http://artsfuse.org/381/norman-mailer-tough-fights/
Norman Mailer: Tough Fights
(Artsfuse, 11/12/07)
When I spoke to Norman Mailer re "Oswald's Tale: An
American Mystery," I was one of three interviewers going at him. One
wanted to know about Mailer's marriages and his love life. Another wanted tips
about how to stack the books up against each other; he wanted help structuring
the Mailer canon. (What I wanted from Mailer is evident enough in the
interview). Mailer had no problem granting three unrelated interviews
simultaneously. We all got lots of what we came for.
As I read my interview with Mailer now, it occurs to me that
something he said about Oswald applied to him. "Oswald," Mailer said,
"was always a bell-shaped curve, always all of a bell-shaped curve. In any
activity he engages in you can see him at his worst, you can see him at his
best, and there's very little similarity."
However true that may be about Oswald, it was profoundly
true about Mailer. In his life, in his works -- and even, sometimes in
individual works -- Mailer was a great bell curve, spanning vast distances
between terrific and abysmal, exemplary and embarrassing.
The interview was the only time I met him but as a writer,
an activist, and a personality Mailer had been part of my life for decades. He
was a figure -- and a force -- to reckon with. I mourn and will miss him.
NORMAN MAILER: TOUGH FIGHTS
by Harvey Blume
Oswald was a
secret agent. There is no doubt about that. The only matter unsettled is
whether he was working for any service larger than the power centers in the
privacy of his mind.
From "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery"
HB: It's important to you, in "Oswald's Tale", to
see Oswald as something more than "a snarling little wife abuser."
You write, "If such a non-entity destroyed the leader of the most powerful
nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe
that is absurd."
Again and again in "Oswald's Tale", you equate
that absurdity with postmodernism.
NM: I hate postmodernism.
HB:So if you can invest Oswald with some size, you've won a
round against it.
NM: Let me reverse it for a moment. What is the passion
everyone has to have him small, essentially meaningless, a non-entity? For instance,
there was a fairly good review of "Oswald's Tale" in the Sunday Times
Book Review and then, at the end, the reviewer says, Mailer's dead wrong about
Oswald as a tragic figure; he's a cockroach. There's a passion there, a passion
to see Oswald small.
I would ask why you have a strong feeling that you don't
want him bigger?
HB: I don't have that feeling. My gut feeling is, I don't
know who killed President Kennedy and that postmodernism could be defined, in a
phrase, as 30 years of not knowing who killed your President or why, not really
being sure.
It occurred to me that's what drew you. If you could get to
the bottom of that question, maybe you could put to rest all the uncertainties that
spread out from it.
NM: I'm not sure that was my motive. I had mixed motives,
one of them to learn more about the KGB because I wanted that for
"Harlot's Ghost". But I also had been absolutely obsessed with
Oswald. For 30 years I had been a conspiratorialist. I'd read a lot of the
literature over the years; I'd lived with it.
HB: You reviewed Mark Lane's "Rush to Judgment"
when it came out in 1963.
NM: I gave it a good review. I was terribly suspicious of
the whole thing. The more I got to know about the CIA the more I began to understand
that with the exception of the Bay of Pigs they really did very few things from
the top. They even quarantined the Bay of Pigs so not all the top knew what was
going on at the same time. It seemed to me it was beyond their measure to plot
the assassination of President Kennedy from the top. Probably there were
enclaves in the CIA; if anybody would have done it, it would have been
enclaves.
HB: You portray Oswald as a single man facing the
bureaucracies of capitalism and a failed communism. He has a vision; he's
deeply idealistic, willing to take it all on, willing to be a terrorist against
it all.
NM: He is that. He's a great many other things as well.
That's the side of him that's boldest. He's also the failed husband, the bad worker,
the man who can't spell. He's a complex figure.
We have to look at Oswald under three possibilities, as for
instance when he's alone in Dallas during those weeks where nobody knew where he
was. Either he's being trained as some sort of agent for an intelligence
organization or he's having a homosexual affair or he's so sick of all the
pressures he's been under he's just holing up to have time to think. We have to
keep all three possibilities in mind as we move forward.
One of the reasons you write--you write for many
reasons--but one of the reasons you write is to learn more about writing. And
what I learned is that you can do this and your character becomes more alive.
