New York in the '50s (23 page)

In the ongoing war between the bohemians and beatniks and the locals—working-class Irish and Italians—sexual mores were often at the root of the hostility. As Mike Harrington observed in
Fragments of the Century
, when the neighborhood kids attacked the White Horse regulars as “faggots,” the epithet expressed “their fury that we were always in the company of good-looking and liberated women while they drank in the patriotic virility of all-male groups.”

The tension between bohemian beatniks and Italians had roots going back to the twenties, but in the fifties the conflict erupted politically when independent Democratic reformers in the Village battled Carmine De Sapio's Tammany Hall. I described it as a contest between “two different tribes” when I wrote about it for
Commentary
. The
New York Daily Mirror
called De Sapio's opposition “Village Commies, lefties, eggheads and beatniks.” In fact, they were
the first yuppies—a bunch of young lawyers and other professionals. One of their leaders was a young guy whom Mike Harrington judged at the time as “a diffident, somewhat lovable schlemiel” with a “retiring, modest manner.” I also thought the man a nice, harmless nerd. His name was Ed Koch.

VILLAGE VOICES: THE NEWSPAPER AND NORMAN

Brock Brower and Ann Montgomery each went to Europe after graduation from college (she to model for the Ford Agency, he on a Rhodes scholarship) and later met at the American Express office in Paris. They fell in love, got married, came to New York, and moved into a ground-floor apartment in the Village in 1956. Brock had just sold a verse play to
New World Writing
and was working as a first reader at the Viking Press, and Ann had a job in subsidiary rights at Farrar, Straus. “We became avid readers of the
Village Voice,
” Brock says. “It defined the place for us.”

It served that role for many residents of the Village from the time of its first appearance in 1955, and also for readers all over the country who, if they weren't lucky enough (or gutsy enough) to live there, could get a sense of it, a feel for it, in the pages of the
Voice
.

One of the powerful attractions of the new weekly newspaper for readers like this young Village couple was Norman Mailer's column. “My God!” Brock Brower says, some thirty-five years later. “My father had given me a copy of
The Naked and the Dead
as a Christmas present when I was sixteen, with the inscription, ‘The opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of your father.' I loved it. And then we went to a party in the Village and Mailer was actually there, on view.”

“He was cute and friendly,” Ann remembers. Apparently, it was one of Mailer's better nights.

Mailer's fellow
Voice
columnist Mary Nichols says, “I liked the controversy Mailer stirred up at the
Voice
. I kept running into him there, of course. At the annual Christmas party he would always get drunk and punch somebody out. It was inevitable, part of the holiday ritual.”

Mailer was part of the Village in the fifties and part of the
Voice
, helping define them both, even though he resigned from writing his column, some six months after it began, when his running disagreements with the editors came to a head over a typo: “nuisances” instead of “nuances.” The column in which the typo appeared led to one of his most provocative and fruitful subjects, hip versus square, and the later publication of his controversial essay “The White Negro” in
Dissent
.

Even though he wasn't writing his column anymore, Mailer was still a presence in the pages of the
Voice
—he still wrote for the paper from time to time, and the paper always seemed to be writing about him—and in the Village. He was admired, attacked, scorned, loved, hated, lusted after.

When Millicent Brower, a witty and talented Villager who wrote for the
Voice
, did articles on “The Greenwich Village Girl” and “Those Village Men,” based on interviews with the natives, there were comments in each about Norman Mailer. A man identified as “C.D., 40, advertising, Bleecker Street,” said, “What I'm looking forward to is the return of the Bloomer Girl—all carrying hockey sticks to protect themselves from Norman Mailer.” A woman from West 16th Street wrote to divide the “species” of Greenwich Village males into four categories, including “4. The Genius. You've got dozens of him working on your paper. Norman Mailer is not one of them. He's in category 2 [The Promising Young Man].”

Mailer, it seemed, was everywhere. Seymour Krim would later write a piece called “Ubiquitous Mailer and Monolithic Me,” complaining he couldn't escape the shadow and presence and symbol of Mailer because of “his aggressive ubiquitousness in the literary-sexual-intellectual avant-garde.”

