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Richard Bradford, "Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
01:12:09
An interview with Richard Bradford
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- [00:01]
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- [01:00]
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- [01:25]
Richard Bradford
Foreign welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:32]
Dan Moran
Hello everybody. Welcome to New Books and Biography, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dan Moran, and I am thrilled to be here today with Richard Bradford, author of Tough the Life of Norman Mailer, just published in January 2023 by Bloomsbury Caravel. Welcome, Richard.
- [01:50]
Richard Bradford
Hi. Nice to be here.
- [01:52]
Dan Moran
Great. So I love the book. I loved every page of it. But I have to start with a big question. The question's a little long, but I have to get your overall take on this. Now, your book is not a work of hagiography. Mailer is portrayed as a philanderer, a drunk, someone who could be intellectually lazy, a loudmouth. He's a bully. He's physically abusive, sometimes to women. We know the story. He stabbed his second wife. You talk about that in the book, but he's also portrayed as a writer with more misses than hits. I just want to read you a few comments on some of his work. You say in his essay about the meaning of Western defense, you quote, I have no idea what this means and nor I suspected Mailer. When you talk about what he wrote for the Village Voice, you say, quote, as a satirist, he is embarrassing. When you talk about his praise for waiting for Godot, you say his praise matches the play in its incomprehensibility. His novel, why Are we in Vietnam? You call dreadful. On his essay, his famous essay, the White Negro, you say, quote, the passages that do make sense are uniformly ghastly. You call his book the Prisoner of Sex, intellectually stunted. Then you get into the later books, you say about ancient evenings, quote, it's astonishing that anyone found it publishable, let alone readable. You say that his biography of Picasso is, quote, equal parts bad and revealing a Mailer's ignorance of the visual arts. And of his last book, the Castle in the Forest, you say, quote, he chose to write about Hitler because he had exhausted all other exhibitors of literary self aggrandizement. Wow. So, all that said, right, why Norman Mailer?
- [03:36]
Richard Bradford
Well, before I get to the question, without entirely avoiding it, I should comment on a couple of reviews that I've had in the national press in the uk and most of them have been okay. And the ones who have put question marks before their qualified approval have seemed to think that I'm some sort of biographer hitman. One of them stated that I conducted a CIA style wet job, as they put it. And at the same time, this was in a liberal newspaper, they conceded that Mailer is, as I say he is, and he did what I say he did. And they seem to think, you know, well, why didn't you let him off? But anyway, back to your question. Why Norman Mailer, really? I might give the impression that I loathe Norman Mailer and everything he has written. In truth, I don't. I think secretly I probably envy him a little bit, but I'm not letting it out. But why did I write about him? Well, as you probably recall, but I'll go through it here anyway. I begin the introduction with a. A sort of fictional hypothesis where there's an agent, a Manhattan agent, in his office trying to work out what he's going to say to one of his best, most popular writers, who has just submitted a novel on literary writing, the current state of the literary world, in which he portrays a male writer who is a psychopath who deals with his reviewers if they don't give him a particularly praiseworthy review with a pickaxe handle, who is a prize winning lothario, who beats his wives, who on one occasion uses a samurai sword at a party to seek revenge upon one of his literary rivals. If he wasn't so drunk and full of drugs, he would have finished the job. But the ambulance arises too soon. Eventually he's elected Governor of New York State. And among his policies are bear baiting in Central park and the legalising of the public flogging of paedophiles. And the agent has read this novel or the. The script of this novel, and he gets onto his author and he said, it's exciting, but this is supposed to be a realist novel. No one is going to believe this. Okay, we know it's fiction, but it has to be credible. And then he thinks, maybe I could sell it. And then he thinks, no, I can't. It's too close to the actual real story that is the life of Norman Mailer. So you can see why I made that up. Because Norman Mailer's life is too bizarre for fiction. In many ways, as I also said, everyone, I suppose, most American writers of the 20th century and 21st century, the Holy Grail is the great American novel, so called. I think the great American novel is the life of Norman Mailer, except that it's not a novel. So I'm not claiming to have written the great American novel, but the story of his life is quite astonishing.
- [07:31]
Dan Moran
It is astonishing. In your defense, I never thought it was a wet job at all. I mean, you'd have to be kind of a miserable person to just want to devote your life to somebody or devote all that time and work to somebody you loathe and whose work you all loathe and things like that. So I still. I always had the spirit that you were like, you can't look away from him. No matter what you think about, Norman Mailer is a force of nature.
- [07:54]
Richard Bradford
Yeah, exactly. He's addictive in many ways.
- [07:59]
Dan Moran
Yeah, he is.
- [08:00]
Richard Bradford
Even though you feel, I can't put up with this anymore, you find yourself grinning at not putting up with it anymore because, I mean, you feel ashamed about enjoying it when you read about him.
- [08:15]
Dan Moran
But that's not spot on. Absolutely. Let's talk about the title, because there were times when I was reading it, I thought, and the COVID image is terrific, of him about to spar with the light bulb. There are times I thought the title was ironic. Like sometimes his idea of being tough was to headbutt somebody or drink a whole bottle of bourbon before he gave a speech. How did you decide on that title?
- [08:36]
Richard Bradford
Well, I confess I give credit here to my Bloomsbury editor, Jane Parsons. We were talking about it and I'd come up with other ideas, and she said, I mean, she's a great salesperson. She said, right, we've got to be snappy. We want two short monosyllables. Which will also evoke the name of a particular book that everyone will associate with Norman Mailer. So it was simple as that. Tough guy.
