‘Norman,’ a friend said to him at the time. ‘You’re a writer. You shouldn’t be doing all this.’ ‘You’re wrong,’ said Mailer. ‘This is exactly what I should be doing.’
American success has been doubly unkind to him. Never timid, Mailer accepted his fate — and proceeded to do his growing up in public. ‘I was on the edge of many things’, he wrote later, ‘and I had more than a bit of violence in me.’
Earlier that winter I had gone to see Mailer on the $i-million-doilar set of Ragtime, Miles Forman’s rambling film version of the Doctorow novel. Turn-of-the-century New York had been re-created on an acre of Shepperton mud. Nattily dressed, his wig prinked, Mailer was playing the role of the architect Stanford White, and Norris, appropriately, was playing his wife. In the scene they were shooting that morning, White was to make his entrance into Madison Square Garden (whose facade had been reconstructed for the occasion), there to be shot in the head by an enraged cuckold.
The interior murder scene had already been filmed. In the car on the way back to the studios that day, and later over lunch, Mailer elaborated on his existential anxieties about his ‘symbolic death’ on the screen. ‘They put wires, charges and blood packs in my hair. Unpleasant, but that didn’t bother me so much as the idea of enacting my death. Then John Lennon was shot, two days before we did the scene. After that I knew which death was for real.’
‘Okay, Norman!’ the megaphone had bawled on the set that morning. ‘Let’s do it again!’ For the seventh time the jalopy pulled up at the steps of Madison Square Garden. Mr and Mrs White pushed through the waiting newsmen while antique cameras flared and fizzed. Norman got to say his lines. It was the Mailers’ last scene on the film, and the mood was genial. When the final take was finished, Forman shouted out: ‘Okay! Let’s hear it for Norman!’ Norman smiled and nodded at the applause of the crew, pleased, braced, unembarrassable to the last.
During the sixties Mailer directed and starred in three films of his own, Wild 90, Outside the Law, and Maidstone, in which he pretends to be, respectively, a mafioso, a cop and a film director. All three were disasters, and much of the money lost was Mailer’s own. But still, he hardly needed the big screen by this point: he was doing most of his acting in real life.
So began the years of the Performing Self. Why write it when you can live it? The author was no longer a craven figure hunched over his desk: the Author was a Hero, an Event, a Spectacle.
In the autumn of 1960 Mailer threw a party with his second wife Adele Morales, a Peruvian painter. ‘She’s an Indian, primitive and elemental,’ he liked to boast. Things got a little too elemental that night on the Upper West Side. After several fistfights, and in a frenzy of alcoholic paranoia, Mailer forcibly divided his guests into two opposing groups, those for and against him. Towards dawn he stabbed Adele, nearly fatally. In a subsequent poem which I have been unable to trace, Mailer wrote that ‘So long as you use a knife/There’s some love left,’ or words to that effect. Cheering for Adele, who anyway didn’t press charges.
‘Fuck you! Fuck you all!’ was how Mailer opened his speeches when he campaigned for Mayor of New York in 1969. ‘No more traffic.’ No more bullshit!’ It was Mailer’s dream to make New York City the fifty-first State in the Union; he wanted the city divided into autonomous units, ‘some based on free love’. In The Presidential Papers (1963) Mailer had proposed the following ‘existential legislation”: states wishing to retain capital punishment should do so by means of public gladiatorial games; cancer researchers should be executed in this way ‘if they failed to make progress after two years’. Today Mailer will look you in the eye and say, ‘I was sure I was going to win.’ John Lindsay won. Mailer came nowhere.
‘It seems that people want my ideas,’ Mailer had said bewilderedly in mid-campaign. Mailer’s ideas: they were coming in a torrent by now. The essays ‘Reflections on Hip’, ‘The White Negro’ and ‘The Existential Hero’ are the keys to how Mailer was regarding himself in those days. Attracted by Hemingway’s idea of ‘the Good’ (‘what makes me feel good is the Good’) and Lawrence’s idea of ‘blood’ (ditto), Mailer cobbled together a philosophy grounded on drugs and jazz, mighty orgasms, frequent fistfights, and doing what he liked all the time. This credo resembles the usual rag-bag of Sixties sophistries, but it was imbued with Mailer’s own kind of extremism.