I’ve decided that at bottom I’m just a sadist, and no damn good for any woman. The reason – I can beat them up. Only with men do I act decently cause I’m scared they’ll whop me, isn’t human nature depressing?
One of the most formidable and endearing voices running through this book is that of Fanny (‘my kids are tops’) Mailer, Norman’s 86-year-oId-mother. ‘I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t gotten the Nobel Prize.’ ‘Why he picked Adele I never could understand.’ ‘If Norman would stop marrying these women who make him do these terrible things.’ Fanny named her ‘really lovely baby’ Nachum Malech Mailer, ‘Nachum’ becoming Norman, while ‘Malech’ (‘king’ in Hebrew) became Kingsley. ‘He was our king’, ‘a little god’. ‘”He’s going to be a great man.” I knew that. Absolutely.’ Fanny never waivered, and all his life Norman had plenty of collaborators in building the mansion of his self-esteem.
His name is Norman Mailer, king of kings: look on his works, ye Mighty, and — what? Despair? Burst out laughing? In secure retrospect, Mailer’s life and times seem mostly ridiculous: incorrigibly ridiculous. Some observers talk of his ‘great huge ambition’, his ‘great grace and correctitude’; others just lick their wounds. A devout immoralist, he always veered between the superhuman and the subhuman, between Menenhetet I and Gary Gilmore. Like America, he went too far in all directions, and only towards the end, perhaps — with no more drink and ‘no more stunts’, dedicated to his work and to a non-combatant sixth wife — has he struck a human balance. As for the past, nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.
Observer 1981,1982 and 1985
Palm Beach: Don’t You Love It?
The only road-accidents in Palm Beach take place between pedestrians. And you can see them happening a mile off. The mottled, golf-trousered oldsters square up to each other on pavement and zebra, and head forward, inexorably, like slow-motion stock-cars or distressed supertankers. (Everyone is pretty sleek and rounded in Palm Beach — unlike New York, where people’s faces are as thin as credit cards.) Then it happens. Oof!… The old-timers rebound and stagger on. ‘Hey!’ ‘This is a sidewalk, honey.’ ‘Oh yeah? How’d you like that!’
Meanwhile the tamed gas-guzzlers toil in line along the seafront strip, hearse-like limousines, roadsters with their haunches and biceps — Toronadoes, Thunderbirds, Cutlasses. But these gas-guzzlers are on the wagon. The limit is between 25 and 35 m.p.h., and people drive even slower than that. There are never any accidents, no alarms of any kind. A flat tire on a Mercedes will bring out the squad cars, helicopters, state troopers. The only people who need to get anywhere fast are behind the wheels of the Emergency Service Units, which specialise in heart attacks and are the most efficient and advanced in the world. Everyone else cruises in meandering, Sunday-sightseeing style. The speedometer on my gurgling 1981 Mustang stopped at 85, like a Mini. Energy is being conserved. But for what?
Your psychic clock needs time to adjust to Palm Beach, to the sun, the wealth, the safety and the pool fatigue. For the first forty-eight hours 1 felt 1 was going to be spontaneously arrested by the police for having such a relaxing time.’… But Officer – what’s the charge?’
‘You’re too relaxed. Way too relaxed.’ The truth was, of course, that I wasn’t nearly relaxed enough. I sprawled nervously by my personal swimming-pool, dozed jumpily on my baronial bed, idled edgily into town at the wheel of my sparkling car …
There is no sign of any work going on here. There is no sign of anyone who hasn’t got lots of money. The only black faces you see, you see through glass: trimming the borders, washing the dishes, or licking your windscreen. There is no litter, there is no crime; a snatched purse in the shopping mall would cause headlines, statewide man-hunts. There is only one kind of activity in Palm Beach: leisure.
Palm Beach proper, the strip of land between Lake Worth and the Atlantic Ocean, is the most expensive piece of real estate in America, out-tabbing Martha’s Vineyard or Beverly Hills. People talk obsessively about real estate — partly, I suppose, because it is an informal way of talking obsessively about money. ‘And I mean those are top prices. And I mean top. Top. Top.’ ‘Then I raised the money at 140 per cent of the asking price. Don’t you love it?’ In one of the main shopping streets in Palm Beach there is a plush-looking office called Creative Realtors. Perhaps there is even a course at Miami University in creative realting.