- [09:06]
Dan Moran
Yeah. For tough guys don't dance. Yeah.
- [09:10]
Richard Bradford
It has a certain impact, if you like. Yes, yes. Credit to her.
- [09:16]
Dan Moran
Great. Let's start going through his life as you do in the book. So, you know, we know he went to. We'll skip his early days, but he went to Harvard. He gradu in 1943. And you write about him there, kind of reveling in this role as like a troublemaker. You call him a conspicuous outsider. You say sometimes he might have bordered on being an adolescent self publicist. And he loved this idea of an outsider his whole life. Like he would dress down on formal occasions. What did he enjoy about his time at Harvard? What did he enjoy about that role?
- [09:45]
Richard Bradford
Again, it's impossible to read so far back and know exactly, even from accounts from people who were his peers and contemporaries at the time. You can't really mind read the condition of someone of that age in that period. But all I can say is that the way he behaved and the way he presented himself at Harvard, it seemed to prefigure his career as a writer, even though at the time it wasn't certain and he wasn't certain that he wanted to be a writer. But he certainly enjoyed being the person who was difficult to categorize. Yeah, he cultivated a kind of smirking unpredictability. He liked to dodge anything straightforward. No one could really pin him down. And in many ways you could see him enjoying this at Harvard while you could look forward and see that this was going to be the Norman Mailer of the books that he wrote, the Norman Mailer of the various personae that he adopted as the literary superstar, and so on and so on. So, yeah, I think that Mailer at Harvard was the apprentice version of Mehler in his later years as a writer and a cultural super soul.
- [11:19]
Dan Moran
Yeah, that's a great way to put it. The Apprentice years. Right. You say there that he. That at Harvard he developed his credo of, and this is your quote, wanting to write things that would upset people. And that's where he figured that out.
- [11:31]
Richard Bradford
That's true. But I don't think he simply wished to cause offense. He was a rebel. But he was also at the same time a mischievous egotist. He wanted to draw attention to himself by annoying people. So in a way, he didn't want to upset people or offend people because he was intrinsically malicious. He did it in all sorts of ways. Without necessarily wanting to hurt them too much, but he wanted them to look at him and remember him and make sure he'd leave an impression on them. And again, that was Mehler later in his life as well.
- [12:23]
Dan Moran
Yeah. That certainly. That was the arc of his career. Right. And you point out that. And also a thing that went from Harvard on is that Mailer wanted to be kind of like both an insider and. And an outsider at the same time. Right. So there's a part in the book. We'll talk about the Naked and the Dead in a few minutes, but there's a part where you talk about how he got the film rights that were paid for the Naked and the Dead. He gets all this money. Right. And you say he's trying to be a Trotskyist, but at the same time he enjoyed having all this money. Right. And you quote Diana Trilling as saying that he was a chameleon and he would slip between these radical hipster Persona and somebody who enjoyed very much being part of that social and cultural hierarchy. Right. So was he what people would call, like, a Mercedes Marxist? Like, how much of this was opposed? What do you think?
- [13:09]
Richard Bradford
Yeah. Or the English version of that? Is the Bollinger Bolshevik? Yeah, I know what you mean. I don't think it was opposed to really, in the sense that he wasn't so much putting it on as living an anomaly. I mean, because, like so many people in Western countries, in the States, probably less so now, and certainly in the uk, they would very often be committed to Marxism and its various manifestations as an ideal, but at the same time, they happily ignored an anomaly. Most of them would either be born into a position of privilege or they would have attained it themselves because they were doing well at whatever their career involved, whether it was in the media or writing or the theater or filmmaking or whatever. The anomaly that they happily and absurdly ignored was that if capitalism was replaced by socialism, their agreeable lifestyle would come to an end almost immediately. So they turn their eyes away from that. I mean, it's hilarious. I know.
- [14:34]
Dan Moran
It is. It is. So let's talk about that first book. So we mentioned the Naked and the Dead. So that's completed in 1947. You tell the story that it ran to 900 pages. It took nine months to get into print. It was just reissued, I think, this month by the Library of America.
- [14:50]
Richard Bradford
Yep.
- [14:51]
Dan Moran
Put him on the map. Skyrockets him to fame, as the cliche goes. Tell the story about reception of the reception of that book. And like, what it did for mailer and his reputation.
- [15:01]
Richard Bradford
Well, I mean, apart from the reception, it's. It again, there's a lot of debate still on the most important novels of World War II, or the most important novels immediately following World War II, which almost inevitably meant that they were written by people who in some way experience the conflict. And it is one of the best World War II novels. And I think it's good because it epitaphizes a form of documentary realism that's quite rare for war novels. And he did this. He achieved this in two ways. He met many of his fellow servicemen, the ones he met when he was going out to Pacific and when he served there as well. Many of them were interviewed later, once he'd attained an enormous degree of fame and about the novel in particular. And they said they could never work out why he would continuously want to talk to people, not just about trivial events or sex or whatever, but he'd sit there talking to them incessantly, listening and making notes as well. And what he was doing was without a tape recorder, recording accents and idioms and the way that people presented themselves as in. In the way that they spoke and the way that they use language as a form of Persona, their Persona and so on and so on. And these notebooks were part of the novel. The second aspect were the letters he wrote to his first wife, May, and she kept them all because it's assumed, although we have no absolute record of this, that he asked her to. And when he got back, she didn't co write the novel, but she helped him with it. In practical terms, they drew enormous diagrams and he was using, I mean, with some parts of the letters, you can see, not quite verbatim shifts, but you can see how he was using, say, the scenes of the mountains when he was traveling across the States to the west coast and the sea and, you know, the islands in the Pacific. These were immediate impressions. And when he got back to the States, he was using these as raw material for the novels. So it was brilliant documentary realism. And I think the reception to the novel, you know, it was celebrated because of that. And it got what it deserved. It was. It was and is a great book. I think it's probably his best book, to be honest.
