Having written about Mailer and Henry Miller, Dearborn envisions an
eventual book about Ernest Hemingway. "I guess the common
denominator is fairly obvious; I want to look at [20th-century
American literature's] three most macho men through the eyes of a
woman and a feminist. But these are not feminist screeds. You can't
just write Miller or Mailer off as sexists. In most cases, it's much
more complicated than that." But she says that she'll need a break
before taking on the Hemingway book, just as, between Miller and
Mailer, she shifted gears to write about Louise Bryant. "Queen of
Bohemia is my favorite of my books," she reminisces. "She's
definitely not a major figure. People know who she was, because she
was popularized as the Diane Keaton figure in Reds, but her
real life is murky, not well known. So it was fun to do the historical
recovery." Writing it involves much more library research than
Mailer, for which Dearborn did extensive interviews. "Almost
everybody you run into has some sort of Mailer story or other. If
they didn't ride down the elevator with him themselves, they heard
about how he rode down the elevator with someone and punched
them out."
We met in the bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City and
conducted the interview over beers.
RH: Did you get any assistance from Mailer on this project?
MVD: He has an authorized biographer who's been working on
his biography for over twenty years. So he couldn't help me, but he
said he wouldn't stand in my way. He was true to his word, and
wonderful throughout. He asked me over for drinks in Provincetown
when he learned I was in town through a mutual friend. I went over,
and he said, "No business. This is strictly social." It was fine--we
drank single malt scotch and talked about the mosquitoes, and about
Don DeLillo, about JFK.
I admire Norman very much, and I think the book is very fair. But
there's stuff in there that he'd rather I not get into... What I say
about him is that, with Hemingway, he's our century's most
important writer, and certainly he wouldn't quarrel with that.
Hemingway gets the first half of the century, he gets the second. Not
so much for what he wrote--some of it probably won't last--but for
who he was, who he is, for how much effect he's had on events as
much as for what he's written about them.< P>
RH: How willing were other people to talk to you about
him?
MVD: They weren't particularly willing. I thought at first that
they were protecting him, but the truth is that he's fallen out with a
lot of his old friends who don't want to talk about him for whatever
reasons of their own. And there's also a lot of arrogance among
Mailer's friends, who'll say, "Oh, I'm going to write about him
myself." That's very common. Somebody actually responded to my
request for an interview by saying, "What's in it for me?"
I didn't contact family members, though I got to know some of them,
and I've become friends with his fourth wife, Beverly--with whom
he was living when he wrote what I think of as his most imporant
work, in the late '60s. She was very forthcoming about their
marriage and the divorce. She brought an informed perspective to
that part of the story. He wasn't good to her, which wasn't
particularly a surprise, but it was distressing to hear about.
RH: Your biography brings out so many of the contradictions in his
character. Here you have a man who wants to be the big existential
rebel of the 20th century, but still wants his wife home cooking
breakfast for him.
MVD: He has changed. That was one of the things that struck
me when I met him. He's very much the patriarch, very
bourgeois...living in a brick mansion in Provincetown. Where's the
existential hero lying on his living room floor, smoking pot with his
ear pressed against the speaker listening to jazz? The one who wrote
in "The White Negro" about transgression being the most exciting
thing you could do?
He's become more conservative. His edge is really gone. And I think
he'd admit that--he's as much as said, "I'm old, I'm comfortable, and
I value my comfort." And we can't expect him to keep getting
arrested, to keep getting into brawls. But politically--he's always said
he was a "left conservative," but he's much more conservative now
than he was when he was younger.
RH: You also write about his competitiveness with his
peers.
MVD: Look at the essays he wrote [in the '50s] about his
contemporaries--"the talent in the room," as he called them. I don't
understand at all why he would feel the need to alienate his peers
like that. That need to grade everyone. In the first essay, it's whether
anyone is capable of writing "the big one," of being major.
That's not literary criticism...and it reveals a lot of his prejudices.
Like his comment that James Baldwin reeks of perfume, a not so
coded reference to his homosexuality.
He's still not very gracious about his peers. I notice that he's very
generous to younger writers, so he's capable of it, but when he comes
across somebody who might be a competitor, he has to knock them
down.
RH: What did you learn about Mailer that surprised you the
most?
MVD: The friendship that he shared with the right-wing
lawyer Roy Cohn. It turns out that Cohn lived on Mailer's property,
and was instrumental in Mailer's getting the mortage to buy it. Cohn
lived in the boathouse. And he was the one who set up Norman with
Random House. Norman's attitude was, "It's about time I had a
patron," very cut and dry about the situation.
But he didn't want other people to know about it, because he knew
what they'd think. Cohn would make lunch dates for prominent
places in midtown Manhattan, and Mailer would change them to the
Village where they wouldn't be seen. And when 60 Minutes
covered Cohn's 59th birthday party, you can see Norman trying to
dodge the cameras.
It was just bad business. Cohn was the sort of person the younger
Mailer would have had nothing to do with, but for purely mercenary
reasons, he did. That just blew me away.
RH: I was unaware until reading Mailer just how extensive
his drug use had been in the '50s.
MVD: He was on pot a lot. He didn't smoke it like other people
would drink beer at parties, you know, to get mellow. He treated it as
a nearly religious experience. He thought of smoking a joint the way
others would think of taking an LSD trip. And I think he got higher
than other people do on pot.
When he stabbed his wife Adele in 1960, it was, I think, a complete
breakdown. And nobody knows the psychopharmacology of these
things exactly, but I think the combination of marijuana and heavy
alcohol use...it was hard for him to connect with reality. He got
deeper and deeper into self-referential thinking. There were real bad
signs even before the stabbing. The amount of drugs he was doing,
and the tailspin it sent him into...he wasn't a casual user. He was
fucking with his own head...And he never did get treatment, of
course. He refused. He believed that if he were to get treatment, it
would make his writing suspect. But more than that, I think, he just
didn't want to confront anything. He just wanted the whole thing
over and done with.
