvian roots but came to Brooklyn at a very young age and grew up there) was a primitive Indian with passions to match, and he encouraged—or, rather, forced—her to live up to that image. One of her close friends described it well:

[Norman] creates a person, and if the person subjects himself, if the person is vulnerable to that, he or she accepts it…. The idea that Latin
  

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people are any more passionate or sexual than Jews is not so, of course, but, still, it was like he was doing an investigation of this kind of passion, something that he was going to practice—practice the hundred ways in which he and Adele could have a fight.
I think I must have witnessed at least a dozen or two of these "hundred ways" both with Adele and several of the wives who followed her, and it was very hard to stomach. Almost as hard to take was the spectacle of Mailer surrounded by his mostly raunchy court, and I tried as best I could to avoid seeing him in those circumstances and to meet him alone instead.
   The other big problem was drugs. As I have already made clear in connection with Allen Ginsberg, I was a heavy drinker in those days, but I had no use for drugs. I was, quite simply, frightened by hard drugs like heroin, and even marijuana seemed dangerous to me. As an adolescent with an older friend who was connected to the jazz world on Fifty-second Street, I had tried pot and disliked it. I was also put off by the mystique that came to surround it in the I 950s and which Mailer totally bought. In later years, marijuana would become so common that the kind of talk then circulating about its powers to expand consciousness and introduce the mind into new realms of being would seem overheated. So too would the solemnity surrounding its use.
   Mailer was always trying to turn me on to pot—for my own good, of course—and one night at a party in the Greenwich Village apartment he and Adele had recently rented, I gave in. The scene in retrospect looks even more ridiculous than it struck me at the time, with a dozen or so people sitting in a circle, passing a joint around, and inhaling it by turns with the reverence of devout Catholic communicants taking the Eucharist. In contrast to the loosening of tongues that drinking customarily caused, everyone in this circle communed only with himself and no one spoke (leading me to remark later that if pot were ever legalized it would never replace liquor at weddings and bar mitzvahs). Suddenly, the girlfriend of a well-known actor (who happened to be starring around that time in a play by Jack Gelber celebrating the glories of heroin) started to throw up all over the place. Yet not even this party-pooping accident disrupted the religious tone

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of the gathering. Everyone continued to sit in place privately listening—or maybe just pretending to listen—to the music of the spheres through the invisible headphones with which a puff or two had miraculously equipped them. As for me, there was no music of the spheres. All I got was a slight buzz in the head and an unpleasant feeling in the stomach. The next day Mailer scolded me for resisting and thereby allowing the "establishment" side of my character to beat down the radical in me. Very likely he was right. Subsequently, I made two other conscientious but equally unsuccessful attempts to overcome my resistance, and that was that for marijuana and me.
   The only other experiment I would try with drugs was on Fire Island in the 1960s, when one of Mailer’s courtiers (he himself was not present) persuaded me to sniff an amphetamine capsule. The buzz in my head this time was not at all slight, and the dizziness it brought with it did not live up to its advance billing as an extraordinarily pleasant sensation. I seem to remember Mailer teasing me when I told him about this, though he was not a great partisan of amphetamines or hard drugs in general. Down deep I think he was almost as afraid of them as I was. He gave me the impression that he felt obligated to try peyote and perhaps acid, but so far as I know he never used heroin or cocaine.

Then there was sex. If I was put off by Mailer’s constant proselytizing for marijuana, I had an entirely different reaction to his even more obsessive preoccupation with sex. Here there was a complication. On the one hand, I thought Mailer made far too much of sex in his writing. By no means did I think sex was unimportant; on the contrary, in some ways I was just as obsessed with it as he was. But not as an issue. There was a part of me that resonated to the crack made by a critic (I believe it was Henri Peyre) that French literature was entirely devoted to something that ought to interest a serious person only ten minutes a week. If this criticism could be leveled at any American writer, it was Mailer (though he would later get a lot of competition from Philip Roth and John Updike). Much as I admired the virtuosic workings of his prose, and much as I was fascinated by the wildly unconventional

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workings of his mind, I was embarrassed on his behalf by the apocalyptic significance he attributed to sex in general and to kinky or perverted sex in particular. It struck me as callow of him to treat oral sex as such a big deal in The Deer Park or to attribute a veritably metaphysical significance to the act of heterosexual anal penetration in "The Time of Her Time:’
   All this on the one hand. On the other hand, if he wrote and even talked like someone of such limited sexual experience that he lacked all perspective on it, he was certainly creating a false impression so far as the experience itself was concerned. By which I mean simply that he was wildly promiscuous, both in and between marriages (of which he was to have six). One might describe him as a pioneer of the sexual revolution to come, except for the fact that, unlike the counterculture radicals of the 1960s to whom casual sex was the norm, he did not take sex in action any more lightly than he did on paper. No matter how many women he might bed, he rarely went in for one-night stands or anonymous couplings. When Mailer slept with a girl, she was probably in for more than a physical encounter. Before being sent on her way, she could expect a lecture, or a scolding, or a dose of advice on how to become better than she thought she was; and, as often as not, he would arrange to see her again, and then again, and then again. Combining the skill of a professional juggler with the talents of a White House scheduler, he could keep a number of affairs going simultaneously for years, some of them even overlapping with his successive marriages. Where he found the energy and the time for all this while still turning out many pages a day always baffled me. Evidently, living that way fed rather than drained him.
   Although I disdained his ideas about sex, I could not help envying his practice of it. Here too there was a complication. For while I was just as much "a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn" as Mailer was, and an even more serious student in school, I also had a secret double life (secret from my parents, that is) as a bad street kid. I liked hanging around with the boys who were, usually with good reason, regarded as bums by the adults in the neighborhood; I frequented poolrooms where older bums, hustlers, and petty criminals held court; I got into fistfights (though never willingly, and only when my terror of