- [17:53]
Dan Moran
Really?
- [17:53]
Richard Bradford
Yeah, well, it's best. His best piece of pure fiction anyway.
- [17:58]
Dan Moran
Sure, sure. So going through his career, you talk about this idea about him being an insider and an outsider and how he loved these roles he played. I want to ask you about another one. He was involved with his friend John Malacquai. They were Hired by Samuel Goldwyn of Metro Golden Meyer to co author a screenplay of Nathaniel West's Miss Lonely Hearts. And Miller kept getting, you tell us, bogged down by turning the film into a sermon. And that Goldwyn said to him, and one of his Goldwinisms, I love this quote, mailer, please stop this professional writer shit and start writing. Now, that's a great. But it taps into the way Mailer lived. Like, he loved this professional writer shit, right? Like, how did he see his role as a writer or especially as like an American 20th century writer?
- [18:42]
Richard Bradford
Well, the period he spent in Hollywood. I'm not digressing here because I think it's relevant to your question. It is. The Deer park, in many ways, was a degree of sermonizing because it's a very moral take on corruption and sexual exploitation in Hollywood, so on and so on. But in truth, he actually enjoyed it quite a lot. So in a way, he was alienating himself from something he did quite like. I mean, there's an anecdote about how they were given in the studio an office and a room next door to it with a bed. They couldn't work out what it was for, and it was for use by their secretaries and them, because they were asked what sort of what nationality of secretary and what hairstyle of secretary they wanted. It only became apparent to them that they weren't secretaries at all. Well, they might be able to do the typing, but they would provide other services at the same time. And I think a much better novel could have been written that was horribly comic about this, but he chose not to. But back to your question, his role was a professional writer? Well, despite pretending to be appalled by the sexual exploitation, corruption, and conspicuous consumption of Hollywood, he loved the place. And in many ways, he wanted to remain part of it while living mostly from his writing. So in a way, he could see how his career as a writer, if he continued to be successful, would be similar to that who succeeded in Hollywood. And that's the way he continued to live, although he didn't admit it or rarely admitted it anyway.
- [20:43]
Dan Moran
Right. It was. It's funny because one portrait of Mailer in the book is that it's the opposite of, say, like the withdrawn artist who works in a garret. It just wants to be heard by a few. Like, he was. He was like a brass band.
- [20:57]
Richard Bradford
Quiet. Yes, absolutely.
- [21:01]
Dan Moran
So let's talk about. You talked about the secretaries. This leads me on to my next question. So we go through. You go through his six wives, right? It's like shades of Henry VIII or Something.
- [21:09]
Richard Bradford
And.
- [21:09]
Dan Moran
And you go through his whole story. And I couldn't help but think of the famous line by Samuel Johnson, you know, who once described second marriages as the triumph of hope over experience. So this is just a. I don't know if you can answer this, because it's a. It goes into his psyche. But why did Mailer feel the need to keep marrying? Like, why not be this unmarried Lothario? He kept doing it. You think by, you know, the fifth time, he'd be like, all right, maybe. Maybe I'm not the marrying type. But he kept going and going and going.
- [21:36]
Richard Bradford
Oh, yeah. Well, I was. I mean, in my head, I've been trying to do a bit of basic arithmetic, but I've come to a rough account. And after he was first married, until his death, he was only unmarried for about a month.
- [22:02]
Dan Moran
Wow.
- [22:03]
Richard Bradford
Really? I'd say just about a month. As soon as each marital relationship ended, practically always in disaster, he almost always married again as rapidly as possible. It was nearly always the case that the person he would marry before the previous marriage had ended, he would be having an affair with. But he didn't hang around. I mean, there was no courtship involved. He married them as soon as he could, as soon as the divorce was ended. So he was married. In a way, he was a sort of schizophrenic monogamist. He stayed married for all of his life, but to different people, if you see what I mean.
- [22:54]
Dan Moran
Yes.
- [22:56]
Richard Bradford
And at the same time, he was still having a double life, even though he was the, as I put it, schizophrenic, monogamous monogamist. He was persistently and continuously having affairs with other people. Almost from the beginning of every new marriage. He started having an affair with somebody else.
- [23:17]
Dan Moran
Yeah.
- [23:22]
Richard Bradford
There's something curious about this. The one woman he remained faithful to insofar as his love for her was unswerving and he never deliberately caused her distress. Was his mother right? And I. You know, I don't like amateur psychoanalysis, but Freud might have been right, though. You never know.
- [23:50]
Dan Moran
Yeah. She doted on him, too, according to your book.
- [23:53]
Richard Bradford
Yeah. I mean. Yeah. When. When he finally won the. Well, when he won the Pulitzer Prize for Armies of the Night, there's that wonderful quote where she's saying, why didn't he get it before? Obviously, somebody's conspiring against him. He should have the Nobel Prize. And you could almost hear the sort of New York Jewish accent coming through here.
