Pages from a Cold Island (31 page)

I own that peculiar cow-country mentality (Watertown is not in my marrow, it is my marrow) that causes me endless distress, as
when, for example, I know some
one is issuing a maxim, a hard-won wisdom nugget, know that my clear duty is a sophisticated crossing of the legs, a wise pursing of my lips, and an all-encompassing nod ding of my noggin, yet aga
inst a thousand previous resolu
tions I find my lower jaw going as slack as a cretin
’
s; I can almost feel my head rising into its pin shape; I find myself whinnying,
“
Whadda yuh mean by that?
”
In the early days of our friendship, when Ray was broke, un settled, and anxious of the future, he often became so enraged with what he deemed my bumpkinry that with chilling earnestness he
’
d threaten to knock my teeth out. And though over the years, through the acquisition of the Village Chumley
’
s, the uptown steak house, and a home in Westport, he
’
d mello
wed somewhat, it was (as inerad
icable as a birthmark) in his temperament that his Latinic quirks manifested themselves. Enraged once at the idiocy of a telephone operator, he stepped back from the wall phone in the galley of the downtown restaurant, doubled his fist, and did what every
New Yorker
has thirsted to do, threw it with all his might, leaving the blameless phone in uncount able black plastic pieces on the kitchen floor. Embarrassed, he told his bartender he had errands to run and expected the phone fixed on his return.

When hours later he called back, he talked about this and that, then said,
“
They fix the phone?
”
Told that they had, Ray said,
“
What was the matter with it?
”

It was impossible to stay angry with Ray. There
’
d be periods of two or three years we didn
’
t see one another, but on arriving in the city I
’
d always go to him first. He
’
d circle me warily, stealthily, looking me up and down, over and around, as if he were scanning my clodhoppers for shit, as if he were having trouble placing me, as if he
’
d never seen anything quite like it. Then finally he
’
d smile and say,
“
How
’
s it goin
’
, Numb Nuts?
”
Ray
’
d take me to Chinatown for dinner, constantly reminding me throughout the meal that he was a frightfully busy man, that this was the only time he was going to give
me during my visit, the implica
tion being that even this was more time than I warranted. He
’
d let me drink on the house at Chumley
’
s, with mock apologetics explaining to his bartender that
“
this fuckin
’
farmer can
’
t handle these New York prices; where he comes from the shitkickers are still selling Genesee 12-Horse Ale for fifteen cents a bottle, ten cents less than they pay for it.
”

Santini was kind, and now he was going to do me the most delightful kindness of all—introduce me to Norman.

That evening there was a championship fight in the Garden. Apparently Mailer was at the bar of the steak house belting back a few in anticipation of the bout, and if I hurried I was led to understand I
’
d get a chance to swap badinage with him. Perhaps, I thought, Mailer
’
d even invite me to the fight.
“
Wonderful, Ray,
”
I said, hanging quickly up.
“
Wonderful,
”
I repeated dumbly to myself. This, I thought, was going to be nothing like the remotely formal world of the Institute. No, sireee, this was going to be just a couple writers, one famous, one unknown, bantering with each other, consigning this guy to hackdom, that one to
“
a nice little commercial novelist.
”
Frantically selecting a blue button-down shirt with a maroon and gold regimental tie, a pair of gray flannel slacks, my black wingtip Florsheims and a beige corduroy jacket, an outfit I thought Norman would approve, I dressed, fled out of the apartment and hailed a cab.

13

“
Where
’
s Mailer?
”
I said to Ray.
“
He
’
s not here yet.
”

“
Oh?
”
I was disappointed.
“
How do yuh know he
’
s comin
’
?
”

“
Because a friend of mine made reservations for a party of people, including Mailer.

“
He
specified
that Mailer was in the party?
”

“
Yes.
”

“
Why?
”

“
What do you mean
‘
why
’
?
”

“
I mean, is Mailer a vegetarian or health-food addict? You have to order some special food for him, sauerkraut juice or something?
”

“
Now, listen here, Little Muffin—
”

“
Well, for Christ
’
s sake, Ray, I thought I
’
d get a chance to pass some time with the guy. How
’
m I gonna talk with him if he
’
s surrounded by a cadre of flunkies?
”

“
I never said you could pass any time with him. I said.
‘
C
’
mon up and I
’
ll introduce yuh.
’
”

“
You got me into a necktie to shake his hand? Should I kiss the hem of his jacket or anything?
”