Giving him three possible motivations, all different, didn't blur him; it
rounded him in an odd way. And I realized that's the way we look at all our
friends. Most of the time--with friends, mates, children, enemies--we don't
think they're doing it for A or for reason Z; they're doing it for some reason
in the middle we haven't found yet.
HB: You clean up the spelling and syntax that results from
Oswald's dyslexia. Do you give him your syntax? Is this a sign of identification
with him?
NM: No, I gave him my assistant's syntax. She's a very
intelligent woman and I gave her specific instructions: don't improve him, just
clean him up. There were spots where she was unsure what to do and we'd discuss
it.
I didn't want to give him a style he didn't deserve. A
member of my family who is very bright had dyslexia so I had a certain personal
feeling there.
HB: As the book proceeds, conspiracy theory falls away and
the lone gunman becomes more likely and more comprehensible, at least so far as
character goes.
NM: When I started studying Oswald I was surprised at how
ballsy he was. When a guy's got guts, I never look upon him as a non-entity. We
all know that guts are the hardest single thing for a man to have. It's just
not routine. It's in disrepute now because machismo is scoffed at.
He was a gambler at a high stakes table, at the least. He's
betting that everything he reads in the papers and everything he hears in the media
about the Soviet Union being a terrible place is wrong. That's a very large
bet. You're betting with your life.
Once he's over there, my astonishment is that he's a
pathetic figure. He reminded me of myself in Paris at the age of 23. Can't speak
the language--thought I could and now I can't. No, I didn't stay in my hotel
room but that indicates to me just how terrified he was. He used all his
courage to get there and then he collapses.
Slowly, he regains his courage over a couple of years. He
becomes repelled by life in the Soviet Union and decides he wants to go back.
And he takes on both bureaucracies. That's not a small business; he takes on
both bureaucracies, and he succeeds. He's at his most adroit there because he
understands bureaucracies, understands their fear of getting caught with
something they can't handle.
That took more than ordinary stick-to-itiveness. It took him
a year to get back, a year and a half, writing letters all the time, keeping up
the pressure. Then he gets back and takes a potshot at General Walker. He goes
out in an alley at night facing a John Bircher who might well have people
guarding the house. He's got guts.
HB: Is "Oswald's Tale" the continuation of
"Harlot's Ghost"?
NM: "Oswald's Tale" is not the continuation.
HB: It will be a novel, then, that fulfills the promise of
those last words -- "to be continued?"
NM: I made the promise. Let's see if I can keep it. It's
hard writing a novel.
I've been writing about fights all my life. I've finally
come to understand old fighters. I know why old fighters don't like tough fights.
They kill you. They really age you. At the end of it, their bodies have taken a
beating from which they won't finally recover. Writing is like that, writing
fiction. Too much anxiety just eats up your guts. I mean there are a great many
benefits to it but you pay a physical price.
Fiction's got a lot of virtues for me nonfiction doesn't
have. It's more interesting, more exciting, chancier. It's like grace, like falling
in love. You can't say I'm going to fall in love next year. You can say next
year I'm going to write a book of nonfiction about this or that. I can choose a
nonfiction book, decide I want to do it, and do it. The odds are very much in
my favor that I'll finish that book.
With fiction, you can start with a marvelous idea and it
comes apart. Your characters can disappoint you, disappear on you. It's scary
because on a given day you can wreck the book. It's a high-wire act. When you
have a good book, anxiety increases.
HB: You give Oswald powerful language on the day of the
assassination: "Will he have the courage to fire his rifle and will he
shoot well? Everything else, including the mounting temper of excitement in the
crowds outside the Book Depository, has no more presence for him than the
murmur of a passer-by. Stationed within himself, he has now descended to those
depths where one waits for final judgment."
That could have been about a fighter--or, in your terms, a
writer.
NM: I thought if he was going to succeed at that point, it
was because he would transcend himself.
Oswald was always a bell-shaped curve, always all of a
bell-shaped curve. In any activity he engages in you can see him at his worst,
you can see him at his best, and there's very little similarity. So I rather
like the idea that he can miss a rabbit from ten feet with a shotgun and yet
can pull off a couple of those rounds. That was his nature. The best of him and
the worst of him were very far apart.
