A WRITER'S SUMMER:This month, seven inaugural Norman Mailer fellows gathered at the writer's home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Irish writer BRIAN LEYDENwas among them and here he reports on the experience
PROVINCETOWN, Massachusetts, is a gay and lesbian town, a pool party, dance party, beach party, and leather event town. Its houses are sweetly colonial in style, spruce, timber-framed with shingles, dormers, Doric and roman porticos, porches with easy chairs and white picket fences so perfect you expect to meet James Stewart doffing his cap to Katharine Hepburn.
The light is special, opalescent, sea-heightened, making Cape Cod a favourite spot with the painters Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Edward Hopper, who lived down the road in Truro. This “New Orleans of the North”, this “Morocco of America” as Provincetown enthusiast Michael Cunningham calls it, attracted over the years such writers as John Dos Passos, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill.
Norman Mailer – an Aquarius who believed very strongly he had to live by water – first came to Provincetown in 1943, right after he graduated from Harvard, and was stunned by the 18th-century feel of the place. After the war he summered here almost every year and made long visits in the off season. By the early 1990s he was spending the majority of his time in Provincetown and the Mailer clan would gathered here every August – they still do.
It was in 1982 that he bought the house that is now the headquarters of the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony. This month, the seven recipients of the inaugural colony fellowships gathered in the Mailer residence at 627 Commercial Street for a series of seminars, readings, workshops and meetings with writers and editors from the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Playboyand Random House. There's a follow-up programme of summer and autumn workshops ready to roll out. I've been one of the lucky souls on a seven-day scholarship that covers tuition, accommodation, a small food allowance and a bicycle – the best way to get around Provincetown.
Right now, over by the gable-wall-sized fireplace, Lawrence Schiller trains a camera on our group, horseshoed around the work table. Sea-light streams in the triple-paned, floor-to-ceiling windows opening onto the sun deck, the beach, and Provincetown bay. A photographer who took on his first assignment at the age of 15, Larry's friendship with Mailer goes back to 1972, when he organised an exhibition of portraits of Marilyn Monroe by 24 famous photographers. At Larry's behest, publishers Grosset and Dunlap commissioned Mailer to write 15,000 words – he came back with 105,000 that became the book Marilyn. Larry also undertook the original research that Mailer wrote up as The Executioner's Song. And it was through Larry that Mailer got hold of copies of the round-the-clock surveillance files and wire recordings the KGB made of Lee Harvey Oswald's defection to Russia. Mailer incorporated the material into Oswald's Taleand "three and a half years later," Larry says, "the KGB gave this stuff to the president of America". The result is that Larry holds copyright on all three Mailer titles and three further books.
A collector of Chinese avant-garde art, 72-year-old Larry says he returned from a trip to China in August 2007 to find the 84-year-old Mailer frail and breathless, and aware that he was dying. The two were joined by Mike Lennon – Mailer’s authorised biographer – and the talk between the three turned to ideas for a Mailer bequest. Open to the idea but mindful of the shape it would take, Mailer was more concerned with the proofs of his forthcoming book – his argument with God – and the thought of what would become of the house, his counterpart to Hemingway’s Finca Vigia.
The fate of the house took hold of Larry’s imagination that day. But Guy Wolf – who looks after the property year round – takes up the next part of the story with a walk-through tour of the writers’ colony that starts in the dining room where Mailer kept open house, ate, drank, played poker, and gleefully raised arguments with statements such as, “nobody under 40 writes with a style any more”.
A steep, narrow stairs leads to Mailer’s working room under the rafters: a stairs that the elderly Mailer tackled breathless and on crutches to put in his usual 10-hour working day. His desk under the rafters faces west, and the castors of his “sheriff’s” chair have worn grooves in the floorboards. Not that Mailer wrote for 10 hours every day. His exercise bicycle gathered dust, but he believed in naps; the sight of the single bed under the eaves prompting Guy to tell us how Mailer, in The Spooky Art, warns writers to resist masturbation because it puts the capacity for fantasy to non-creative ends – though one can’t help wondering if alimony payments notched up from some of his six marriages didn’t knock more out of him.
Great stacks of cream-coloured document files crammed with research lean in every direction in Mailer's den, the nearest labelled "Himmler", "Goering", and "Hitler's Bunker" – the background reading for Mailer's novel The Castle in the Forest.
"Norman was enraged by Americans unfulfilled promise", Veronica Windholz tells us. "And the way 'a worm' like Lee Harvey Oswald could annihilate the promise of a dream presidency. But many things enraged Norman." And she can say these things because she worked closely as a copy editor with Mailer on six of his books, and later she'll be giving a five-day workshop on bringing clarity, continuity and consistence to what we write – or as Eduard Doga, her partner, put it, "to become our own kibitzer– the guy who watches chess players with a critical overview, but whose job is 'to keep his mouth shut and not have smelly feet'." All told, the literary awards and honours bestowed, the personality, the industry Mailer put into his work, is overwhelming. But around the colony, too, there are original paintings on the walls and darkly striped, rose-patterned wallpaper and rococo furniture introduced by his wife, Norris, which calm the forceful Mailer presence in one of Provincetown's few brick houses – brick being the only material, said Mailer, that could contain him.
Along with Lawrence Schiller, Norris is the co-founder of the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony, set up to encourage the endangered serious writer. Its advisory board includes, Günter Grass, Joan Didion, William Kennedy, Gay Talese and Doris Kearns Goodwin; and its associations with the Michener Centre for Writers, the Norman Mailer Society, and the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas at Austin, where the Mailer archive is kept, amplify the air of “distinction and attainment”.
Among the many photographs of Mailer in the colony you find him meeting Jackie Kennedy, Castro and Capote. But the picture that grabs me has an elderly Gore Vidal standing alongside Hans Janitschek, but with eyes only for his aged and ailing friend Mailer. It’s been said the Irish fight with each other because they can’t find more worthy opponents, and the lifelong brinkmanship between Mailer and Vidal fits that category of feuding. In the photograph, Vidal’s fiercely patrician profile is for once less arresting than the look directed at a loved antagonist; it is a look that reaches as deeply into Vidal’s own mortality as it bestows immeasurable tenderness on his friend and registers an inevitable parting. Norman Mailer died on November 10th, 2007. He is buried in Provincetown.
Brian Leyden wishes to thank the Arts Council for a travel award that enabled him to accept the Norman Mailer Scholarship 2009