- [24:19]
Dan Moran
It's funny, because when you talk about Harlot's ghost at the End of the book, you say that he was in love with this idea of seduction. Like he loved. He loved all of these, you know, double and secret agents of his heart, so to speak.
- [24:32]
Richard Bradford
Yeah. Yes, you're right. He loved the thrill of trying to keep sex or his sexual infidelities secret. Hence he enjoyed what he called the research regarding spy writing for Harlot's Ghost. But the irony there was that while he was doing the research for Harlot's Ghost, he was also using that time away from Norris, his final wife, to have an affair as well.
- [25:08]
Dan Moran
Right.
- [25:08]
Richard Bradford
His problem was that although he was slightly obsessed and fantasized about the CIA, he was utterly incompetent at, shall we call it, sexual espionage. He always got found out. Yeah.
- [25:26]
Dan Moran
He was always caught, you would think. I laughed at myself as I read your book. Like, after however many times it is, you think like, he never got any better at this. He never became a true CIA operative.
- [25:40]
Richard Bradford
Yeah. Because he never found it easy to keep anything secret. Not that he gave it away deliberately. He's just so careless.
- [25:49]
Dan Moran
Yes, Careless is the perfect word for it. That's perfect. Right. So let's move on to some of his. If we can do this, this might be even tougher than trying to pin him down psychologically. But let's try to pin him down, like, politically and culturally. Right. If you. If someone asked you, like, what are two or three of his, like, core ideas or the ideas that Norman Mailer brought to the American scene in his career, like, what would you say some of them were? The big ones?
- [26:13]
Richard Bradford
Well, oh, dear, to be honest, you. I suppose you could try to pick some. If you wanted to select some in terms of quotations and then summarize them, you could do that, but you'd be telling lies, really. I don't. I don't think, in truth, he had any ideas that were sincere and coherent. He used ideas in all sorts of ways. I mean, the white Negro was an unintended black comedy in many ways because it was a. It was a collection of idiocies. I. I don't. I have no idea what ideologies he thought he was invoking in this. If you could, if you could. I suppose if you were being charitable, you might call him a. A careless anarchist in the sense that I've always been puzzled by anarchy in that it's supposed to be a sort of coherent political ideology, but it always, to me, invokes, I don't know, laziness. You know, I don't really care about all political organization. I just, you know, rather not bother, really. And the white Negro and many other of his ideas, he'd pick up things which he knew would be shocking, and he'd sort of throw them into the mix that they might. The fact that they might contradict other aspects of his supposed ideological position didn't seem to matter to him. I mean, there was a terrible anecdote in the white Negro where he has the two thugs, or the two young Latinos they're supposed to be, who shoot the shopkeeper. And he seems to eulogize them in a way. You know, these are the heroes of the new America, you can think. But what about the shopkeeper? You know, he had a family, for God's sake. But because they are in some ways, in some way sort of existential, anarchic heroes, they deserve more attention than the family left behind by the shock. It was all completely bonkers. I don't think he has had a political position that you could pin down at all. It was just him, the showman, basically. Yeah.
- [28:58]
Dan Moran
You talk about him giving a speech and you say that he sounded like an undergraduate preparing a paper half an hour before the seminar. And I thought that was a perfect simile.
- [29:08]
Richard Bradford
Yes, quite. I mean, that's exactly what I meant by. He was far more articulate than someone of that age, I suppose. But when you try to pin down what he was actually talking about, if you had a record of these things, there are accounts of when he gave some of his early speeches and his wife and friends of his sort of turning to look at one another, and none of them could quite work out what was going on or what was going to happen next.
- [29:47]
Dan Moran
Right.
- [29:48]
Richard Bradford
It was enormously entertaining but slightly disturbing at the same time.
- [29:53]
Dan Moran
Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about him being articulate, because one of the things your book inspired me to do was I went down the YouTube rabbit hole and I watched many, many clips of Mailer. I watched him speaking. I watched his inter. And I want to ask you about. In 1962, you talk about how he debated William F. Buckley in front of this sellout crowd of 3,600 people, which is great. And you can go back. And I've watched the episodes on Firing Line with Buckley and Mailer, and the two of them are really, really great together. Now, we know from other sources that, like, Buckley and Mailer actually did get. They should be a snake and a mongoose, but they got along very well outside of their. Each of their respective shticks, you could say. Right. So do you think that that Kind of like, thing is vanished. Public intellectual life, like this idea, like you have Mailer debating, you know, Buckley and those kinds of figures, you think that's kind of gone.
- [30:46]
Richard Bradford
Yeah. There's two aspects of that. I think it has gone both in the US and in Britain and in most parts of continental Europe as well, probably. And again, I'm gonna sound slightly pompous here, mainly because the general public's attention span and general interest in ideas have both diminished considerably since 1962 because of the way that the media and social media have gradually eaten into our sense of wanting to listen to things and continue to or maintain an interest in things that might involve a challenge that's going to last more than about two or three minutes. So, yeah, that has diminished. You say, you know, 3,600 people who would turn up for something like that and stay interested in it. And also, they weren't. He and Buckley, as you point out, were quite good friends, and they weren't performing when they went up against each other in a sort of verbal boxing match. They did hold different ideas, but at the same time, they could be comfortable with themselves while being opponents on the stage. And that sort of thing has disappeared, largely. Yeah. Both in politics and in the world and in the world of culture and literature as well.
