Norman Mailer vs. Everyone

Your invitation to come out your way appeals to me, and I might just take you up on it some time in the next six months, especially if I get a to hell and away with it all feeling, and want to have a couple of days of talk with you. I’ll just assume it’s generally all right with you, subject to your work, and if the mood hits me, and I can get away, I’ll call you first to make sure it’s not going to come at a time when you don’t want to have work-distractions.

There’s a lot more I’d like to say, but I feel kind of written-out, so I’ll let this suffice for the time being, and will answer Lowney’s letter in a couple of days and pass on any further news to her.

Love from one old man to another,

Norm

Disgruntled by pop culture after a trip to England, Mailer writes this playful letter to novelist and screenwriter Don Carpenter, proposing new slang.

October 23, 1961

Dear Don,

Just a note this time. Back from England and I’m digging into the mail again and singularly without wit this afternoon. London turned out to be a very funny place. Reminded me a little of the way New York was back in 1946 and 1947. A great deal of innocence, a great deal of sexual vitality and a fascination with—God save the mark—our own dear Hip. I thought if I heard one more Englishman say, “I dig” that I would never dig again. I got so sick of “hip” and “square” as words that from now on they’re out. I mean let’s start something new. Existentialism is the word we have to use now as in “That’s very E - X, man, very E - X.” Squares will now be called essentialists, as in “That’s very E - S, man, straight 8.” Which occurs to me is the first useful separation of the letters in sex that’s been made for a long time.

Nothing much new here except for the uneasy feeling that my personal life is likely to get some disagreeable publicity soon. I hope not but it’s in the air. Time did a nice knife job last week. Had a small picture of me doing the Twist. Mentioned that I was perspiring (naturally everybody in the fucking joint was perspiring) and said I had a dazed look on my face which my probation officer will naturally read as drugged. In the dreams of Walter Neo-Mitty there is one recurring fantasy. He comes to power like Fidel Castro and enters Time magazine with a burp gun.

Best for now Amigo,

Norman

Mailer gets personal about sobriety, and throws a few jabs at the movie business, in this letter to his friend Larry L. King, author of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

May 11, 1981

Dear Larry,

Thanks for the clipping from the Lone Star Review. I’ve come to decide that the better I feel during an interview, the worse it’s going to look in print, but at any rate, they’re nice kids.

I’m still on the wagon—I guess it’s close to a year now—but I think I’m afraid to take a drink. When it began, I thought I’d stay off long enough to get to the point where I could drink a little and enjoy it, and then not drink again for a few days, but the longer I stay away from it, the more I begin to feel if I take one drink, I’m going to want to be drinking every night, and then I’ll be bloated again and dragging my ass around the ring. I think when I get down to it, the reason I stopped drinking is because of boxing, and I have to laugh when I think of all the dedication and abstention I’ve put into a sport where on my greatest days I rise within sight of being a mediocre amateur-gentleman-boxer. Since it’s the only thing that gives me the illusion that I’m not heading rapidly toward the decrepit, then once in a while there’s a high to it. When you get in with a guy who bangs about at your own level and you both feel bruised and virtuous at the end of three minutes. Also, hitting a heavy bag does move the piss around in one’s system. I guess if I weren’t on this regimen of jogging three times a week and boxing on Saturdays, I couldn’t help but go back to drinking. There has to be something to cut off the great rage.

Larry, it looks like traveling up the royal road you slashed through the forest of penury. I’m working with a kid named Richard Hanum on an adaptation of my quickly assassinated last book, Of Women and their Elegance, and at present there looks to be one chance in two or three that we’ll have a Broadway production next year. Tom O’Horgen’s directing it and it could be very funny. It’s being called Strawhead and it is not a musical, although all but. It has a form and seriousness and modest penetration of a play devoted to good music (The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas naturally excepted—I love the penetration in that one). Anyway, it has some interesting and amusing things to say about Marilyn and I may be hitting up on you for advice if and when the thing gets closer to production, cause, God, that’s a new world for me. But interesting, I fear, much too interesting. I find I work on my novel three days a week in order to give myself the sanction to enjoy going to casting sessions (for a workshop) two or three of the other days in the week. But, Larry, it seems like a holiday to me. Probably it is.

Give our warmest to Barbara and let us know if you’re thinking of a trip this way.

Cheers,

Norman