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being considered chicken overrode my fear of getting beaten up); and I gambled, betting what little money I had on sports events and often shooting craps on street corners, which occasionally led to a brush with the cops. But what was most important in this context was that I had also been much more sexually precocious than Mailer, having started earlier and having enjoyed an amount of success with girls that was unusual for those days, when "getting laid" as an adolescent really was the big deal Mailer would make of it as an adult (when it no longer was).
   I had, however, said goodbye to all that by the time I first met him. At the age of (nearly) twenty-eight, I had been married only for about a year, and I believed strongly in marital fidelity. This belief derived not only from high-minded moral ideas about marriage but also from an ideology rooted in an earlier stage of the sexual revolution of the twentieth century. According to this doctrine, sex was good and also necessary to the health of men and women alike, but promiscuity was not the way to achieve true sexual fulfillment. To be promiscuous was to be stuck in an "infantile" or "immature" stage of development, deprived of the depths of erotic experience that could only be plumbed by marital or monogamous sex.
   This was not, as people like the Beats and Mailer himself would later assume, the creed of the "square"; it was the reflection of a highly sophisticated sense of life preached in various modalities by thinkers and writers from Sigmund Freud to D. H. Lawrence. Admittedly, it involved its own type of solemnity, its own exaggerations, and its own failures of perspective in relating sex to the rest of life. But those of us who held to it prided ourselves on being more serious about what Lawrence had called "the hard business of human relationships." We were convinced that our kind of sex was more profound and even more exciting (leading, not to put too fine a point on it, to better orgasms) than the superficial bohemian variety that Lawrence had also denounced as "sex in the head."
   But of course I was young and the blood was hot and the temptations ever present. Resisting them was at least as hard as the "hard business" of building a good and lasting marriage, and my friendship with Mailer made it even harder. He subverted me by explaining that

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his own marriage to Adele had "in a funny way" (one of his favorite locutions) been strengthened, not weakened, by his infidelities, allowing him to rid himself of the resentment that he would otherwise have felt at being stifled and imprisoned by her. This was no sophistical trick: Mailer was very fond of my wife, he had great respect for her, and he had no wish to damage our marriage. Nevertheless, he thought that fidelity was yet another element of the "establishment" side of my character that would have to be overcome before I could realize my ambition for greatness, which, as I often told him, was just as burning as his.
   I would eventually learn that I was wrong about this: my ambition was not remotely a match for his. But Mailer’s ambition for greatness, and the naked frankness with which he expressed and pursued it without worrying about looking bad or actually making a fool of himself, was one of the main sources of my attraction to him. In my essay on him, I had quoted a statement he had made to an interviewer about his own intention to explore, as he put it,
the possibility that the novel, along with many other art forms, may be growing into something larger rather than something smaller, and the sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important. . . . We’re all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
   At this distance it is difficult for me to recapture the thrill I felt at the prospect that the arts and the life they reflected would grow "larger," and the conviction I developed that the road to this happy eventuality could be opened up only by breaking through the constrictions and the limits defined by traditional moral and cultural categories. At the same time, I was convinced that this could only be done by working one’s way through those categories: merely dismissing them contemptuously, as the intellectually philistine Beat writers were doing, could lead into nothing but sterility and nihilism. If a new moral and cultural radicalism was to be born, it would have to be generated in the world of theory by the likes of Norman 0. Brown. In his book Life Against Death (whose fame I had helped to spread by introducing it