- [32:27]
Dan Moran
Yeah. I 100% agree. And I love what you said about that because. Because when you watch those clips of Firing Line, it's really just two people in two chairs. There's no flash. There's. There's zero flash. It's literally just two people talking about ideas.
- [32:40]
Richard Bradford
Yeah.
- [32:40]
Dan Moran
For an hour.
- [32:41]
Richard Bradford
Yeah. You won't find that on television and certainly not live on stage now at all. It has. It doesn't exist anymore.
- [32:55]
Dan Moran
Right, Right.
- [32:56]
Richard Bradford
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- [33:42]
Dan Moran
So he got along well with Buckley, but not with Gore Vidal. And he was another great 20th century figure, another character, so to speak, from this pantheon that we have to talk about. So you tell the story and you can. Everyone who's listening could see this on YouTube, talk about what happened when they were booked on the Dick Cavett show in 1971.
- [34:00]
Richard Bradford
Well, the. The argument, if you want to put it in that way, between Gore Vidal and Mailer, I suppose, began when they first met towards the end of the 50s, when they were both making a name in literature. And it was clear that even at that point, Mailer in many ways resented Vidal, probably because he thought that he was part of the. He was born into the. The American social aristocracy, and he had become part of the cultural and literary aristocracy. And Mailer felt that, you know, why not me? But at the Cabot show, as usual, Mailer had had several substances, had taken several substances, and drank a lot of stuff as well. And there's subtext that the audience didn't appreciate, because at one point he accused Vidal of. He said, you. You murdered Jack Kerouac. And the audience was sort of puzzled and staring at one another because two years earlier, they knew that Kerouac had almost certainly drunk himself to death. He had several serious medical conditions, but in fact, he bled to death because his liver was in a mess. And how could he have murdered Jack Kerouac? But the subtext of this was that around 10, 11 years before, when Mailer and Vidal were knocking around in the same literary circles, Mailer was driving him back from a party in Provincetown. And in his typically insouciant manner, Vidal said, when they were talking about Kerouac. And so I said, oh, yes, I can't quote it verbatim because there's no record of it. Something like, I slept with the weekend. And Mailer almost crashed the car because apart from anything else, he thought homosexuality was a disease. And throughout the decade afterwards, he privately blamed Vidal for turning Kerouac into an alcoholic and ruining his career, because in many ways he'd infected him with homosexuality. And that's what led to this bus stop. It was preposterous, ridiculous, hideous in many ways, but horribly black comic as well.
- [36:55]
Dan Moran
He slapped Vidal before they went on stage, right in the green room.
- [36:58]
Richard Bradford
It wasn't the only time as, well, he pushed him over a table of. Well, he was loaded with food and drink at a literary launch at some point. And Vidal was getting used to this in 2002. It was quite charming, really. They made up in Provincetown at the Repertory Theater. Mailer and his wife, his final wife, Norris, decided to do a performance of Don Juan in Hell. And he wrote to Vidal saying, would you like to fly over and play the devil? And Vidal thought he was joking. He thought this was a sick joke. He said, no, no, no, not at all. And Vidal, to his credit, even though he's at that time, you know, he was almost the same age, he was occasionally using a zimmer frame. He flew over, and there was this performance with Mailer, the debaucher, Norris, his occasional paramar as Donna Anna, and Vidal as the devil. And the audience packed the place every night because these figures from Liffri, legend of the past 50 years were having such a good time playing out this slightly ridiculous drama, but having a good time of it as well. So, yeah, in the end, it all, you know, ended happily, I suppose.
- [38:46]
Dan Moran
Yeah. The drama off stage and on. I also have to. I have to tell the listeners the story. I love how you say when. When Norman Mailer threw Vidal over the table, that Vidal actually got the bet. He got the last laugh because he said, once again, Norman, I see words fail you. So from Gore Vidal to jfk. So Mailer had a great enthusiasm for jfk. You say that Mailer thought JFK was going to be America's savior, that Mailer imagined himself becoming this Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Like figure to advise the president. And JFK had a meeting with him. He was briefed on what Mailer's books were about, but that after JFK won, that's it. He cut the ties. And I. And, you know, jfk, he did the same thing with Sinatra. Sinatra thought he'd become part of that inner circle. And JFK gets elected, and it's like, okay, we're cutting ties with Sinatra, too. So do you think that Mailer was just kryptonite? Like, JFK was like, I can't have this guy around me? Or was that part of, you know, that was.
- [39:44]
Richard Bradford
Also.
- [39:45]
Dan Moran
Seems to be Mailer's idea of himself, like, advisor to the president? Can you talk about his relationship with jfk?
- [39:51]
Richard Bradford
Yeah, well, when. When. When Mailer was first invited to the Kennedy House, when he was running for the presidency, you know, he was. He was flattered and fascinated. But apparently what happened was that there'd been a. The. The Democrats had used this representation of. Sorry, my mind's gone blank. His. His. Who else is a. Selling for the president at the Same time.
- [40:28]
Dan Moran
Oh, what, Nixon or Humphrey or against?
- [40:31]
Richard Bradford
Against Kennedy in his first.
- [40:34]
Dan Moran
Yeah. Was it. Was Nixon Nixon, yeah.
