September 13, 2021

Bullfighting in the Village: The Late Short Fiction of Norman Mailer

Abstract
Norman Mailer’s later short fiction was a proving ground of sorts for ideas that he developed during the second half of the 1950s and his struggles to publish his third novel The Deer Park. His difficulty in publishing The Deer Park becomes the catalyst for Mailer’s reassessment of his role as a writer and artist. It prompts him to keep a journal of self-discovery, Lipton’s Journal, in which he develops a theory for himself as an artist and individual in conflict with an external and hostile world. This conflict and resolution finds its way into his late short fiction and is publicly articulated in “The White Negro” and Advertisements for Myself.

“ I was working my way toward saying something unforgivable . . . my vision . . . was leading toward the violent and the orgiastic. I do not mean that I was clear about where I was going, it was rather that I had a dumb dull set of intimations that the things I was drawn to write about were taboo. ”

Norman Mailer ended his short story-writing career by blowing up the world. “The Last Night: A Story” was published in the December 1963 edition of Esquire and provided an apocalyptic transition between a struggling artist of the 1950s and the more mature and seasoned “author who takes himself seriously.” The Mailer signing off in the pages of Esquire had discovered a new voice in Advertisements for Myself after a difficult decade had him questioning his own competence as a novelist. His second novel Barbary Shore had not been as well received as he would have liked, one critic calling it “evil-smelling” and another “paceless, tasteless, and graceless.” The Deer Park had publishing difficulties, recounted in “Mind of an Outlaw,” until Knopf, after a lengthy consideration, ultimately refused because Blanch Knopf was “almost irra­tionally terrified” of consequences to the publishing house. Even though these trials had Mailer considering that his breakout novel The Naked and the Dead might have been “an imposture,” Walter Minton of Putnum’s finally agreed to publish The Deer Park, but only after Mailer’s dark night of the soul forced him to take a long, critical look at himself and to pick up the mantle of the artist/rebel to transform himself and his work. The apocalyptic orgasm ending “The Last Night” propels his White Negro protagonist to inseminate the universe beyond simultaneously blowing up the world—an apt metaphor for his last short story, as his later short fiction from 1951–1962 builds up to this final release.

Mailer’s views at the time were expansive. He longed to be something great, and he knew he had the capacity and desire to prove himself a “major writer,” though he was tired of playing “the comic figure” running “the circuit from Rinehart to Putnamn.” Even before Minton accepted The Deer Park, Mailer had been ready to self-publish the novel “to make a kind of publishing history” and as an act of defiance against the “gentlemen” of the publishing industry that had become too conservative and spineless. He writes: “I was finally open to my anger. I turned within my psyche I can almost believe, for I felt something shift to murder in me. I finally had the simple sense to understand that if I wanted my work to travel further than others, the life of my talent depended on fighting a little more, and looking for help a little less.” Mailer’s conviction to become a “psychic outlaw” has its genesis in his negative experience in publishing The Deer Park, but his thoughts were leaning in this direction even before: specifically in his later short fiction that acts as a proving ground for ideas he workshopped in Lipton’s Journal and published in Advertisements for Myself—specifically in “The White Negro.” The group of short stories dating from the winter of 1951–52 and those that followed allowed Mailer a fictional space to explore the dissident and subversive ideas that would characterize his breakthrough work of the 1960s.

Mailer saw these external forces as strong and oppressive, often getting the better of him and his protagonists, though occasionally there are little victories. The struggle is the only constant for Mailer, and this idea was reflected in his fiction and the conflicts of his protagonists to assert their individualism in the face of great opposition. Mailer saw himself as a “peronality-in-progress” which found its way into his work during this time in the form of the ubiquitous forces of conformity that attempted to “bury the primitive” and to shape the individual into socially acceptable forms—generic, castrated, benign, and out of touch with something essential. Later in The Presidential Papers, Mailer writes: “What is at stake in the twentieth century is . . . the peril that they will extinguish the animal in us.” In an attempt to resist these forces, Mailer turned to self-analysis during the winter of 1954–55 in what he called Lipton’s Journal.

In Lipton’s, Mailer posits a dichotomy of opposition between external regulating forces—which he calls “sociostatis”—and the essence of the individual, which he calls “homeostasis,” then “homeodynamism.” The former he likens to the forces that regulate social order while the latter he sees as an individual’s energy, movement, and creativity in resisting those forces that would homogenize and oppress him—a conscious movement that Mailer claims is “the most healthy act possible at any moment for the soul.” In biology, homeostasis is the body’s internal balance of physical and chemical conditions that help protect against external influences, yet in Mailer’s evolving thought, he replaces “stasis” with “dynamism” suggesting that constant movement resists the imposed stasis of society and is a necessary action for realizing the individual. This dualism comes to represent a major disconnect in the contemporary world and a key struggle for Mailer and his protagonists. In other words, his work in Lipton’s propels him to write: “I must trust what my instincts tell me is good rather than what the world says is good.” Perhaps most germane for Mailer, he opines that “sociostatic repression always allows the writer the least dangerous (to society) expression of his vision” and that the “homeodynamic demands the most.” Mailer’s work pushes toward the most dangerous expressions in his his work, and his later short fiction exemplifies this S/H struggle.