To say Mailer invited controversy would be putting it mildly. He demanded it. In his first appearance in the
Voice
, under the heading “Quickly, a Column for Slow Readers,” Mailer began by jabbing his audience: “Given your general animus to those more talented than yourselves, the only way I see myself becoming one of the cherished traditions of the Village is to be actively disliked each week.”

He cast himself in the role of devil's advocate, which he advertised in case anyone missed it. In a column urging the Democrats to draft Ernest Hemingway for president in 1956, Mailer added a
postscript: “One advantage of being a Village villain is that one is always certain of influencing events by arguing the opposite of what one really wants.”

Still, this was a villain whom people sought out and befriended. Dan Wolfe met him “at a party given by Jean Malaquais, whose course in modern literature I was taking at the New School.” The New School for Social Research, in the Village, had the hottest faculty around when Dan went there after World War II on the GI Bill: Erich Fromm and Karen Horney taught psychology, Max Lerner taught American studies. Malaquais was a French intellectual whom Norman Mailer had met in Paris in 1948, after Malaquais translated
The Naked and the Dead
. Mailer dedicated
Barbary Shore
to Malaquais, and says of him now, “If I had any mentor, Malaquais would have been it. He's the most brilliant man I ever knew.”

Malaquais invited a few of his students, including Dan Wolfe, to the party at his house in Brooklyn Heights, and Mailer brought his first wife, Bea. “Of course I'd read
The Naked and the Dead
,” Wolfe says. “Mailer was then the most famous young American writer, though not yet the most colorful.

“We got to be close friends, and he wanted to come and live in Manhattan, so he found an apartment next to mine on First Avenue between 2nd and 3rd streets. My apartment was $16 a month, but Norman was affluent, so he could afford
two
cold-water flats, front to back. The flats went from street to rear and looked out on a wonderful old cemetery. It was the best view in New York.

“Mailer wanted to meet more bohemian types. There were still people left over from old bohemian days, and young people who'd been in the war, who saw the Village as an extension or a successor to Paris. The young people who came after the vets were not as literary as the older ones. And then came the beats, who were even less so.”

Wolfe's best friends at the time were Mailer and a fellow student at the New School who was studying psychology, Ed Fancher: “One day I said to Ed, ‘The Village ought to have its own newspaper—we should start it.' He said, ‘I'll think about it and let you know tomorrow.' I was surprised. I thought he'd just say yes, let's do it. But he did say yes the next day. That was the beginning. Then I
went to Mailer, and without hesitation he said, ‘Absolutely.' He put some of his own money in.”

Ed Fancher, who became publisher of the
Voice
when Dan Wolfe became editor, is a psychologist who practices Freudian analysis in the Village, where he still lives. “We needed money desperately,” he recalls. “I borrowed $5,000 from the bank, put up a little stock I had, and my father guaranteed the stock. Mailer was one of the few people we knew who had money. He put up $5,000, so we launched a newspaper. We figured we'd break even by Christmas. That's how crazy we were—we just rented an office and thought it would work. When the
Voice
found itself in financial trouble, Mailer said, ‘Let's go out with a bang. Let's have the most outrageous paper imaginable.' We just wanted to save the paper. Mailer thought we were too stodgy and middle class. Well, we were by today's standards, but that was thirty-five years ago.”

Mailer was, as always, ahead of his time.

Harvey Shapiro, the first advertising manager and the poetry editor of the
Voice
, remembers his shock when Mailer bought a half-page advertisement in the paper in order to quote some of the worst reviews of
The Deer Park
. Under the heading
“The Deer Park
is getting nothing but
RAVES
” were pans from papers around the country: “sordid and crummy” (
Chicago Sun-Times
); “the year's worst snake pit in fiction” (
Cleveland News
); and “moronic mindlessness” (
New York Herald Tribune
).