- [40:39]
Richard Bradford
They presented Nixon as a slightly swarthy car salesman.
- [40:44]
Dan Moran
Right.
- [40:46]
Richard Bradford
And the Republicans, in many ways to their credit, came back with this, with this story of, say, you know, he might sell you slightly wonky cars, but what JFK will do is sell you the car, come round to make sure it's serviced, then pop round the day after and have sex with your wife. The Kennedy crew were getting a bit disturbed with this because they thought, actually this is true, because no one outside the circle knew that JFK was a serial philanderer. But they were a bit disturbed because they thought, well, they wondered if the Republicans knew this and would they begin to start releasing quietly pieces of information to the press. So the real reason that Mailer was brought in was as. Was potentially as a source, how much did you know the media know about what JFK was like? So once he'd satisfied himself from Mailer that they didn't really know very much at all, he was booted out. But at the same time he saw things very differently. He thought he was being recruited to the court as a special advisor. But no, once, once that slight moment of doubt was settled, they didn't want anything more to do with him. But he continued to write bizarre letters to them offering advice on, you know, the problems in the south and Cuba and God knows what. And they never ever wrote back again. It was part of the bizarre comedy of his life.
- [42:28]
Dan Moran
Yeah, JFK took out a ten foot pole.
- [42:30]
Richard Bradford
They must, you know, they must. We have no record of what they actually said, but they must have thought, how can we get rid of this nutcase who continues to write us letters about how he can help us?
- [42:46]
Dan Moran
So JFK is elected, JFK is assassinated. We move on to Johnson. Let's talk now about something. You know, we've beat up on Mailer a lot, something he does really well. In 1968, he gets his first Pulitzer for Armies of the Night. And that's his book about the 1967 anti Vietnam protest. Now this one you like, you like this book a lot. You say that the book works because it allows Mailer to, quote, embed his sometimes deranged prophecies of the previous 15 years with a portrait of America that seemed authentic. So, you know, how does this book epitomize what you think Mailer does well as a writer?
- [43:21]
Richard Bradford
Well, I think the key to its success is in its subtitle, which is, you know, as you know, from the COVID history As a novel, the novel as history. Because after Mailer, I think, realized that his career as a pure fiction writer was going to be limited, he turned instead to this half breed form of never pure fiction, never pure non fiction. And the Armies of the Night was his best version of that blend. Because although he didn't change any facts about what happened or as he saw it happening, and as things were reported to him during the protests at the Pentagon and so on and so on, what he did was to tell it as though it were a novel. So in many ways it's true and in other ways it's a version of the truth. And that's what he did. Quite. He's juggling, basically. He's keeping balls in the air persistently, continuously. You know, these things actually happened. And you know that Norman Mailer is there because he's a character in his own novel. But at the same time, you're never quite sure about how the nuances and the presentation shift things slightly towards the way he wants you to see it, rather than towards a purely documentary account of what actually happened. So I think it is very good in that sense.
- [45:08]
Dan Moran
Yeah. You wonder about the tension between the Mailer in the book and the Mailer who wrote it.
- [45:12]
Richard Bradford
Yeah, quite.
- [45:16]
Dan Moran
I wholly enjoyed the part of your book, this might have been my favorite part of the book, where you talk about his second run in 1969 for mayor of New York City with Jimmy Breslin as his running mate. I knew this happened vaguely, but reading your book filled in all the gaps I had. And this part was just terrific. Right. So you tell the story of how Jimmy Breslin, who was this great, roll up your sleeves, rough and tumble New York reporter, he kept quitting or threatening to quit over what you called the deranged element of Mailer's proposal. So Mailer bursts on the seat. Now, it's funny, you just reminded me that Buckley also ran for mayor of New York City and also didn't work. But. So Mailer would give these press conferences and have all of these crazy proposals about what was going to happen if he were mayor of New York City, what were some of these proposals? And tell the story of how he did as a candidate.
- [46:05]
Richard Bradford
Yeah, I mean, and you say his partner was sometimes have his head in his hands. He couldn't believe what he'd taken on here because Mailer's various aspects of his manifesto were sort of planned logically in advance, but he keep adding to them as the campaign went on. And his team was variously frustrated and going insane. By what he'd say next, I mean some of the less controversial. He decided that New York City would be made up of little districts which would have a certain amount of autonomy. And he said to make sure that, you know, that there was no. Instead of the old differences in terms of ethnicity or gang war for warfare or anything like that, the old days of the metropolis, there would be stickball competitions which would be a sort of a friendly version of baseball where each area would play each other at stickball. And, you know, there'd be reconciliations all over the metropolis. There'd be free loan of bicycles for all commuters because he was trying to cut down on cars because of pollution and because of the danger pedestrians and allow people to exercise continuously in Central Park. There will be no charge for day centers and nurseries. And there'd be farmers markets that would be exclusively devoted to produce by farmers from the periphery of the city that would be brought in. You know, he marioned it sometimes with horses and carts and so on. And you think, this is bizarre. It was rather like the green city of the present day. But you know, you shouldn't get carried away by this image because there was a degree of manic, weird hedonism involved as well. Because he wanted legalized casinos where gambling would be encouraged rather than people wasting their money on other things. And there would be an annual Grand Prix in Central park, not with sort of Formula one cars, but with the most expensive sports cars in the world. So people could sit around and admire these things crashing and their owners dying, if necessary. Drug addicts would get free methadone and they'd be given this by usually policemen who'd hand it out to them. So again, this would control crime. And policemen would be encouraged to take up or live in apartments in some of the most crime ridden areas of the city. And he seriously expected the police to put up with this. And of course, he also would excuse every person in the city military service without facing the problem of how he was going to get around this with Washington. And the most famous, of course, was his version of sweet Sundays. Every month there'd be a sweet Sunday where there'd be no traffic, no airplanes, all electricity would be turned off. And people would just sit around contemplating the niceness of everything. And at various points he'd be quizzed on this. You know, people were rather puzzled and they'd say, but what about winter? You know, what if it snows? 2ft of snow and how do I get down the street? And famously, he just sort of sit there Staring at the floor. People would say, I need to take my grandmother down to the shop and I can't get through with the snow. How can I get there without a snowplow? I piss on it, right.
