Norman Mailer Writer's Colony And How I Missed My Shot
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-kearney/norman-mailer-writers-col_b_531478.html
Charles Kearney
Posted: April 9, 2010
The New Armies of the Night
Norman Mailer--the writer, the provocateur, the prisoner of sex, the
enfant terrible, Marilyn Monroe's biographer and finally, the elder
man of letters--died in 2007. But his life and his death have been
transfigured into a writers' colony that searches the
English-speaking world for the next generation of writers.
The Invitation
Just a note to explain how it all finally began. On April 13, 2009, I
received an e-mail that read, in part, "We are honored to inform you
that you have been named a 2009 Mailer Fellow by the selection
committee of the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. Out of over 400
applications, your work has been chosen for our first Fellowship
Program at Provincetown from July 5, 2009, through July 31, 2009." It
was a rather lengthy e-mail full of specific information about the
program. But about midway inside the e-mail, I was asked to answer a
question. "Will you be attending the Fellowship program? We need to
know this, since we have several alternates in case your plans have changed."
So it had finally happened. I was going to Provincetown,
Massachusetts, for the first time, and I would knock on the door of
Norman Mailer's home and I would be invited inside. I would be one of
seven writers--four men and three women--who would comprise the first
graduating class of Norman Mailer Fellows. Being the first seemed
important. Maybe just a footnote in the Norman Mailer canon of books
by him and about him, but for me, it was Ahab strapped to the great
white whale, beckoning his fellow seamen to pursue him and the whale.
The Time Machine
In 1948 Norman Mailer published The Naked and the Dead, his hugely
successful prize-winning debut novel. It was a book about World War
II in the Pacific, and it was a book about America--the author Norman
Mailer and the nation America were often inseparable themes, two
sides of the same coin--and so throughout his grand novel of war, he
would leave the Pacific Theater of operations and return to the
United States with a flashback device he called "The Time Machine."
Now, more than 60 years after its publication and nearly a
year-and-a-half after Mailer's death, the idea of collecting my
thoughts about him would enclose me in my own time machine and take
me back to the America of my youth. I first read Norman Mailer in
high school during the war in Vietnam--The Armies of the Night, the
Pulitzer Prize-winning literary nonfiction book that told the world
about the anti-war march on the Pentagon. That was 1968. Five years
later, as a senior at the University of Maryland in College Park, I
studied a series of books about the Vietnam War--pro and
con--including, once again, The Armies of the Night. Of course, by
now, I had also read other books by Mailer, including The Naked and
the Dead, Cannibals and Christians, Advertisements for Myself and The
American Dream.
For a young writer dutifully serving his apprenticeship--first
writing imitations of the poet Dylan Thomas and his lyric poetry and
later imitations of James Joyce's arguably perfect fiction--there was
much to like about Norman Mailer. He took on big themes. He embraced
contradictions. He combined a certain literary swagger with an
unabashedly comic sense of self-deprecation. He was unpredictable and
an interesting guy. His personal story was as compelling as his work.
I found memorable his observation, writing about himself in the third
person in The Armies of the Night, that "While he could hardly, at
this stage of his career, look back on a succession of well-timed and
generally established triumphs, his consolation in those hours when
he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst
he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by
Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom! and baroque
in the style."
This determination to stay in the ring, no matter what, endeared
Norman Mailer to me, a young Irish-Catholic American writer with my
own version of being unwilling to back down. So Norman Mailer the
writer served as an ally of sorts, but Norman Mailer the raconteur
and storyteller was perhaps even better. During the sixties and
seventies, at the height of the counterculture, the truly guilty
pleasure for me was listening to authors tell stories about writing.
There was a brief but deep interest in literature and the importance
of language, and debates between authors were not uncommon. Writers
were invited to speak on talk shows--the Dick Cavett Show, the Johnny
Carson Show, the David Frost Show. On a good night, writers would
talk about books and the literary world and who was a great writer
and who was a second-rate writer. For a fan, and I was as big a fan
as anyone who ever attended a baseball game, it was reliably great
sport, and Mailer was often at the forefront. He would riff on a
writer he admired or held in disdain or on the ongoing Indochina War
or the women's liberation movement. He would riff on himself and what
it meant to live in opposition to the Establishment.
Like anyone who longs to be a writer, I longed to meet and speak with
a real writer. For me and for many of my generation, the man to speak
with was Norman Mailer. Certainly, Mailer had his long list of
critics and adversaries, but to me, these voices were faint and
insubstantial. If Mailer was the cliché of the enfant terrible, he
was also the irresistible black sheep uncle. So, in the heyday of
hitchhiking, I would now and then think about hitchhiking to
Provincetown to knock on Norman Mailer's door and say hello and meet
the man I believed I was supposed to meet. But I never made the trip.