“I knew Mailer and I saw him around the
Voice
at that time,” Harvey says. “He was even delivering papers on occasion. One night we left the office together after he'd bought that ad, and I remember standing on a street corner with him and saying, ‘Norman, writers don't act this way. It's not the dignified thing to do, it can only hurt you.' But I was wrong. Everything changed—and Mailer changed it!” Harvey shakes his head and says with a smile, “I was very fifties in the fifties.”

So was I. I admired
The Deer Park
because, unlike Mailer's other work, it was controlled, honed, and spare—the opposite of the style of prose and life for which he was becoming famous. I couldn't share the blanket enthusiasm of Brock Brower, who admired Mailer so much he went on to write a major profile of him for
Life
magazine. Norman wasn't pleased with the piece, though, and shot off a telegram from Provincetown that included an offer Brower could and did refuse: “If you have any honor, come up this weekend, and bring your dear wife Ann for protection.”

I didn't know Mailer personally, though I used to see him at those
Village Voice
parties and talked to him a few times at big social events over the years. As long as I was speaking with him one-on-one, Mailer was a gracious, pleasant, fascinating conversationalist, but as soon as a group of people gathered around to listen, his voice tended to rise, and his manner and opinions became more brash and pugnacious. Krim had a similar experience, finding that conversation with Mailer “immediately changed when we met in a group or anywhere in public where there were more than just the two of us; when that happened he assumed (and I didn't contest it) the central role.… There was usually a turning point in my presence (around the third drink?) when the showboat cowboy in Mailer would start to ride high, bucking and broncking.”

That was long ago, however, and those who know him say Mailer has mellowed. His longtime debating foe and personal friend William F. Buckley tells me, “I knew Norman in his bellicose years. He's become quite avuncular now.”

Mailer has agreed to talk with me about the fifties and suggests we meet at El Taquito, a small and funky Mexican restaurant on West 44th Street, convenient to the Actors' Studio, where he's been involved since the fifties and is now on the board of directors.

Over lunch he tells me about the old writers' group Vance Bourjaily started at the White Horse, and adds that “the
Voice
was more significant than anything else at the time in giving a sense of community to writers, but that first couple of years I felt its positions were not adventurous enough, then I left and that improved. Sometimes you get what you want by no longer being there—your ghost gets you farther than if you were still around.

“The
Voice
changed the nature of American journalism. People like Pete Hamill came out of it, and James Wolcott. Of course, Jimmy Breslin was an enormous influence on journalism too. Breslin and the
Voice
were big influences of the time.”

When I remind him of Harvey Shapiro's cautioning him about the ad for
The Deer Park
in the
Voice
, Mailer says, “I realized when
the book was turned down by Stanley Rinehart that the literary world was being run for the convenience of publishers and book reviewers. As a writer you were supposed to be a nice little boy, but that was good for them, not us. They told us it was a gentlemen's occupation, so we had to be nice. Well, I had the feeling of not looking back. I wrote a line once: ‘Like a true killer, he never looked back.' In fact, I was killing part of my attitude, part of my slave mentality. It was analogous to Black Power—they wanted us to be nice and agreeable, which was nice for them, not for us. This later happened with Black Power and then the feminist movement. The end of the fifties represented ‘more news to follow.'”

I tell Mailer that
The Deer Park
had been called “the most controversial novel of 1955,” and Mailer smiles and says, “Isn't that unbelievable? Compare it now to
American Psycho
. Anything that dealt openly with sex was controversial back then. The issue of sex was the cutting edge of the new novel of exploration in the fifties. It was the way of going beyond the frontier.”

I hadn't realized until recently that
The Deer Park
was turned down not only by Rinehart but also by Random House, Knopf, Scribner's, Harper & Row, Simon & Schuster, and Harcourt, Brace—before being bought by Putnam. Walter Minton, who was advertising manager as well as the son of the ailing president of the company, and a great fan of
The Naked and the Dead
, was responsible for taking on the novel. He paid its author the biggest advance in the firm's history, $10,000. Minton's instinct was justified when the novel sold more than fifty thousand copies in hardcover and rose to number six on the
New York Times
best-seller list.