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to Lionel Trilling), Brown issued a powerful challenge to Freud’s doctrine that human possibilities were inherently and insurmountably limited. But he did so not by arguing, as earlier critics like Karen Horney and Erich Fromm had done, that the master’s theories had been valid only, or mainly, for the particular kind of society in which he himself had lived. Disdaining the cheap relativism of such tactics, Brown set out to show that Freud’s pessimistic sense of human possibility did not necessarily follow from his analysis of human nature, an analysis Brown accepted as sound in all essential respects. The brilliance of Life Against Death lay in the amazingly convincing case Brown was able to build for the consistency of that analysis with his own vision of a life of "polymorphous perversity," a life of play and of complete instinctual and sexual freedom.
    Brown’s vision, of course, jibed perfectly with Mailer’s much less rigorous notion about the implications of the hipster’s pursuit of immediate gratification, and it scared me just as much. Even so, it gave a highly respectable theoretical justification to the sexual restlessness I could not help feeling and that Mailer was bent—again for my own good!—on encouraging me to act upon. He was especially keen on getting me to participate in an orgy (this exotic species of sexual experience having become a central element of his new philosophy), and I finally did, though without his help or knowledge.
    Under the rationalization that going to an orgy was not, strictly speaking, a form of infidelity, I got entree into one that consisted entirely of people I had never met before. But I was simply not up to it, and it turned out to be a total and humiliating disaster for me. Yet instead of feeling that Mailer had misled me, I decided that I was simply not good enough to break through my own sorry limitations. Naturally, I told him about it, and he shook his head in amazement. That was not, he said, what he had been talking about. What I had gone to was "a concentration-camp orgy," and I was lucky to have gotten out of there alive.
    Some weeks later he invited me to spend an evening with him and one of his longtime girlfriends, who lived in another city and was in town for a few days. She turned out to be a beautiful woman who had actually read and liked my stuff, and the three of us had a very good

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time together over dinner in a restaurant. Afterward, we repaired to her hotel room for a nightcap. The atmosphere was sexually charged, and I began wondering, with a mouth getting dry, what Mailer was up to when he suddenly excused himself and went into the bathroom. A few minutes later he returned stark naked and directed a very serious look straight into the eyes of his girlfriend. It was as if he had decided to make up for having inadvertently misled me by demonstrating what a proper orgy was like. But his girlfriend, totally unprepared for this turn of events, was not having any of it, and she laughed him off with a witty apology to me.
   I must admit that I was more disappointed than relieved. But this was not yet the end of the story. About ten years later, she showed up in New York again, and this time the three of us had lunch rather than dinner together. When it was over, she shooed away Mailer (who took this with so little complaint that I suspected it had been prearranged) and asked me to come up to her hotel room for a drink (by which she of course meant, in the parlance of the period, a "matinee"). Alas, her generous effort to make up for having disappointed me the first time around had come too late, and now it was my turn to say no. Not, God knows, in retaliation but because I had by the early 1970s decided that the radical ideas in the sexual realm with which I had been playing around were no less pernicious than their counterparts in the world of politics and I had now returned for good to my old set of beliefs in marital fidelity and everything that went with it.
But it was not only over drugs and his ideas about sex that Mailer and I had our differences and difficulties. There was also the issue of loyalty. As a "foul-weather friend," I stood up for him when, in the course of a violent fight with Adele toward the end of the big party at which Allen Ginsberg had yelled at me and that I had already left a few hours before, he stabbed her with a penknife, coming within an inch of killing her. They were then living on West Ninety-fourth Street, and we were just a dozen blocks away in a second-floor apartment that faced onto West 106th Street. After the stabbing, Mailer beat it out of his house and rushed up to mine. It was about 4 A.M. when he

stood there under our windows calling out to me, but I was so fast asleep that I never heard him. He then left, and waited until later in the day to telephone and ask me to meet him downtown in a coffee shop near the hospital to which Adele had been taken. Still hiding from the police, he refused to tell me exactly what had happened: if he did, I might have to lie and would then get into trouble myself. But what he mainly wanted was to extract a promise from me that I would do everything in my power to keep them from committing him to an asylum. He would rather go to jail than be institutionalized, he said, because if he were deemed insane his work would never be taken seriously again.
    My impression of Mailer’s mental condition differed from that of some of our mutual friends, including Diana Trilling, who thought he "needed psychiatric help," and Lillian Hellman, who (at least according to Diana) thought that it was now unsafe to be alone with him.* Unlike them, I did not believe that he was clinically insane, and my opinion was shared by Lionel Trilling, who, Diana later reported, "insisted that it wasn’t a clinical situation but a conscious bad act; .. . [that] Norman was testing the limits of evil in himself, that his stabbing of Adele was, so to speak, a Dostoyevskian ploy on Norman’s part, to see how far he could go?’ I also agreed with Mailer that institutionalization would make it easier for people to take his work less seriously. And since, finally, I felt that he should be allowed the right to choose jail over an asylum, and that this acceptance of responsibility was more morally honorable than pleading insanity, I promised to help as much as I could.
    There was a strategy session by the Mailer family that Sunday evening at which I was among the few outsiders and where I made the case Mailer had persuaded me to make. Then I met him again the next day in the same downtown coffee shop. There he asked me to accompany him to the hospital, where, after visiting Adele, he would surrender to the police. I too went in to see Adele, who, although lying
*Lillian told me, and also Diana, that Mailer had once tried to break down her bedroom door, which may account for her response to the stabbing. But whether this event, if it actually occurred, took place before the stabbing or after, I cannot recall.