Cannabis, the “tea” from which Lipton’s gets its name, might have been an essential catalyst in uncovering this primal revelation for Mailer, for “Lipton’s . . . destroys the sense of society and opens the soul.” Smoking tea may have been the integral taboo action that facilitated the transition from his earlier work to his more mature style beginning with “The White Negro” and Advertisements for Myself. It certainly allowed him to conclude that the post-Enlightenment state of society, that associated with reason and rationalization, is antithetical to the health and well-being of individuals when reason can weaponized by the state. In turn, “life fights back by having people become monsters and mystics” and embrace the irrational and the violent, for “it is possible that at this moment in history the irrational expressions of man are more healthy than the rational.” Mailer’s hipster figuration and his writer-in-opposition persona are engendered in Lipton’s, workshopped in his short fiction, and theorized in “The White Negro.”

The pinnacle, or perhaps nadir from an H perspective, of sociostatis begins “The White Negro”: state-sanctioned violence of the concentration camps and the atom bomb that wreak a “psychic havoc” and could render both death and life meaningless. Out of this intolerable oppression, Mailer posits his rebel genius: the philosophical psychopath, the American existentialist, the Hipster, takes his cue from the African American who “has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries” and has the courage to speak with his own voice against “a slow death by conformity.” To combat the social malaise, the Hipster discovered that the

“ only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. ”

The Hipster eschews the contemporary world of pop-culture analysis and neo-liberal conformity and seeks the “art of the primitive . . . in the enormous present” by “relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body”: “the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm.” The Hipster’s world is the jungle of contemporary life, and he embraces subversiveness and violence to enable him “to remain in life only by engaging death” all while seeking “an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it.” This “apocalyptic orgasm” is the Hipster’s gold, his fountain of youth, and “the oldest dream of power.” Yet it is elusive, since he must act in the drama of the civilized world of progress and setbacks “so that even as he drains his hatred in one act or another, so the conditions of his life create it anew in him.” The struggle is chronic, and little victories also produce defeats.

The apocalyptic organism becomes a slippery but key metaphor in Mailer’s thought at this time. It seems to echo another contemporaneous thinker’s own reaction to the the Western society of the mid-1950s: Jacques Lacan first theorized jouissance in 1953 to simply mean the enjoyment derived from the satisfaction of a bodily need, and later, after 1958, it became increasingly more nuanced, complex, and more closely associated with orgasm and taboo. After 1958, Lacan distinguishes desire (a limited pleasure that could be associated with sociostatis) from jouissance which comes to be associated with transgressing the limits imposed on pleasure into the excessive—the revolting, traumatic, and/or painful. It is an extreme form of pleasure: “ecstatic or orgasmic bliss that transcends or even shatters one’s everyday experience of the world.” This is not an isolated pleasure, but one that requires opening up one’s ecstasy to another and potentially losing control of oneself—similar here to what Freud terms lust or libido, and Mailer’s portmanteau lerve, or “life-energy.” For Mailer, lerve is “the determining thing in keeping people alive and functioning despite the heavy psychic armor they carry,” making it of utmost importance in the struggle between sociostatis and homeodynamism. Like jouissance, lerve is driven by external, ecstatic encounters with others that push into the taboo, the verboten, and ultimately allow the subject to grow in a positive way. Mailer’s short fiction of this time acts as a fictional search for the White Negro’s apocalyptic orgasm that can defeat, if only temporarily, the sociostatic forces that seek to limit it.

Mailer’s protagonists define their identities by attempting to assert their individuality, defined in masculine terms, by living dangerously and confronting existential situations. In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer writes: “Masculinity is not something given to you, something you’re born with, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honour.” These small battles are the crucial moments in life that define the experience of Mailer’s characters and could be likened to search for the apocalyptic orgasm. They are risky and dangerous, push beyond safe boundaries often through sexual and/or violent encounters, and are necessary for continued growth. In Norman Mailer: A Double Life, J. Michael Lennon cites Nietzsche’s work as an influence on Mailer’s ideas, particularly a section called “Live Dangerously” in Walter Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre: “For, believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities under Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you lovers of knowledge!” So, Mailer’s “honor,” here, could be read as a courage to accept the challenge, to look danger in the face, and try to be ready for whatever comes next. It’s a part of Mailer’s concept of American existentialism where the outcome is both serious and uncertain that the Hipster lives by in his “uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.” Later in his essay “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer writes “you are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place, and you do not know how it is going to turn out.” Living dangerously, then, defines the protagonist on his own terms—not as other external, sociostatic forces might compel him too be. The existential situation pits the protagonist against external forces, and the outcome of these small battles shapes the protagonist’s identity in subtle and profound ways.

