Chapter One
LIT BIZ
I am tempted to call this section
Economics, for it concerns the loss
and gain (economically, psychically,
physically) of living as a writer.
Let’s settle, however, for a term that may
be closer to the everyday
reality: Lit Biz. Spend your working life as a
writer and depend on
it–your income, your spirit, and your liver are all on
close terms with
Lit Biz.
In 1963, Steve Marcus did an interview with
me for The Paris Review, and
I have taken the liberty of separating
his careful and elegantly
structured questions into several parts in order to
give a quick shape
to my first years as a writer. For those who are more
interested in what
I have to say about writing in general than about myself
in particular,
you are invited to skip over these autobiographical details
and move on
to a few comments on my first two books, The Naked and the
Dead and
Barbary Shore. Or, if you are in search of directly
useful nitty-gritty,
move even further, to “The Last Draft of The Deer
Park.”
steven marcus: Do you need any particular environment in
which to write?
norman mailer: I like a room with a view, preferably
a long view. I like
looking at the sea, or ships, or anything which has a
vista to it. Oddly
enough, I’ve never worked in the
mountains.
sm: When did you first think of becoming a
writer?
nm: That’s hard to answer. I did a lot of writing when I was
young.
sm: How young?
nm: Seven.
sm: A real
novel?
nm: Well, it was a science fiction novel about people on
Earth taking a
rocket ship to Mars. The hero had a name which sounded like
Buck Rogers.
His assistant was called Dr. Hoor.
sm: Doctor . . .
?
nm: Dr. Hoor. Whore, pronounced h-o-o-r. That’s the way we used
to
pronounce whore in Brooklyn. He was patterned directly after Dr. Huer
in
Buck Rogers, who was then appearing on radio. This novel filled two
and
a half paper notebooks. You know the type, about seven inches by
ten.
They had soft, shiny blue covers and they were, oh, only ten cents
in
those days, or a nickel. They ran to about a hundred pages each and
I
used to write on both sides. My writing was remarkable for the way
I
hyphenated words. I loved hyphenating, and so I would hyphenate
“the”
and make it “th-e” if it came at the end of the line. Or “they”
would
become “the-y.” Then I didn’t write again for a long time. I didn’t
even
try out for the high school literary magazine. I had friends who
wrote
short stories, and their short stories were far better than the ones
I
would write for assignments in high school English and I felt no
desire
to write. When I got to college, I started again. The jump from
Boys’
High School in Brooklyn to Harvard came as a shock. I started
reading
some decent novels for the first time.
sm: You mentioned
in Advertisements for Myself that reading Studs
Lonigan made you want to be a
writer.
nm: Yes. It was the first truly literary experience I had,
because the
background of Studs was similar to mine. I grew up in Brooklyn,
not
Chicago, but the atmosphere had the same flatness of affect. Until
then
I had never considered my life or the life of the people around me
as
even remotely worthy of–well, I didn’t believe they could be treated
as
subjects for fiction. It never occurred to me. Suddenly I realized
you
could write about your own life.
sm: When did you feel that
you were started as a writer?
nm: When I first began to write again
at Harvard. I wasn’t very good. I
was doing short stories all the time, but I
wasn’t good. If there were
fifty people in the class, let’s say I was
somewhere in the top ten. My
teachers thought I was fair, but I don’t believe
they ever thought for a
moment I was really talented. Then in the middle of
my sophomore year I
started getting better. I got on The Harvard
Advocate and that gave me
confidence, and about this time I did a couple
of fairly good short
stories for English A-1, one of which won Story
magazine’s college
contest for that year.
sm: Was that the story
about Al Groot?
nm: Yes. And when I found out it had won–which was
at the beginning of
the summer after my sophomore year [1941]–well, that
fortified me, and I
sat down and wrote a novel. It was a very bad novel. I
wrote it in two
months. It was called No Percentage. It was just
terrible. But I never
questioned any longer whether I was started as a
writer.
sm: What do you think were some of the early influences in
your life?
What reading, as a boy, do you recall as
important?
nm: The Amateur Gentleman and The Broad Highway
were glorious works. So
was Captain Blood. I think I read every
one of Jeffrey Farnol’s books,
and there must have been twenty of them. And
every one of Rafael
Sabatini’s.
sm: Did you ever read any of them
again?
nm: No, now I have no real idea of their merit. But I never
enjoyed a
novel more than Captain Blood. Nor a movie. Do you remember
Errol Flynn
as Captain Blood? Some years ago I was asked by a magazine what
were the
ten most important books in my development. The book I listed first
was
Captain Blood. Then came Das Kapital. Then The Amateur
Gentleman.
sm: You wouldn’t say that Das Kapital was
boyhood reading?
nm: Oh no, I read that many years later. But it had
its mild influence.
sm: It’s been said often that novelists are
largely nostalgic for their
boyhood, and in fact most novelists draw on their
youthful experiences a
great deal. In your novels, however, the evocation of
scenes from
boyhood is rare or almost absent.
nm: It’s difficult
to write about childhood. I never felt I understood
it in any novel way. I
never felt other authors did either. Not
particularly. I think the portrait
of childhood which is given by most
writers is rarely true to anything more
than the logic of their novel.
Childhood is so protean.
sm: What
about Twain, or Hemingway–who drew on their
boyhoods
successfully?
nm: I must admit they created some of the
psychological reality of my
own childhood. I wanted, for instance, to be like
Tom Sawyer.
sm: Not Huck Finn?
nm: The magic of Huck
Finn seems to have passed me by, I don’t know
quite why. Tom Sawyer was the
book of Twain’s I always preferred. I
remember when I got to college I was
startled to find that Huckleberry
Finn was the classic. Of course, I
haven’t looked at either novel in
thirty years.
Excerpted from The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer
Copyright © 2003 by Norman Mailer
Excerpted by permission. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without
permission in writing from the publisher.
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The Spooky Art