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there frightened and crying, told me that she had decided not to press charges. Then the police who had been keeping watch over her room arrested him. Probably because he was a celebrity, they were very polite and even allowed me to go along with them all to the station house on I00th Street, where he was booked.*
    They then sent him to Bellevue for psychiatric observation, and eventually a deal was struck, whose terms I never learned, that set him free after a couple of weeks. The day he was released he came to our house for lunch. As my wife would later describe the scene:
He was absolutely himself, very calm, and definitely not tranquilized.
  .. Norman had always had a "court," and when he got out [of Bellevue] he turned up with the doctor who’d been examining him. . . . The doctor had been converted into another courtier.
    I have often asked myself whether I did the right thing in acceding to Mailer’s request; in a similar situation today, I would almost certainly push for psychiatric help. But in the early 1960s, when electroshock therapy (of which I had a great horror) was the main treatment used, I feared for the effects on Mailer’s mind. I was well aware of the streak of craziness in him, but it did not seem to go very deep and for the most part it was under control. I had noticed that Adele had been ragging him all night and that the mood between them was getting very ugly—so much so that the novelist Barbara Probst Solomon, another mutual friend who was there, recalls my telling her that I "didn’t like the look of things." Her recollection was accurate. Having been witness to more than my share of nasty scenes between Mailer and Adele, I decided to leave before another one exploded. In any event, my conviction that he was not clinically insane was reinforced by the very fact that he did not blame her for provoking him
*Mailer was very good with children (he had three of his own then and would eventually have another six), and mine, who adored him, steadfastly refused to believe that he had stabbed Adele. One of my daughters, then about ten, assured me that she knew who had really done it. "Who?" I asked. "Leonard Lyons," she answered, referring to the gossip columnist of the New York Post who had been writing of nothing else for days now. "Leonard Lyons?! What on earth makes you think that?" "Well," she said, "if he didn’t do it, how come he knows so much about it?"

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into the stabbing, that he took responsibility for it, and that he was ready to go to jail. Which was why I felt so uneasy over his escape from punishment and over my secret fear that he might have dishonored himself by allowing money to change hands to get him off. Still, there was no evidence whatever for this suspicion, and I bent over backward in trying to dismiss it as unworthy. Over the next few months I consistently defended Mailer against most of my Family friends, who did not need him to be institutionalized in order to use the stabbing as a good reason for persisting in their refusal to take his work seriously.
    Our friendship accordingly deepened and we saw each other even more often than before. By now I had become the editor of Commentary, and I was working very hard in trying to drag the magazine out of the Cold-War liberalism in which it had been stuck under Elliot Cohen and to pull it in the leftward direction I myself had already been moving as a critic for the past three years or so.
    By mutual agreeement, Mailer did not at first figure in this project. For one thing, we both recognized that he was too wild for a magazine sponsored by the most establishmentarian of all Jewish organizations, the American Jewish Committee. As the editor, I enjoyed complete independence, and I was making such full use of it in articles about both foreign and domestic policy that I was already being subjected by the Trillings and other Family friends to accusations of having become too soft on Communism and too hard on America. But I was simultaneously being careful not to jeopardize the institution for which I was now responsible or my position in it by moving too far too fast in a culturally radical direction. This meant, at a minimum, no four-letter words or overly explicit sexual material whether in stories or in essays.
    Confirmation that such prudence was necessary came when, even after I had already been running Commentary for nearly five years and after it had been well established as a main intellectual center of the new radicalism, I published an article by the psychoanalyst Leslie H. Farber called "I’m Sorry, Dear:" This was perhaps the first serious critique of the sexologists Masters and Johnson, and the moral assumptions behind it were actually quite traditional. Yet because it