For Mailer, short fiction was not to be taken as seriously as novels—or as a shameful pastime between novels, as he complains in a letter to Mickey Knox: “I’ve given up temporarily trying to write my damn novel, and have started doing short stories. (Don’t spread this around.)” In the “deadest winter of the dead years 1951–52,” Mailer would write a handful of short stories as antidote to his troubles in writing The Deer Park, but these stories were written quickly and, he comments, were characterized by “sadness in the prose” that suggested to him that “I had nothing important left to write about, that maybe I was not really a writer—I thought often of becoming a psychoanalyst.” Indeed, the short stories coming out of this time were all characterized by beaten protagonists, culminating with “The Man Who Studied Yoga” whose narrator is disembodied and distinct from Mailer’s pathetic protagonist Sam Slovoda—a narrator who finally takes his leave of Sam, as if it is Mailer who has purged these negative aspects of himself with his writer’s block. This group of stories includes three about World War II—“The Paper House,” “The Language of Men,” and “The Dead Gook” (all written by the end of 1951)—and two in the city: “The Notebook” (1951), a scene inspired by an argument with his wife Adele, and “Yoga” (April 1952). In addition to similar protagonists, these stories are also interested in psychology, the external forces that influence one’s psyche, and the destructive “power of psychoanalysis in popular culture,” and “Yoga” explicitly addresses these issues with a metafictive narrator. After abandoning Lipton’s and publishing The Deer Park, Mailer finishes his short-fiction writing career with four more stories: “The Time of Her Time” (1958), “The Killer: A Story” (1960), “Truth and Being: Nothing and Time” (1960), and “The Last Night: A Story” (1962). Written after “The White Negro,” these stories pave the way for the Mailer’s ultimate Hipster protagonist Stephen Rojack in An American Dream and also illustrate Mailer’s more successful protagonists: ones who succeed in promoting their individual identity by transgressing the limits of pleasure and social constraints even if the effects are only temporary or ultimately curtailed by sociostatic forces.

Many of the texts from this time period are not short fiction in the traditional sense, while others pushed the limits of the genre, seeming to act as transitions from one state to another. They, like their author, longed to be something grander, more provocative, weighty and significant. His somewhat tongue-in-cheek introduction to his 1967 collection The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer, he begins by stating that he agrees with his critics, both real and imagined, that his short fiction is nothing “splendid, unforgettable, nor distinguished,” and ends by claiming that “The Time of Her Time” and “The Man Who Studied Yoga” are “superior to most good fiction.” He is the Salesman hawking the virtues of his wares with an understated and false modesty. He is a “journeyman” who considers the short story easy to write and who “is seduced more by method than by gold or gem.” For him, “the hearty protagonist” and short story prospector, his concern is experimentation: “short stories are imperfect artifacts—various drillings, diggings, tests, and explosions on the way to finding a certain giant mine, well-advertised over the years by the prospector.”

While he might claim to be a short-story dilettante, Mailer cautions the careful reader not to dismiss his 1967 collection The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer too quickly, as there are treasures to be gleaned with careful excavation. The collection, when considered together, truly does appear as a sounding board for Mailer’s desire to push the limits of short fiction not only in form but in content. Mailer’s short fiction, particularly his later stories, are emblematic of his desire as a writer to see just how far he could stretch the genre and himself. Success, for Mailer, would come to mean being true to himself and his individual vision and not selling out to one imposed from the external world of consumerism, technology, and authoritarianism. Mailer’s later short fiction illustrates this struggle with various outcomes for his protagonists, either with them as victims of external forces set against them or them growing into more through a struggle that’s usually violent, taboo, or apocalyptic. Victories are never final, though there are some little ones that allow for a “fresh start” or a way to move forward to the next struggle. Richard Poirier sees it like this: “By sitting so frequently in self-judgment upon his past he is always implicitly proposing for himself some fresh start in the future” and that allowed his to eschew the “literary manners” of the time to write and rewrite his “persona of the perpetually embattled writer.”

Early-Late Short Fiction

This group of five stories from the winter of 1951–52, three of which are war stories and two take place in the city, all concern a central figure and his struggles with his identity vis-à-vis external forces, usually feminine or feminized that acts as the major antagonistic force. “The Man Who Studies Yoga” stands apart in several ways and acts as a transitional story, both narratively and stylistically to his later short fiction.

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Works Cited

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