- [50:22]
Dan Moran
I piss on it. Right.
- [50:24]
Richard Bradford
People say, but what about hospitals? You know, hospitals need electricity to keep various things going to keep people alive. And we talk about what about, you know, these sweet Sundays where people are dying in hospitals. Well, impeach me.
- [50:42]
Dan Moran
Yeah.
- [50:44]
Richard Bradford
And at the, at these points, at this point, members of his team were having a nervous breakdown.
- [50:49]
Dan Moran
Right. But it was because Jimmy Breslin. Yeah, really did believe these things like Jimmy Breslin did. He, he really thought he was in for a real campaign.
- [51:00]
Richard Bradford
Yeah. And it was a, it was a, it was a bizarre version of his half digested notions of anarcho Marxism and the sort of life that he enjoyed himself, that he'd offer to everyone else without really having to work for it. Right.
- [51:22]
Dan Moran
Yeah, everyone. A whole city of Norman Mailers. So let's move ahead. And of course, you know, you talk about how he did in the polls. Like he came in like, I think fifth or.
- [51:34]
Richard Bradford
Yeah, I think he, I think he came with a considerable vote though, you know, so some of the other. Can. There were, there were several people who stood, who were leftist, left ish, I suppose, and who never forgave him because he denied them what they thought was their share of the vote because there were serious politicians and, you know, people mad enough to believe that Mailer could do this voted for him and they deprived them of the boat.
- [52:12]
Dan Moran
Yeah, yeah. So that's over. And then we move on to 1979. We move on to the Executioner song that got him his second Pulitzer. Now, just to review the story for our listeners, if they don't know, you know, Gary Gilmore committed two murders in cold blood during two robberies in 1976. He was executed in 1977 after a 10 year period of no executions in the United States. And this seems to be the one book that even Mailer's enemies don't begrudge him. Like, like I've met a lot of people will say, oh, Norman Mailer, he's blah, blah, blah. But the Executioner song, that's a terrific book. Now you acknowledge the power of that book, but you have this caveat in there, and I thought this was really interesting. Here's what you say about the book. You say Mailer played a game of smoke and mirrors. He did not quite alter the facts of Gilmore's life, crimes and eventual fate. But Turned them into a spare existential artwork and therefore embargoed the question of whether Gilmore was just a small minded narcissist who killed people because he felt like it. So I love that you say he embargoed the question. So you have this 1100 page book that's going to be this, you know, piercing look into the soul of America. But the key question, you say Mela kind of sidesteps and he embargoes it. Right. Can you talk about that?
- [53:29]
Richard Bradford
Yeah, again, it's. You can see that he's doing something not dissimilar to the Armies of the Night, where he. There's a great deal of pretty exemplary search into the background to Gilmour himself even before the murders, the murders themselves, the trial, the events running up to his eventual execution by firing, fraud and so on and so on. Nothing or hardly anything is distorted in terms of factual reportage. But again, there's this aspect of Gilmour and people he knew who again, at the same time are based on real individuals who are turned into. Exemplars of some sort of, as I say, an existential tragedy artwork, if you like. And while we wonder always about the nature of Gary Gilmour, because we follow the story of Gary Gilmour to his execution, what he notably ignores, perhaps because he has to, is how the people of the two, the families of the two people he killed feel about this. In many ways, it would have been impossible for him to write the novel had he even speculated on the effects of Gilmour's act. Without actually going into Gilmour's mindset when he committed these crimes, had he speculated on the effect of those families, it would have ruined the novel. So I think that that's really behind my claim or caveat, as you point out, that he embargoes the true nature of Gary Gilmour. If he'd said something or speculated even on the effect of what happened, both of the people who probably had, who knows, five minutes before the bullet went through their brains to die, or the people who had to view the bodies and then bury them. Now he couldn't touch that at all. I mean, I'm anti capital punishment completely, but I think there's something slightly unsettling about turning murder and capital punishment, where it is part of the judicial system, into what is, to be blunt, a form of entertainment. Although I know it seems to diminish the quality of the book to say that. And it is a good book, but I feel very uneasy about it personally.
- [56:50]
Dan Moran
Yes, unease is a great way to put it because you wonder as you read the book, I mean, I've read it again maybe five or six years ago, you wonder like, does Mailer want Gary Gilmore to be like Meursault in the Stranger where he's this existential, you know, hero, or is he something else and you can't quite pin him down and that makes you very uneasy.
- [57:10]
Richard Bradford
He certainly doesn't romanticize him as a hero in inverted commas.
- [57:15]
Dan Moran
Right.