Then in 2007 Norman Mailer died. I spoke with my wife about him. I
recalled the January 1968 interview with Norman Mailer in Playboy. I
telephoned the Ohio Bookstore and ordered the 1968 issue. Reading the
interview again after forty years was like watching a re-issued old
movie, familiar dialogue, unfamiliar dialogue, forgotten surprises,
laughs, but probably not the same laughs I got from the first
reading. I also ordered two copies of The Armies of the Night--one
paperback to read and one first edition out-of-print hardback for the library.
The Presidential campaign and politics took me away from normal life
in 2008. Then, in early 2009, my writer-editor wife handed me an open
copy of Poets and Writers magazine and said, "You should do this." I
studied the one-page announcement about the Norman Mailer Writers
Colony, handed the magazine back, and said, "Okay."
The Colony
So it began. The Colony invited seven Fellows to spend the month of
July in Provincetown, to attend workshops, lectures and readings and
to devote time to their own work. Some of the Fellows wrote novels,
while others specialized in nonfiction--a fitting combination, given
Mailer's output in both genres and his blurring of the lines between
the two. My plans included both. I was going to complete a final
line-edit of my literary nonfiction memoir about the Middle East and
Central Asia, entitled The Logic of Maps and Dreaming. I also planned
to line-edit a novel, a Nick-and-Nora style political thriller,
Letters from Kathmandu, about a married couple set in Washington,
D.C. Lastly, I was going to write an article about the Colony.
The Colony provided airfare to Provincetown, accommodations for the
month of July and a generous stipend for meals. I declined the
airfare offer, and instead, my wife and I cobbled together a road
trip from Columbia, Maryland, to Provincetown with a stopover in
Mystic, Connecticut. Debra, a friend who writes crime stories, lent
us her new Honda SUV, a stunning gesture, and we packed it with
everything: a new Apple iMac computer, books, manuscripts, vitamins,
tea, music, exercise gear, baseball caps and straw hats for the sun
of Cape Cod. We decided to arrive in Provincetown a week before the
Colony's official start to enjoy a vacation on Cape Cod. And so we
set off, a middle-aged writer and his middle-aged wife, both of us
thrilled, expecting everything, the specifics to sort themselves out later.
Lack of Traction
The first week--our pre-Colony vacation--was flawless. The first week
of my Fellowship residency was awful, I repeat, just awful.
On the second day, unfamiliar with my surroundings, I slipped while
stepping out of the plastic-floored shower onto the painted wooden
bathroom floor, my right foot going forward, my left foot going
backward, my upper torso and lower torso going in equally different
directions, the entire naked collection of parts reorganized by
gravity, pulled down fast and very hard, the full weight of
everything falling like Newton's apple from a tree. It was the worst
fall of my life: a twisted ankle, two blown knees, abrasions on my
upper and lower back, a sprained wrist, and a left pinky finger that
was swollen and purple and rigid with pain. Amazingly, after spinning
and thrashing and clutching at the air, I had not sprained my neck or
dinged my head. In other words, from the neck up, I was fine.
I had to make a decision. I was a guest at the Norman Mailer Writers
Colony and I was a de facto guest in the home of Norris Church
Mailer, and guests are supposed to make light of inconveniences and
transient mishaps. So I waited and thought about what to do, what to
mention or keep to myself. Finally, at a dinner party, I showed my
grim pinky finger and sprained and bruised wrist to Catherine Moore,
Administrative Assistant at the Colony, who reacted with concern and
tacitly ordered me to inform Lawrence Schiller, the Executive
Director and unofficial father-in-residence of the Colony, about what
had occurred. I told Lawrence--or Larry as we later called him--that
I was reluctant to say anything about falling down like an idiot, but
I was equally worried that another later Fellow--after all, I was
part of the first graduating class, a test group of sorts, a literary
astronaut, testing the program for flaws--might repeat my stumble.
Lawrence Schiller does not take prisoners when it comes to problems.
There is no line between him and the execution squad. He is the
execution squad. Go to the hospital, he said. We'll take you. Have
X-rays. Be sure you are okay. I explained that I had already seen an
acupuncturist in Provincetown, and she did not believe the finger was
broken, and she would treat me for the swelling and the pain.
Way too early the next morning, Schiller was knocking at the door of
my condominium (in a building down the street from Norman Mailer's
house, which is now the headquarters of the Colony). Are you sure you
are okay--are you sure you don't want to go to the hospital, he said.