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contained a frank discussion of the female orgasm and a description of a film Masters and Johnson had made in which women were shown masturbating, it caused a great deal of trouble for me with the AJC. One prominent member of my board resigned in protest, and a campaign was launched to get me fired.
    But if Mailer at first agreed that it was advisable for him to stay out of Commentary, he soon began growing a little resentful about it, as I could tell from the remarks he kept making about how tame the magazine was. Then, all of a sudden, he came to me with a proposal. In Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, he had decided that there was, as he would soon write, something in Judaism that called out to him—"a rudimentary sense of clan across the centuries." Mailer had grown up in a "modestly Orthodox, then Conservative" family, had gone to a Hebrew school, and had "passed through the existential rite of a bar mitzvah." But none of it had stuck. "I would never say I was not a Jew, but I looked to take no strength from the fact. . . . I left what part of me belonged to Brooklyn and the Jews on the streets of Crown Heights."
    Indeed he had. In wiping out every trace in himself of the "nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn," he had done such a good job on the Jewish part that not even I—to whom the "Jidas touch" had once been attributed ("Everything you touch turns to Jewish")    could detect any lingering odor of it in his personality or his behavior. This man, who saw himself as a fearless spiritual adventurer, was apparently fearful of exploring his own spiritual roots, preferring instead the pretense of being an "existential hero" with no ties to the past.*
    But now, perhaps proving that I really did have the Jidas touch, Mailer, of all people, came up with a plan to write a monthly column in which he would reprint stories from Buber and then provide his own personal commentaries on them. If this was his way of overcoming my increasingly irksome resistance to his appearance in Commentary, it was certainly very cunning. What idea could be more suitable than this for Commentary, one of whose purposes from the very beginning had been to arouse the interest of disaffected Jewish writers and intel
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lectuals in their own origins? And what could be more quintessentially Jewish than a commentary appended to a text?
   Nevertheless, I had grave doubts about whether I wanted such a column. Commentary was, after all, a magazine which prided itself on the maintenance of serious intellectual and scholarly standards, and Mailer’s ignorance of the material he proposed to elucidate was vast. How could I, the editor of a magazine in whose pages Buber himself and Gershom Scholem, the greatest living scholarly authority on Hasidism, sometimes held forth on the subject, allow what they would rightly have called a total am-haaretz (illiterate ignoramus) to poach on their territory?
   As we sat drinking together in a bar, I tried saying these things tactfully to Mailer, but it was no soap. For the first time in our relationship, he showed real anger toward me, calling me a "delicate bureaucrat;’ denouncing my disloyalty, and attributing it to the establishmentarian timidity that would in the end do me in altogether as a writer. With these charges, to which I was very sensitive, he beat me down (which was what I thought he really wanted to do even more than he wanted to write the column). But I salvaged what self-respect I could by insisting successfully against his initially furious refusal that it be a bimonthly feature instead of appearing every single month.
   As part of his preparation for launching the column, he wanted to see some Hasidim in the flesh. He therefore asked me to take him to the Yom Kippur eve service at the synagogue of the Lubavitch sect, which, as it happened, was located in Crown Heights, right around the corner from where he himself had grown up. I was a little edgy about this, knowing that something very unpleasant might occur if Mailer failed to behave himself. So before yielding to his request, I made him promise that he would get himself a hat, put on a proper suit, remove any jingling coins or keys from his pockets, and carefully avoid doing anything that might offend the congregation. With a docility unusual for him, he accepted these conditions, and sure enough he arrived at the appointed time (well before sundown, so as not to risk being caught violating the prohibition against travel on the holy day) with a brand-new fedora on his head and all dressed up in a blue suit and white shirt and tie.

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   The synagogue was located in the basement of the building that served as the headquarters of the Lubavitch movement, and (in the manner of many Orthodox shtiblach, or small houses of prayer) it was very unprepossessing. The room was bare except for very heavy wooden benches, and since the holiday had not yet begun, young yeshiva students were standing around smoking and dropping their cigarette butts on the floor. To my great relief, nobody paid much attention to us when we came in (the Lubavitcher, unlike other Hasidic sects, were accustomed to being visited by curious fallen-away Jews), and soon the room grew as crowded as the subway at rush hour. Then, without any advance warning, someone shouted in Yiddish that the rebbe was coining, and miraculously, like the Red Sea for the Israelites fleeing from Egypt, the crowd immediately parted and the two of us were nearly decapitated as the benches were hoisted up with unbelievable swiftness to make a path for the rebbe through the mob.’ The services then started without any further ado, but as soon as the opening prayer of Kol Nidre was over, Mailer whispered that he had seen enough, and asked if we could leave. Once outside, he pronounced himself delighted by how "mean and tough" the Hasidim were. Their attitude, he said (with considerable shrewdness), was "Out of my way, motherfucker," and he was all for it.
   "Responses & Reactions,’ as we called the column, turned out to be something of an anticlimax, neither creating great curiosity nor provoking a scandal. After six installments, Mailer lost interest, and the column was quietly dropped. Yet even though he had won his point against me, the whole episode left a bad taste in both our mouths—in mine because I had given in to his bullying, in his because I had been less than fully loyal to him.
Soon enough, however, I was to commit what was in Mailer’s eyes a much more serious act of disloyalty, and one for which he never ever
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forgave me. Mailer had become obsessed with the Kennedys, and had written a couple of famous pieces for Esquire about them. The first, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," had pleased John F. Kennedy by representing him as a true existential hero (the greatest accolade Mailer could bestow on anyone). But the second, "An Evening with Jackie Kennedy," had offended her deeply (not that that was so hard to do). This bothered Mailer, who wanted very much to be inside the circles of power (though always on his own terms), and I had the impression that he was on the lookout for some way to square things with her.
   Some months after the assassination of her husband, Jackie moved to New York, and one Sunday afternoon, as I was sitting around my apartment not doing much of anything, an unexpected call came. It was from my friend Richard Goodwin, who had worked in various capacities for President Kennedy and had somehow managed the trick of staying on in the White House with Lyndon Johnson without being branded as a traitor by the Kennedys (in whose government-in-exile he figured as a leading courtier). Goodwin said that he was in town with someone who wanted to meet me, and asked if they could drop by for a drink. Within minutes, he showed up at my door with a jeans-clad Jackie Kennedy in tow.
   She and I had never met before, but we seemed to strike an instant rapport, and at her initiative I soon began seeing her on a fairly regular basis. We often had tea alone together in her apartment on Fifth Avenue, where I would give her the lowdown on the literary world and the New York intellectual community—who was good, who was overrated, who was amusing, who was really brilliant—and she would reciprocate with the dirt about Washington society. She was not in Mary McCarthy’s league as a bitchy gossip (who was?), but she did very well in her own seemingly soft style. I enjoyed these exchanges, and she (an extremely good listener) seemed to get a kick out of them too.
   After a while, she invited me (along with my wife, whom she generally treated as an invisible presence) to a few of the dinner parties she had started to give. At the first of these which my wife and I attended, I arrived from the West Side in what Jackie considered improper attire,

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. . . Deep in me I could’ve been saying, "All right, now we get you for that Jackie Kennedy party." . . . So it could have been a double cross.