That doesn't mean you feel a deep affection for the guy. You
don't. The hardest thing with Oswald is to feel affection for him of any sort.
It was part of the problem in writing about him.
HB: Why did he keep a journal? What was a journal to him?
NM: He kept a diary and I found it meager--not terribly
interesting and not well-written. There's a lot of reason to believe he wrote
that diary in a relatively short time--a couple of days or a week--a long time
after the events. It has the ring of somebody summarizing events some time
later.
HB: Why did he do that?
NM: He may have taken some notes because he was thinking of
writing articles when he came back to America, and may have decided the way to break
into print was with a diary; it's exactly the kind of thing a newspaper would
print.
HB: You call him an intellectual.
NM: I don't call him a good intellectual. He was a mediocre intellectual.
But at the age of 24, he was writing stuff that wasn't bad. His stuff on the
Soviet Union, cleaned up, is readable. It's nothing remarkable but I've read
feature stories that were less interesting. Let's say he was somewhere between
a 23-year-old feature writer for a newspaper and an intellectual. I call him an
intellectual because he did do some of his own thinking and his thinking was
very important to him. Finally, if there's anything positive about him, it's
that thought was so important to him.
HB: It isolated him.
NM: isolated him very much because nobody could understand
him. It isolated him specifically because the entire Russian community in Texas
was opposed to him, and of course, being down in the South at that point wasn't
exactly the place to be radical. On top of that, he just made people nervous
with his air of political superiority.
HB: Let me come back to this question of postmodernism. You
inveigh against it. But you were a pioneer of the nonfiction novel. You have crossed
genre boundaries numerous times throughout your career. Now the New York Times
doesn't know whether to classify a given work of history as fiction or
nonfiction. That, to me, is a sign of postmodernism, and you have helped bring
it about.
NM: The reason I'm looking quizzical is you have a slightly
different notion of postmodernism than I do. My idea of postmodernism is that you
mix strawberries with mustard. In other words, the idea is that whatever you
mix is interesting. And I think it's because of a huge breakdown in values that
finally the only way you can get a frisson any longer is to try something new,
even though there's not a hell of a lot of logic to it viscerally.
I was interested in breaking down a lot of those barriers
because I felt there was much too much pomposity attached to the categories.
Now you can say that's a postmodernist impulse.
HB: I would.
NM: In that sense I'm a postmodernist.
HB: Despite yourself.
NM: Malgre moi!
HB: Exactly.
NM: All right. I always thought I was doing it to restore
dignity to--I'm being pretty pompous myself--modernity. In other words, let's not
pretend that history has a sanctity the novel does not have. History is also
fiction. I realized that with "Armies of the Night." Anything anyone
ever writes is fiction--having written all my life I know how impossible it is
ever to be accurate. You mislead people by the act of writing. The hope is also
that you spur their imagination, that they can find their particular
misperceptions of reality to be better misperceptions of reality than they had
before.
HB: So you would say the line between fiction and nonfiction
is less thick than was assumed.
NM: Most people think of it as a Berlin Wall. On the
contrary, it's a barely marked boundary. I love working back and forth on
either side of the boundary; I like being a range-rider on that line.
HB: Did you see the part of the book set in the Soviet Union
as your chance to write a Russian novel, spanning great vistas of time and space,
showing what it was like to live under Stalin, to fear him, to resist?
NM: I didn't think ever that it was going to be my Russian
novel because I knew that material was going to run out. I had just so much of
that material and finally the emphasis was going to go from there to Oswald.
But I wanted to locate Oswald in a milieu and structurally what I found
interesting was to have him appear almost as a minor figure, somewhat
mysterious and shadowy, in that milieu, then take the story forward and back in
time.
HB: You write big books. Do you feel the novel has to be big
to have impact?
NM: The reverse is true. Everywhere I go now, booksellers,
publishers say, why don't you write a short book. From top to bottom it's all
"do a short one." Booksellers' attitude is, short books take up less
space on the shelves. Marketing has taken over writing now. The whole idea of a
book is in the marketing. Big books are a luxury, an indulgence.
I was convinced at an early age by Thomas Mann who said,
only the exhaustive is really interesting.
(First appeared in The Boston Book Review, Vol.2 #8, 1995)
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