Of Time & the Rebel

In August 1948, a wiry young man with kinky hair, cupped ears and an amiable smile came back to the U.S. after spending a year as a G.I. bill student at the Sorbonne, and found that he had become the overnight lion of American letters. Norman Mailer's brutal, scatological novel of war on a Pacific island, The Naked and the Dead, was in its eleventh week as the nation's top bestseller, and the critical ovation was still going on. A few reviewers detected the strong influence of Melville and Dos Passos in Mailer's massive novel, and many Comstocks of the lending libraries were offended by its festering descriptions and raw, one-syllable dialogue; but in the general acclaim their voices were drowned out. At 25. Mailer had written the great novel of World War II. It had come closer to the heart and horror of war than the seascapes of Monserrat and Wouk, or the peripheries of Michener and John Home Burns. Even Mailer's disgruntled contemporaries admitted it. "At the time," says Gore Vidal, "I remember thinking meanly: so somebody did it."

Proud Rifleman. Doing it was no accident. As a precocious undergraduate at Harvard, Mailer was making his plans, and when the Army drafted him, early in 1944, his only concern was where he would be sent ("I worried whether a great war novel would be written about Europe or the Pacific"). After serving in various rear-echelon jobs and, briefly and proudly, as an infantry rifleman on Leyte and Luzon, he returned to the U.S., wrote The Naked and the Dead in 15 methodical months--exactly according to plan.

But the young man's autobiography did not follow the plot. Although Mailer continued to write prodigiously, he never again came close to his first great acclaim. Barbary Shore, his second novel, was a flop. His third, The Deer Park, a study of the tribal sex practices of Hollywood, was a bestseller largely because the word got around that it was dirty (it was), but the critics frowned. By the time his Advertisements for Myself--a threadbare collection of past and future projects, loosely stitched together with some narcissistic autobiographical notes--appeared, late last year, it was all too clear that Norman Mailer, at 36, had fallen hard.

Painful Descent. There were brief starbursts of the old craftsmanship--his essay, "The White Negro," is regarded as the definitive analysis of beatniks, and the later novels had some passages of surpassing brilliance--but the story Mailer wrote and lived was mostly a story of repeated failures. His first marriage ended in divorce. In Mexico he got on the marijuana kick; in Greenwich Village he took to Seconal and Benzedrine (he later managed to cure himself of dope). He became a fiery advocate of lost and leftist causes--an authority on hipsters, bebop, Marxism, existentialism. Once, in an excess of underdoggery, he wrote an article defending homosexualism (an idea that revolted him) for the deviate magazine One.

For a writer who thirsted for succe d'estime, it was a painful descent, and Norman Mailer was painfully aware of it ("Self-pity is one of my vices"). Soon telltale signs of instability began to appear. He quarreled with his editors, darkly accused the typesetters of deliberately mutilating his words. His second marriage, to Adele Morales, a lush Peruvian-Spanish painter and actress, fluctuated from serenity in the morning to raging public brawls at night. Usually an affable man, Mailer became morose and belligerent. In Provincetown last summer he was jailed after a fight with police that began when he hailed a prowl car under the impression that it was a taxi. In Birdland, a Manhattan jazz emporium, two weeks ago there was another brush with the law after an argument over a $7.60 check. "I never know how he's going to react," says Actor Anthony Franciosa, a friend. "Sometimes he tries to provoke me into an argument. Other times he's incredibly gentle. Or, sometimes, when I say to him, 'Norman, how are you?' he'll say, 'Cut the crap; you don't really mean that, do you?' "

Sockless Guests. Mailer reached his Barbary Shore last week after a monumental weekend that began with a party in his West Side Manhattan apartment. The 200 guests were right out of a Mailer manuscript: poets, prizefighters, homosexuals, writers, Big Beat Allen Ginsburg, Actor Franciosa, Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz, Critic Delmore Schwartz. Syndicated Name Dropper Leonard Lyons left in a dudgeon when the sockless hipsters began to outnumber the quality folk ("I couldn't see the furniture for the beats"). The host and hostess welcomed their swarming guests in separate rooms, and as the party roared past the midnight hour, Mailer drank deeply and became moodily belligerent. By the time the party broke up at 3:30 a.m., he had been in two fist fights, had received a small black eye.

Nearly five hours later--at 8 a.m.--Adele Mailer checked into a downtown hospital with critical wounds in her abdomen, her back and near her heart. She had fallen on some broken glass, she gasped. The doctors were dubious, but postponed further questioning until after an emergency operation. By the time Adele Mailer had recovered enough to talk to detectives, her husband was in a television studio, taping an interview with Mike Wallace. He did indeed plan to run for mayor of New York next year, he admitted--on an existentialist ticket. The problem of juvenile delinquency would not be solved by disarming young hoods: "The knife to a juvenile delinquent is very meaningful. You see, it's his sword --his manhood." A better solution would be to hold an annual gangland jousting tournament in Central Park, "which would bring back the Middle Ages." When Wallace noticed the mouse on his cheekbone. Mailer grinned. "Yes." he chuckled, "I got into quite a scrape Saturday night."

"If This Happens . . ." Later that afternoon Adele Mailer described the details of that scrape to the police; she readily admitted that her husband had stabbed her with a 2-inch penknife soon after the party when she was preparing for bed. "He was depressed. He just came at me with a funny look in his eye. He didn't say a word. There was no reason. He just looked at me. Then he stabbed me." That night detectives found Mailer, neatly dressed and unshaven, sitting on a hospital bench near his wife's room.

In felony court a police psychiatrist urged that the author be committed to a mental institution. He was "having an acute paranoid breakdown with delusional thinking, and [was] both homicidal and suicidal." Protested Mailer: "It is very important to me not to be sent to some mental institution. I'm a sane man. If this happens, for the rest of my life my work will be considered as the work of a man with a disordered mind. My pride is that as a sane man I can explore areas of experience that other men are afraid of. I insist I am sane." Not so sure, Magistrate Reuben Levy sent Norman Mailer to Bellevue Hospital for mental observation "in the public interest."

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