“
Now listen, let
’
s get this straight, Peckerhead. I
’
ve only met Mailer two or three times myself. If you
’
re going to pull any of that Watertown cider-squeezer
’
s crap on me, I won
’
t even bother. Sit down.
”

I did, pulling myself up on the barstool Ray usually occupied near the reservations telephone at the dining room end of the bar. To his bartender Ray said,
“
Give Nutsy here some vodka,
”
then to me,
“
Look, I
’
m busy as hell. If you want to meet Mailer, fine. If you don
’
t, go fuck yourself.
”
Already the bar was jammed with fight fans, and the tables, topped with their red and white checkered cloths, lining the walls of either side of the dining room were completely occupied, some people eating steaks, others placing orders. Then I detected that the tables in the middle of the room, which ordinarily were spread out singly to feed four at a sitting, had been juxtaposed to create one long table not at all unlike the table depicted by painters in their conceptions of The Last Supper. Like me, the china place settings sparkled in mute anticipation. I groaned, then chuckled, thinking that all the scene lacked was Christ and his apostles. And I had no doubt who Christ would be.

Well, I thought, what had I expected? Fifteen years before in
Advertisements for Myself
Mailer had told us that, like Bernard Shaw and Capote, whose publicity he had envied, he was embarked
on a journey of self-aggrandize
ment and, if necessary, was going to pound the fact of his imagined superiority into our feeble domes. But he had also revealed—a bluff one had believed—that he was into a ten-year project out of which he
’
d come bearing an orange crate of manuscript containing something like a Proustian evocation of the entire sexual spectrum. He hadn
’
t of course delivered, and despite the occasional flashes of brilliance in his
“
new journalism,
”
which was neither new nor journal ism, I was with my upcountry, whadda-yuh-mean-by-that? mentality perfectly prepared to demand of him what had happened, readily poised to point out that he hadn
’
t made good on a promise he
’
d made me and a million other acolytes who, if not actually writing, were even then nursing our drinks, thinking of putting down words, and being dreadfully intimidated by the grandioseness of Mailer
’
s stated designs, an intimidation I can understand now was utterly calculated for just such a purpose.

Moreover, in a touching attempt to keep the plane of his own ground airily lofty he had patronized or with wanton and spiteful arbitrariness s
hot down every writer who repre
sented the least threat to his imagined eminence as King of the Heap—Bellow, Styron, Updike, Capote, Baldwin, Vidal: well, whom hadn
’
t he patronized?—and even after he
’
d succeeded in his aims and
with his swagger and bluster re
duced the establishmentary committees of Mr. Pulitzer and the National Book Awards to their knees, when he
’
d been paid the homage of his peers, when he should have come to a little peace and got on to whatever it
was he believed him
self capable of, he would instead become
“
a media writer
”
popping up on TV every second week spewing his peculiarly sad venom, a pitiable performance that could only have been motivated by some awful disappointments within himself, something that rises up out of that terrifying place where ultimate grief resides, and probably something as obvious as that all those men he
’
d patronized had gone on to write their novels.

As I find myself saying this, I smile wryly, thinking that if the literary world were as clubby as generally imagined— as clubby, for example, as the United States Senate—Mailer would have long ago, like Senator Joseph McCarthy, been censured, but that the literary scene has yet to produce a writer of stature with the courage of a Margaret Chase Smith, a man to stand up to Mailer and say,
“
You are wan ton, you are irresponsible, you are without the impulse to fairness or decency, and you are finally to be pitied.
”
In time of course someone would step forward, and a woman at that, Kate Millett, but being vindictive and imperceptive she was the wrong woman. Instead of laughing and shrugging it off, Mailer in his melancholy game of one-upmanship took the time to devote an entire volume—
The Prisoner of Sex
, which was supposed to be about Women
’
s Liberation—to nothing more or less than an attack on Millett, as though we were all too thick-skulled to grasp the unfairness of Millett
’
s game.

And now, of course, Mailer is embarked on a campaign to garner himself the Nobel Prize. He wants us to believe that he possesses the generosity of spirit, the largeness of vision, the striking courage of a Faulkner, Mann or Solzhenitsyn, or for that matter the relentless dedication of an Edmund Wilson or the sheer genius of a Nabokov who never won the prize. Mailer opened his
Prisoner of Sex
waiting for a call from the wire serv
ices with the probable announce
ment that the prize was his; he modestly assured his gentle reader that he was sure the wire services had made an egregious error (indeed they had, indeed they had!), but he was unable to convince his new secretary who appears to have been transmogrified into a walking, talking mass of awe-stricken, admiring and gushy mush that Norman could take the whole business so cavalierly; and sadly, oh very sadly, we are left with the impression that Norman would not have been all that surprised had the wire-service man been right.

