FROM FICTION TO FACT: THE LITERARY DEVELOPMENT OF NORMAN MAILER by LAWRENCE SHERWOOD CAMPBELL B.A., University of British Columbia, 1969 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of English We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA September, 1975 11 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the require• ments for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely avail• able for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for schorlarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his represen• tatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada Date 'cTO@€ft ills- ABSTRACT The thesis concerns the development of Norman Mailer's work, focusing particularly upon the nature and significance of his change in form, from novel to compilation to journalism, from fiction to fact. The argument is that the movement from one form or category to another represents an attempt to solve problems inherent in the previous form. The problem that ini• tiates and underlies his entire evolution might be stated crude ly as that of reconciling "reality" and "meaning" in a single work, though these terms should be understood as abstractions whose actual definition varies with different works. This desired reconciliation, it is argued, is not attained in the novels. Mailer goes through three general phases, how• ever, in attempting to bring it about: his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, is limited by its naturalist format to a depersonalized, omniscient depiction of a seamless reality, ali to human value or meaning; his second phase, represented by The Deer Park, tries to correct this limitation by introducing a peripheral narrator, with the result, however, that meaning (or the potential for meaning) and reality appear as balanced but separate and mutually irrelevent terms; and his third phase represented by An American Dream, virtually abandons the real world altogether, devolving into a private realm of meaning centred about a hero-narrator. Mailer's fiction is seemingly caught in a bind where meaning and reality appear as opposing iv terms, so that the pursuit of one requires the relinquishment of the other. With Advertisements for Myself, however, published prior to An American Dream, his development branches in a direction that allows escape from this trap. This is the first of the "compilations", unique and self-contained forms consisting of a double level: a collection of earlier writings and a unify• ing, interlaced commentary. While relieving Mailer from the imaginative burdens of fiction, they provide a display for a scattered variety of alternate forms and styles, including the later journalism. More importantly, they present the construc• tion and elaboration of a Mailer persona, the embodiment of a kind of Mailer-myth, and a potential hero who provides a basis for an eventual synthesis of reality and meaning. But the compilation itself is a transitional form, becoming obsolete as the persona becomes stabilized and the gap between its two levels vanishes. After this gestation period, Mailer achieves his greatest success to date with The Armies of the Night. Here, meaning derives explicitly from the "Mailer" character constructed in the compilations, rather than implicitly from a fictional nar• rative; and reality is secured simply through the reporting rather than through a mimetic realism. Mailer's fundamental problem of fusing reality and meaning is solved in this work (and to a lesser extent in his subsequent journalism) by means of a symbiosis of history and persona. The later journalism, V however, exhibits a growing rigidity, as the Mailer persona becomes stereotyped and increasingly divorced from his subject, meaning divorced from reality. vi Table of Contents Page Abstract iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Naked and the Dead 1+ Chapter 2 Barbary Shore and The Deer Park .... 21+ Chapter 3 An American Dream and Why Are We In Vietnam? I4.6 Chapter 4 Advertisements for Myself and the Compilations 714. Chapter 5 The Armies of the Night and the Journalism 118 Conclusion 135 Footnotes 139 Bibliography 1 51 Introduction Norman Mailer has always considered himself primarily a novelist. ". .1 wouldn't want ever to be caught justifying journalism as a major activity (it's obviously less interesting than to write a novel)", he told an interviewer in 1964.1 Yet, in the twenty-six years of his literary career, he has written only five novels, and only the first of these has received unmixed acclaim. The rest of his published works have taken a variety of forms—a book of poetry, a play, a film script— 2 but since the publication of his last novel to date they have been almost exclusively journalism; and the irony of this change is deepened by the fact that it is Mailer's journalism that is principally responsible for the great improvement in his reputa• tion. Despite his own intentions, therefore, Mailer's develop• ment represents a curious reversal of the more traditional pro• cess by which reporters grow into novelists (as exemplified by his own mentor, Hemingway). It is the purpose of this thesis to investigate such an unusual evolution through a study of certain of Mailer's works, seeking to isolate at key points the liter• ary forces, tensions, and tendencies that are its causal factors That this is an examination of a literary development, and not merely of selected autonomous works, should be emphasized. The works that are studied are therefore not necessarily Mailer' best—rather, attention is concentrated on those that mark the significant phases of his career. Three of these books, dis• cussed in the first three chapters, are novels—The Naked and 2. the Dead, The Deer Park, and An American Dream; the apparently disproportionate amount of space devoted to a form that Mailer eventually seems to leave behind is a consequence of the fact that he himself (however mistakenly) places so much value upon the novel as an ideal, and it is in his various attempts to make that ideal concrete that one can trace the origins of the problems and contradictions that are at the basis of his entire develop• ment. The fourth chapter focuses on the pivotal work of Mailer's career, Advertisements for Myself, a book that is of a unique though unstable form itself, and which begins his movement toward the journalism of his maturity. And the fifth chapter discusses the first and best example of that later jour• nalism, The Armies of the Night. These five books constitute the principle markers of Mailer's literary development. With the exception of the last, perhaps, they tend to be imperfect, spoiled, unbalanced, or unfinished, yet usually charged with a kind of potential energy that is the source of Mailer's power as a writer. This peculiar combin• ation of strength and weakness, frequently troubling to critics, can be explained by the same quality that makes it difficult to study his works as separate entities: Mailer's writings, as he himself states in the Introduction to Cannibals and Christians, "are parts of a continuing and more or less comprehensive vision 3 of existence into which everything must fit". It is this totalizing.consciousness that not only allows but requires the 3. consideration of his work as a development, as a progressive series of struggles to give literary form to a vision that is itself undergoing evolutionary change. 4. Chapter 1 The Naked and the Dead The key question to ask of this first novel, in any study of Mailer's development, is why it is unique among his works. It was an immediate and enormous success, both popularly and critically. Alfred Kazin, for example, regards it as "still the only one of Mailer's novels that continually reads like a novel that is stable in conception.""'' Why, then, did Mailer not continue to write novels of the kind he had seemingly established with his first? He himself has told of his refusal to return merely to the subject-matter of The Naked and the 2 Dead, but that hardly explains his abandonment of its very form or type. It is an insufficient explanation, that is, unless one supposes that the form itself is in some way an obstacle, that it contains certain inherent limitations that render it in• capable of giving expression to new-found visions and ambitions. The question of the uniqueness of Mailer's first novel involves the broader question of the initiating impulse behind the whole of his development, the question of the origin of those liter• ary forces and strains that have sustained his often risk- filled quest for new forms. To answer these questions it is first necessary to examine the form or type of The Naked and the Dead itself, so as to understand more precisely what it is that Mailer is rejecting. If we begin, conveniently, at the beginning, we notice only a 5. short and simple opening paragraph; it is interesting simply in that Mailer chooses not to begin iri media res, with dialogue or specific description, but rather with a fairly abstract and objective statement. Like the establishing shot in film, this first paragraph is a means of quickly situating the story in space, time, and mood. The following two paragraphs, separated from the first by a textual gap, are then obviously designed to illustrate that mood; the first sentence had stated that "Nobody could sleep", and now, like the cut from a long shot to a close-up, we are shown the anonymous case of one of those sleepless soldiers, his simple efforts to get to a toilet told in a dramatic present tense.