No foul-weather friend, he, that was for sure.*
   Still, neither of us was ready or willing to allow his betrayal of me to cause a complete rupture between us. We got together and talked. I was more hurt and bewildered than angry—my own "bruised feelings" easily being a match for the ones he had suffered over the party—and he was more uncomfortable than I had ever seen him before. He simply claimed that he had reread the book, changed his mind about it, and then had to say what he really thought. He would now have to live with the consequences, though he slyly hinted that he had written the piece in the hope of showing me how and why I had "injured a promising book:’
   Among the consequences he would have to live with was a new idea about him that began taking shape in my head. We were now in a period when radicalism was coming to enjoy even deeper influence and greater power than it had achieved at its most recent high point in the 1930s, and under these circumstances Mailer once again came into his own. Indeed, he was a much bigger figure at that point than he had been as the wunderkind author of The Naked and the Dead. Most of the novelists of his own generation thought of him as (in his own parlance) the one to beat, and almost all the younger writers looked up to him as the Master. Occasionally his bad-boy antics would still get him into trouble—as when the curtain was rung down on him at the Ninety-second Street Y when he insisted on using obscene language during a reading, or when he had another, though minor, brush with the police (in Provincetown, where he owned a summer home). But the times they were a-changing, and the more outrageously Mailer behaved, the more admiration he brought upon himself from the spreading radical culture of the I960s.
   His writing too was more and more admired. In 1968, inspired perhaps by In Cold Blood, Mailer produced The Armies of the Night, which

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he subtitled (presumably to distinguish it from Capote’s "non-fiction novel") "History as a Novel—The Novel as History." The Armies of the Night was about an antiwar demonstration in which he had participated, and it won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
   It also won my admiration, even though I had already begun the process of breaking ranks with the political perspective from which it was written. Most of it was originally published in Harper’s, which could pay him far more than I could, but he let me have a section for Commentary anyway. I considered the whole book a dazzling literary performance, his best work in any genre since Advertisements for Myself, which I had called "one of the great confessional autobiographies of our time:’ (Since this extravagant judgment appeared in Making It, Mailer’s attack on that book showed either that he was so incorruptible that not even so gratifying an estimate could buy him off or that his lust for revenge—"a dish," as he had once said, "best eaten cold" was greater than his appetite for praise. Uncharitably, I incline toward the latter explanation.)
   But if I admired The Armies of the Night, the fiction Mailer was turning out gave less and less warrant to my old estimate of him as "a major novelist in the making." As far back as 1964, when I was still counting on him to fulfill his early promise, I had been very disappointed in An American Dream, and though Why Are We in Vietnam? (which came out three years later and was actually about hunting in Alaska and had nothing to do directly with Vietnam) was filled with extraordinarily evocative passages of description, I was disappointed in it as well. Then in 1983, long after it was all over between us, came Tough Guys Don’t Dance, a mystery set in Provincetown which struck me as positively silly. So, in that same year, did his hugely ambitious novel about ancient Egypt (Ancient Evenings), into which he poured all his obsessions about buggery. This was followed in 1991 by the equally ambitious but perhaps even sillier Harlot’s Ghost, the novel in which all his wildly romantic paranoia about the CIA was given full play. Both of these books had their wonderful moments, and they both testified to the aging Mailer’s continued possession of large reservoirs of cre

ative energy and talent. But so foolish were the ideas behind them that I simply could not take them seriously. And so embarrassed was I by the whole concept of The Gospel According to the Son (1997), in which he rewrote the New Testament versions as he imagined Jesus would have told the story, that I could not bring myself even to read it.
   The steady stream of nonfictional works that were interspersed between these novels also bore witness to the tremendous stores of literary energy that Mailer still had in reserve. Yet none that followed The Armies of the Night lived up to the literary standard of that book. Miami and the Siege of Chicago and St. George and the Godfather (about the presidential nominating conventions of 1968 and 1972) were well enough written, but they left no lasting impression. As for A Fire on the Moon (1970), about the astronauts, it was one of the few actually boring books Mailer ever wrote, and The Prisoner of Sex (1971) seemed to me a craven effort to appease the ever more powerful women’s movement, whose sensibilities he had offended in so many of his earlier pronouncements about sex, while simultaneously pretending to go against it. He redeemed himself somewhat in 1979 with The Executioner’s Song, his much-acclaimed nonfiction novel about the murderer Gary Gilmore (for which he won yet another Pulitzer Prize), but I thought it still represented a severe falling-off from The Armies of the Night.
   The same silliness that wrecked most of Mailer’s later novels also showed up in much of his nonfiction of the 1970s and 1980s. In his book on Marilyn Monroe, for example, he uninhibitedly indulged his inveterate weakness for confusing great success or power with intrinsic merit, and in the one he did on the "art" of graffiti he reverted to his old confusion between criminality and creativity.* By the mid-1990s my expectations of getting anything worthwhile out of him had grown so weak I could no more bring myself to read the nonfiction books he produced on Picasso and Lee Harvey Oswald in 1996 than I could bear even to look at his version of the Gospel story, which was published about a year later.