Even recognizing that he was nursing this kind of oppressive vanity. I could not guess he
’
d come to write about the lost and pathetic Marilyn Monroe, or that in the process he would make the great Arthur Miller, whose Death of a Salesman will be lighting up the world
’
s theaters when Norman
’
s books are being recycled to print Miller
’
s words, an arch villain, or that he would seek to enlist our sympathy for his choice of subject matter by telling us—for Jesus Almighty
’
s sake!—that he needs two hundred thousand dollars a year to live on. But one might have guessed as much.

Around the corne
r the preliminary bouts were al
ready under way, both
the bar and the tables were be
ginning to empty, and I had about decided he wasn
’
t going to make it after all
when I sensed an imposing pres
ence behind me and heard, spoken to Ray with funereal gravity:

“
M
y party is ready.
”

I couldn
’
t help it, I started to laugh. Turning, I saw that it was this Quinn, the heavyweight boxing champion of the Corps, whom I didn
’
t then know but who appeared to have way too much Irish-guy niceness to take a steak repast with Mailer so solemnly. Fluttering nervously, perspiring and wiping his brow with a handkerchief, he was an outsized Irish cherubim announcing the Second Coming.

Then the procession began, and in its ritualistic majesty it made the National Institute of Arts and Letters ceremony look like a thing of scant consequence, as pale as the talc
hue of the great Stokowski
’
s head. All together there must have been a dozen or fifteen of them—even including a priest I assumed was going to bless Norman
’
s cauliflower—and as they filed behind me I noticed there was something utterly pilgrimatic or apostolic in their demeanors, that try as they would to glide nonchalantly by they were quite overcome by a ludicrous earnestness, a stealthy determined sense of importance, a kind of wait-till-you-see-who
’
s-behind-me thing. And finally, a full thirty seconds—and what a theatrical effect this delay had—after the final disciple, He came!

Accompanied by his then wife Beverly, who was lovelier than I
’
d been led to believe from the single photo
I’d
seen of her, with dark taffy-colored hair, a peaches complexion and an outfit to match, Mailer was a good deal smaller than I
’
d thought, and thinner than in his recent pictures, though not thin enough for the vested—it made him look roly-poly—lightweight suit he was sporting. But here was his graying, kinky, pseudo-Afro hairdo and unlike the others his petite candy kiss of a mouth was giving off a smile, he was enjoying himself, which made me want to shout at his table,
“
Hey, you guys, look at Norman! He
’
s smiling, you can smile now!
”

I don
’
t know why I stayed, but I did; and against a hundred resolutions not to, I found myself looking at his table, not much liking what I saw and wondering if ever again there
’
d come a time for him when he and his wife could slip into some corduroy slacks, some old and comfortable cashmeres, have a couple of beers and a ham and cheese sandwich at the bar of Chumley
’
s, then walk round the corner and see a fight together. I doubted there would. Mailer had made himself a literary Frank Sinatra, and where one could understand an egomaniac from Hoboken summoning and discharging flunkies to and from his private table way out yonder there
in that ultimately vulgar Ameri
can dreamland of Las Vegas, Mailer yet owned something of brilliance, places in his recent work had taken on a com passion I hadn
’
t heretofore suspected him capable of, and at that moment he obviously housed the inner resources not to have to live his life, as it were, en entourage. And I knew then that, despite my grudging respect for some of his work, I couldn
’
t like the guy, and that he
’
d never deliver on the promise he
’
d made us
“
lesser
”
talents.

Yet I persisted. At his table they were still sipping cock tails, and I implored Ray, before the steaks arrived, to get him and bring him to the bar so I could buy him a drink. Ray pointed out the obvious—that Mailer had probably never heard of me—but I countered with the truth that I didn
’
t expect to confront him as an equal.
“
Just give him my name —I
’
ll play the lickspittle—tell
‘
im I
’
m a votary, and ask him if he couldn
’
t spare the time it takes to quaff a single drink. Christ, Ray, you
’
re in thi
s business, you know how to han
dle this corny fucking New York scene.
”