I was more than half asleep, but real human empathy is unmistakable,
and Schiller had ventured out from his usual circle of control. I did
my best to respond to his truly genuine vulnerability. No really, I
said, I'm fine. Thank you. He was talking and walking backwards in
the grass. I cannot recite exactly what he said, but we had a moment
between us that I doubt he remembers. I remember it because I was the
guest and he was the host, and a lesser, more insecure host would
have avoided me and let the details fall away as I had fallen and by
falling down had raised an issue about safety. Soon enough, the
condominium had a shower mat and two bathroom rugs.
Public Anxiety
Like my deceased father and grandfather and many living members of my
family, I have a law degree. I have spoken in courtrooms and in
arbitration hearings and in depositions and inside the chambers of
state and federal appellate courts. I rather enjoy talking and
answering questions. Sitting atop this personal historical predicate
of liking to talk, I got toppled during my first public appearance at
the Colony.
The order of battle for the first two weeks included two readings per
Fellow, staggered over the initial two weeks. At my first reading,
sitting at the long table in the living room of Norman Mailer's house
with my colleagues, the floor-to-ceiling windows fronting the bay, I
read the prologue to The Logic of Maps and Dreaming, set in a
hospital in Safad, Israel, and the first chapter, set in New Delhi,
India. I had never done a public reading. Not even so much as a poem.
I had certainly never read even a paragraph of my memoir to anyone
other than my wife, and even she had not been present when I read
sections of my book aloud to myself at three in the morning, or
later, when the clattering, illiterate sparrows ended my perfect renditions.
Okay--the ending is what you would think. I read badly. I read unlike
any time I had ever read on earth. My hands shook as I turned the
pages. I read too fast. I lost all cadence. I forgot what to
emphasize. Afterwards, I did my best to answer questions that I did
not really hear.
Only once before, during my father's eulogy, had I experienced panic,
dry mouth, sweating hands, loss of intellectual presence. But then,
in the church, I had pushed forward out of nothing less than a
willingness to die rather than to fail. Here, at the informal
gathering, I had simply felt like an untrained fool. There is no
other accurate description for it.
Zelig
Lawrence Schiller was telling another one of his reliably funny and
riveting stories. I was at a Colony gathering, a dinner party, and
everyone in attendance listened in absorbed silence. When Larry takes
the stage, you listen. Larry is a naturally gifted storyteller. Like
a naturally gifted pickpocket, he is quick, deft, bold and (at age
73) experienced. But he is also forthcoming about himself and his
work, and self-deprecating. He is never disingenuous about himself.
Like his close friend Norman Mailer, with whom he collaborated for
more than 35 years, Larry has lived many lives and taken many risks,
and like Mailer, he also has a buoyant disregard for what others
think about him and for the dangers that others typically shirk. A
successful photojournalist as a young man, he took iconic photographs
for Life Magazine, Playboy and Paris Match, to name just a few. He
took the last professional photographs ever taken of Marilyn
Monroe--of Marilyn swimming nude in a pool--on the set of the film,
Something's Got to Give. She died two months later. He took a
devastatingly poignant photo of Bobby Kennedy, curled up and asleep
on the floor of his campaign plane; weeks later, after winning the
California Presidential Primary, he was also dead, killed by an assassin.
Schiller went on to become a grand master of other media. He was the
director of the Emmy Award-winning television miniseries, Peter the
Great, and also directed the documentary film, The Man Who Skied Down
Everest, which won an Academy Award. He came up with the idea of a
book of photos of Marilyn Monroe and enlisted Mailer to write the
narrative for the bestselling book Marilyn. According to Schiller, he
and Mailer fought vehemently during the first months of their
partnership. In his tribute to Mailer at a three-hour memorial
service at Carnegie Hall on April 9, 2008, Schiller said, "When we
first met in 1972, we were so different that no one thought we could
become friends, or even survive the first month. I was an
accomplished, insecure, thirty-four-year-old photojournalist who
could not read or write properly. He was a literary giant, rumored to
have bogged down in mid-career. What we had in common was we were
both looking for ways to reinvent ourselves. We each had hit a wall."
Schiller continued, "At first, working on the book, Marilyn, we
fought. We screamed at each other regularly." Eventually, the two
outsized personalities found a way to get along and became close
friends and collaborators.