, •

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I have searched my soul to find out whether these adverse reactions, which presented themselves to me as disinterested aesthetic judgments, were in reality driven primarily by ideological considerations. Was I, that is, concluding that Mailer had not turned out to be a major novelist only because I had simultaneously been losing my faith in the cultural revolution whose viability I had once thought his work was supposed to confirm? While I cannot dismiss the possibility out of hand, neither can I dismiss the converse possibility: namely, that the weaknesses of his later books actually should be placed in evidence—the special kind of evidence that literature, properly understood and interpreted, provides—against the view of life out of which they emerged and were written to serve.
    But whatever may be the case about that issue, I am reasonably sure, after conscientiously probing the region surrounding the lowest depths of critical integrity, that not even a minor contribution has been made to my harsh judgment of his later work by a lingering resentment over his article on Making It. Nor, to give credit where it is richly due, did Mailer ever stoop to making such an accusation against me. Indeed, though our trust in each other would never quite recover from the blows it had suffered from Making It, our friendship remained surprisingly strong for nearly another ten years.
    Not, to be sure, as strong as it had been before, when, among many other personal involvements, I had even seen him through the next two wives he married after he and Adele finally divorced. First came Lady Jeanne Campbell, the granddaughter of the great British newspaper publisher Lord Beaverbrook and the daughter of the Duke of Argyle. As if her lineage were not enough to arouse the sexual conquistador in Mailer, the fact that in winning her he would be appropriating the former mistress of the head of Time, Inc. himself, Henry Luce, made her completely irresistible (Allen Ginsberg had written, "I’m obsessed with Time magazine," but in this he had nothing on Mailer, who, if anything, was even more impressed with its power). Unlike Adele before the stabbing, Jeanne was afraid of Mailer: once in our apartment, when he started to snarl at her, she ran out of the

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living room, hid under the covers of our bed, and pleaded with us to let her spend the night there.
  The marriage to Jeanne lasted just long enough to produce a child, and then came Beverly. Like Adele (but unlike Jeanne, whose attraction lay more in her lineage than in her looks), Beverly was a great beauty, though blond and Southern rather than dark and "Spanish." I was even still around when, after splitting up with Beverly, he married one of his girlfriends, Carole Stevens, to legitimize their child and immediately divorced her to marry Norris Church (to whom, as of 1998, he was still married after about twenty years). By the time Norris entered the picture, however, Mailer and I had already been drifting further and further apart. There were three reasons.
  First of all, I could never do with Mailer what I had done with Lillian Hellman, whose writings I had once pretended to like in order to keep our friendship going. He continued to care about my opinion of his work, he insisted that I be candid about it, and he took my criticisms with extraordinarily good grace (if not always in good temper). He also insisted on dragging me to see the shooting of the incredibly amateurish movies he began making in the late 1960s, and he never really tried to bully me into saying anything good about them. He was also considerate and tactful enough not to pressure me into supporting him when he ran quixotically for mayor of New York on a platform that included, among other original ideas, a proposal that all disputes between juvenile delinquents be settled by jousting tournaments in Central Park. For all that, however, not even Mailer was entirely exempt from the law that genuine friendship (or perhaps any kind of friendship at all) is impossible with a writer whose work one does not admire. He behaved very well on this particular score, but the resentment inevitably built up in him even as I, feeling that I had fallen into a false position in my relations with him, grew more and more uncomfortable in his company.
  Secondly, my patience with his marital storms had been wearing thinner and thinner. Unlike Jeanne, Beverly was not in the least afraid of Mailer: she taunted him constantly and stood up to him when they fought. Several of these fights were staged in my presence, and they

    In telling the story there of how I came to break with the Left, I had to devote a certain amount of space to the reception of Making It, which had been a turning point in my relation to the radicalism of the 19 60s. Obviously, the part Mailer had played was an important element in this account, I pulled no punches in laying out the facts and analyzing them. I described carrying the galleys to Provincetown because, having heard so much about the scandal the book had already caused, he was eager to see for himself what the fuss was all about. I then related that when he had read through the galleys, he told me how good a book it was and how unfair and even incomprehensible he found the malicious talk about it which had been going the rounds. I went on to summarize the article he later produced in which the kindest thing he could bring himself to say about Making It was that it was "a not altogether compelling memoir" and in which he now blamed the ferocity of the response to it on its own faults and failures. And, finally, I recounted the conversation we had in which his only explanation for what I had every reason to regard as a betrayal by my "old dear great and good friend," as he described himself in the piece, was that he had read the book again and simply changed his mind.
    I had eventually come up with a different explanation and I now set it forth in Breaking Ranks. I said that the first time Mailer read the book, he had not realized (any more than I myself did until much later) how subversive it was of the radical party line of the day both in its relatively benign view of middle-class American values and, even more seriously, in its denial that the intellectuals—and the educated class in general—represented a truly superior alternative. But then he made a close study of the reaction to Making It in preparing for his piece, and it convinced him that the book had overstepped the line into outright apostasy. To defend it was a more dangerous business than he had counted on, and in the face of that danger, I said, he "simply lost his nerve."
    True, as the bad boy of American letters—itself an honorific status in the climate of the 1960s—Mailer still held a license to provoke, and he rarely hesitated to use it, even if it sometimes meant making a fool of himself in the eyes of his own admirers. But there were, I said, limits he instinctively knew how to observe; and he observed them. He