Adept at landing in the midst of major events, Schiller was present
when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and it was Schiller who
obtained the rights to the photograph of the murder. Before Gary
Gilmore was executed, Schiller interviewed Gilmore, obtained the
rights to his story and gave the material to Mailer, who wrote the
Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, The Executioner's Song; Schiller
directed the made-fortelevision movie. Schiller also collaborated
with Mailer on another project. Both of them traveled to the former
Soviet Union to begin groundbreaking research on Lee Harvey Oswald,
including interviews with his widow and with former KGB agents. KGB
documents never seen in the West were smuggled into the West by three
separate Mailer-Schiller couriers. Possibly the tiniest private spy
network in history. This material became the basis for Mailer's book,
Oswald's Tale.
Schiller's uncanny knack for being in the right hot spot at the exact
right moment led David Margolick, author of a Vanity Fair article
about Schiller's association with O.J. Simpson and his team of
defense attorneys during the Simpson trial--and Schiller's subsequent
bestselling book about the trial, "American Tragedy: The Uncensored
Story"--to remark that many have dubbed Schiller a Zelig character,
in reference to the Woody Allen film about a shrewd, faceless man who
insinuates himself into the lives of famous people.
It is true that Schiller's life is filled with famous people. In a
1997 interview with Playboy, Schiller told a fabulous story about
Marilyn Monroe that I had never heard before, a story wonderful with
details about Marilyn Monroe's gift for charm and insight way above
and beyond her sex goddess-movie star image. The section of the
interview about Marilyn is far too lengthy to summarize, but the
ending of the story I liked is simple. Marilyn had kept photographer
Lawrence Schiller at her home for hours, talking, drinking Dom
Perignon, reviewing photographs that he had taken of her and
generally keeping him from returning home to his wife. "Finally I
[Schiller] said, 'Marilyn, I've gotta go home. My wife is going to
fucking kill me.'" As Schiller then related, Marilyn asked him where
he lived. He gave her his address. She left the room for a long time.
When she returned, they talked for some time and then he left. When
he arrived home, his wife wasn't angry. Marilyn had sent her two
dozen red roses with a note of apology for keeping Schiller for so long.
In his current incarnation, Larry Schiller is immersed in launching
the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. It is an all-consuming task. During
my time at the Colony, Schiller embraced his role as film director
and photography director--making sure the Fellows were captured on
film and in photos for the Colony's archives and for a documentary
about the Colony. But this was just one of Schiller's many roles. A
man with a vision, he commandeered each day, making deals on the
phone, organizing events, smoothing the waters, moving everything forward.
No question, Schiller works hard, and he is intent on creating a
different kind of writer's colony, one that "keeps alive the
endangered serious writer" while also sustaining and carrying on
Mailer's legacy as a writer and a mentor to other writers. In
addition to hosting the seven summer fellows, the Colony hosted
weeklong workshops on a variety of creative topics in the summer of
2009 and sponsored winter fellows in 2009
10. The Colony is also partnering with the National Council of
Teachers of English to establish national writing awards for high
school and college students; the first award recipients were recently
announced. Helping young writers find their way is one part of the
Colony particularly close to Schiller's heart. "Can you imagine a
young high school student winning a $5,000 award for writing?" he
said. "Imagine how hard those students will compete for that award
and what it will mean to the student who receives it."
The idea for a writers colony began to form in Schiller's mind as
Mailer grew increasingly frail and questions arose about what to do
with the house in Provincetown. Mailer had been coming to
Provincetown in the summer for years and started spending most of his
time at the house on Commercial Street in the early 1990s. As
Schiller noted in an article about the origins of the Colony, "The
house had become part of the town's cultural heritage. Norman often
said that Provincetown had become for him what Key West and Cuba were
for Hemingway."
Mailer's generosity toward other writers was legendary. It seemed
fitting to Schiller and to Mailer's wife, Norris Church Mailer, to
continue Mailer's legacy by building a writers colony that would
perpetuate that spirit of generosity and support. Schiller recalled
visiting Mailer in Mount Sinai Hospital not long before his death, to
find Mailer, "pencil in hand, editing some text" written by a nurse
who had confessed to him that she longed to write. Schiller was
struck by the image of Mailer, with the nurse sitting at his side as
he went through her pages line by line. Schiller lifted his camera
and took a picture. "The groundwork for the Colony continued to be
laid without anybody saying a word about it," Schiller wrote. Making
the house the headquarters of the Colony made sense to Schiller, to
Norris Mailer and to others who were close to Mailer.
Act II
The already scheduled day for my second reading was fast approaching.
After the Act I fiasco, I was spooked. I knew I should practice
reading, but even the thought of practicing sent me back into that
fear-induced state I did not want to relive. It was cold comfort, no
comfort at all, really, that public speaking has routinely been
listed at the very top of human fears.