He, who had once affectionately called me a "hanging judge," now thought that I had become too "judgmental and narrow":
He was merrier in the old days. He talks too much now of how he took care of me in those old days. I also took care of him. How many people I argued with saying, "No, no, Norman Podhoretz is not really as middle-class as he seems. He’s really a great guy, and stand-up!’ Today he couldn’t stand up without having his arms around a missile. He’s just as brave and tough as all those other military-industrials.
   Well, he too had come a long way from the "old days." Once during the late 1950s, when the two of us were about to go against Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Mary McCarthy in a debate about the 1930s, he warned me that he intended to appear on the platform in a work shirt and jeans because he would feel uncomfortable in a suit and tie. But now, if I had wound up with my arms around a missile, he had wound up practically living in a tuxedo. So attired, he would appear at least once a week in the society page photographs, and when I would occasionally bump into him at some party or other, it would invariably be a black-tie event.
   By the 1990s he had also mellowed toward me. The first time we met at one of these events, he immediately started chatting. What was I doing here? Did I realize that our hostess was a social lion-hunter and that she was paying me a great compliment by having me over? (This was a mistake she was never to make again.) Clearly, he was feeling out the possibility of a rapprochement, but while polite, I kept my distance from him. And that was how it went whenever I ran into him: he would be cordial and I would be cool, he would wish to talk and I would wish to get away.
   Thus, at a small dinner party to which we had both been invited by an unwitting hostess, he tried to engage me in an argument over the Soviet Union, where he had just spent several months researching his book about Lee Harvey Oswald. Now that the Soviet Union had collapsed, was I ready to admit that I had been wrong about its power during the Cold War? "In a funny way," I was relieved to see that living in a dinner jacket had not prevented him from sticking faithfully

A FOUL-WEATHER FRIEND TO NORMAN MAILER    2 1 9
both young (because I did not have the heart to look at them in the light of what came after both for him and for me).
  Considering how things were going with his literary career, I suspected that Mailer might again have been able to use the kind of foul-weather friend I had once been to him. This suspicion was intensified when, shortly before the big party, he telephoned me for the first time in about twenty years. Hearing from him was surprising enough, but the reason for the call was even more surprising. It seemed that one of Mailer’s sons, whose mother had been a Gentile and who therefore was not Jewish in the eyes of rabbinic law, had fallen in love with an Orthodox Jewish woman and wanted to convert. Could I recommend a suitable rabbi? I could and I did. But I also expressed my astonishment and offered my mock condolences at this unexpected turn of events. It reminded me, I told Mailer, of how a direct descendant of Trotsky had wound up living in Israel as the kind of extremist Orthodox Jew known as a haredi, and I imagined that he himself was no less distressed than the old anti-Zionist revolutionary would surely have been. No, Mailer said, for him it was not like that at all. He did not in the least mind or object to what his son was doing. Indeed, as the father of nine children, he found it fascinating to watch them go their separate and different ways. "Well," I responded, thinking of his own lifelong flight from Judaism and Jewishness, "my own take on this, to quote from a different part of the book you recently tried to rewrite, is that ‘God is not mocked:" There was a pause. "Where did I say that?" he asked. "You didn’t," I laughed, "the New Testament did," and he laughed back.
  A few days later, I received an invitation to the forthcoming party, and after a long debate with myself I decided not to go. If it was true that Mailer again needed me as a foul-weather friend, there was not the slightest possibility that I could satisfy that need. In our phone conversation, I had felt bound to say, exactly as I had done so many years earlier at his house when Breaking Ranks was on the verge of being published, that I had just written something about him (meaning this chapter) that he would not like. Back then he had replied, "Well, you owe me one," and on this occasion his response was that he would not of course have expected anything else from me at this stage of our
 
  lives. Nor, he went on pleasantly, would it bother him, so long as it was written "with a clean heart." Yet even having been granted this preemptive pardon (and even assuming that he would stick to it, which he had of course failed to do in the analogous case of Breaking Ranks), I had no wish to put myself in the false position of participating in the celebration of a career that had so bitterly disappointed my literary expectations. Besides, having spent the last thirty years and more trying to make up for and undo the damage I did in cooperation with Mailer and so many other of my ex-friends, both living and dead, I simply could see no way back to him, or to them, ever again.
 

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