As the time approached, I continued with my line-editing. I also got
to know the other Fellows. They made an impressive group. Phil Shenon
is a former New York Times reporter who wrote a bestselling book on
the 9/1l Commission. Rachel Cantor is an accomplished fiction writer
with an impressive number of published short stories to her credit.
David Morris, a former Marine, reports on Iraq and Afghanistan for
such publications as The Virginia Quarterly Review. Amy Rowland, a
copy editor for The New York Times, is finishing a novel. Hanna
Gersen has published her fiction in such publications as Granta. Alex
Gilvarry, the youngest of the group at 28, has an M.F.A. from Hunter
College and is working on a wonderfully improbable but clever and
funny novel about a fashion designer imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.
I must also mention, however briefly, that the Mailer Colony draws
emissaries from the vast constellation of the literary and publishing
world, including such notables as novelist and National Book Award
recipient Don DeLillo, Playboy Editor-at-Large Christopher
Napolitano, David Margolick, journalist with Newsweek and former
contributing editor of Vanity Fair Magazine, and Michael Shae,
Editor, New York Review of Books. I certainly never expected to meet
any of these men so informally and so companionably. On a similar
note, I never imagined as a boy reading Playboy that I would
eventually be sitting in Norman Mailer's living room and listening to
the Editorat-Large for Playboy.
I finally got around to practicing, word by word, line by line,
paragraph by paragraph, and, most importantly, pause by pause. I did
not even attempt to include making eye contact with the listeners.
That was a bridge too far, and not one that I ever expected to cross.
When the appointed day arrived, I had the jitters, but I also felt
ready. When I sat down to read sections from The Logic of Maps and
Dreaming, my voice no longer quaked, my hands no longer shook and I
abandoned the speed-reading. Larry, who filmed all of our readings
and workshop sessions, shot my second reading from the back. He later
told me that he took that angle to film the back of my head and to
better capture the sound of my voice. Fair enough. He was welcome to
my voice, and I was pleased to have completed the mini-performance
requested of me.
Collected Endings
Two nights before the Fellowship residency ended, Larry Schiller
threw a dinner party for all of us at the Mailer house. For reasons I
can sort of explain, the assembled guests, myself included, seemed
particularly happy and relaxed, outgoing and boisterous--a group of
people who loved books and loved writing, and now, as the literary
expedition marched toward the end, had become fond of each other. Not
unpredictable I suppose, but very pleasant to observe. Everyone in
the room had participated in their share of graduation moments: high
schools, universities, master's degrees, Marine Corps, law school.
Tonight would be another, and certainly it would be the smallest and
most intimate. No diplomas, of course. But there was a long moment of
unexpected formality when Lawrence Schiller, himself a recipient of
Emmys and an Oscar, called the name of each Fellow and presented them
with a small box that contained a crystal glass paperweight engraved
with an image of the Mailer house, the name of the Colony, the date
and our names.
Later, milling around Mailer's living room, with yet another beer in
my hand, I talked with Alex Gilvarry. Alex proffered the box given to
him by Larry and said, "This is our diploma." I told him he was
exactly right and that he had written the ending of the article I had
already begun to write while in residence at the Colony.
Yet the next afternoon, Amy Rowland stopped by my room while I was
packing to leave the Colony, and said, "I have a definite sense of
possibility as a result of being here." I told her the same thing I
had told Alex: "You have written the ending of my article."
But I was wrong about Alex and I was wrong about Amy. The ending of
the article would be written by the invisible hand and the invisible
voice of the person closest to Norman Mailer.
Upon returning home, I wrote Norman Mailer's wife, Norris Church
Mailer, a note of thanks. It included my anecdote about not
hitchhiking to Provincetown to meet her husband. Ordinarily, a note
of thanks for someone's generosity or hospitality does not require an
answer, and I considered the Norman Mailer Fellowship officially
concluded. But I was wrong again. My snail mail letter to her brought
an e-mail reply that perfectly expressed her point of view and my own.
"Dear Charles,
Forgive me for the tardiness of this reply to your nice note. I was
finishing my memoirs and haven't answered any correspondence in quite
a while, but I am so glad you got to come to the Colony and had a
good time. The house has good writer vibes, and I think just being
there gives a boost to whatever you are doing. I hope you found it
so. If you had knocked on the door, we would have welcomed you in,
others have done just that, and Norman was always gracious. He loved
helping young writers, which is why we started the Colony. It sounds
as if you and I are roughly the same age, I graduated from college in
1972, so I guess we can't be called young writers, but I still feel
like that kid in my bell bottoms and scarf from time to time. Best of
luck to you, Norris Mailer."
.
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