- [57:15]
Richard Bradford
But at the same time, he deliberately avoids other questions.
- [57:20]
Dan Moran
Right.
- [57:21]
Richard Bradford
And other, shall we say, emotional issues that surround what he did.
- [57:29]
Dan Moran
Right.
- [57:30]
Richard Bradford
Which inevitably he had. He had to in order to write the book, as it stands.
- [57:34]
Dan Moran
Yeah.
- [57:35]
Richard Bradford
Which makes.
- [57:36]
Dan Moran
Defensive, I was gonna say his defensive.
- [57:39]
Richard Bradford
As I say, a slightly disturbing piece of work.
- [57:43]
Dan Moran
Yeah. But would Mailer's defense, you think be, I left all that stuff out because I wanted, I wanted you to take this story in and think about it. Do you think that's a fair defense of.
- [57:56]
Richard Bradford
Well, I don't, I don't. I don't think that if, if you're going to. Because there are certain parts of it where it's not focused exclusively on Gilmour. He talks about how he, he thinks him side himself into the brain of Gilmour's girlfriend and you see the world as she saw it when she's driving a car at some point, and so on and so on. And if you're going to do that, if you're going to write it as though it were a novel, a technique he perfected with real life events before and particularly in the Armies of the Night, which parts do you keep in and which parts do you completely exclude? And you begin to wonder about, as well as being aware of which parts he knew he was going to exclude, particularly what's it like being shot by Gary Gilmour? Not what does Gary Gilmour feel as he's being shot? Or what are the situation. What is the situation like as he's, you know, strapped to the chair and being shot. Okay. It's depending. Irrespective of your opinions on capital punishment, I find the whole concept of capital punishment quite appalling myself. But to concentrate on that and to entirely exclude what it's like being shot by Gary Gilmour, because it wouldn't have extinguished them in a millisecond, it would have taken longer than that. And the longer term effects on the friends and family of those people who've been shot by Gary Gilmore and so on and so on. Yeah, you've got to be. That's cruelly selective, I think, in writing something like that.
- [59:52]
Dan Moran
Right. Yeah. And it's funny because the length of the book is a cinder block. So certainly it wasn't any constraints of space that had Mailer keep those things out.
- [60:00]
Richard Bradford
Oh, no, of course not.
- [60:02]
Dan Moran
Anything that never bothered her before. Now, after Gary Gilmore, it's, it's interesting. You're talking about this whole idea about like the theory of the novel and what you include. But then after the Executioner Song, Mailer actually starts to apply some of his ideas. You said before he used ideas and when he intersected with another killer. So who was Jack Henry Abbott and how did he enter Mailer's story?
- [60:27]
Richard Bradford
Well, Jack Henry Abbott, I suppose, purely by coincidence, is, I suppose, another version of Gary Gilmour. Okay, you can say that there are thousands, hundreds of thousands of versions of Gary Gilmour who with regard maybe to their background, have spent a lot of time mixing with the criminal fraternity or of spent a lot of their adult or juvenile adult life in jail. Jack Henry Abbott wrote a letter to Gilmour, wrote a letter to Mailer and explained his situation to him. And he wasn't asking for pity, and he wasn't asking Mailer simply to try and get him out of jail. What he was doing was talking to him as an equal, because he seemed to suggest that in writing about Gilmour, Mailer had written about the sort of people that he, Abbott was too. And Mailer was fascinated, because I think Mailer was fascinated, and I think this tells us a lot about what he was doing when he wrote the Executioner's Song. Because when he read Abbott's first letter and then other letters, he began to see something in them of what he had invented in inverted commas when he recreated Gary Gilmour. And okay, we don't really know what Gary Gilmour was like, but we know what Mailer's Gary Gilmour was like. He didn't romanticize him, but he made him something far more fascinating than the real Gary Gilmour, whatever the real Gary Gilmour was like. And suddenly when he started reading this first person account by Abbott, it must have felt to him that, well, yes, this justified what I did with Gilmour because despite the fact that Abbott was, As I said, spent most of his adult life in prison, was a murderer. He wrote really well, and he wrote in a way that you would expect Gilmour to write. Had he been describing his life and writing the Executioner's Song in the first person, which is what fascinated Mehler. And Mehler did help him to get out of prison because he said that, you know, he in some way reinvented himself as a person with literary talent. And that basically was the premise. And the parole board went along with it. And his book was published and he was released from prison straight into the arms of the literary community. And the book was getting fantastic reviews during the first two weeks of his release. And Mailer met him when he arrived in New York, and within about seven or eight days, he murdered a waiter and went on the run. And it was quite bizarre. He was getting fantastic reviews while the police were looking for him. So it was almost as though Gary Gilmour had walked out of his novel and become someone who was no longer in prison on the run. It was quite a bizarre, actual. Mixture of fiction and fact, except fact was taking over from fiction rather than being. Rather than the two of them being blended or controlled by the writer. Abbott was, for Mailer, rather like someone that he wanted to use or wanted to recreate as he had with Gilmour, and that's why he was so fascinated by him. But he found that he couldn't control or manipulate what was actually going to happen. And Abbott turned out to be a real murderer who committed a real murder, even after he'd written a book about who he was. A very fascinating, well written piece of work is quite the most bizarre story.
- [65:22]
Dan Moran
The whole story reminds me of what you said about the. About the sweet Sundays in the snow. Right. So we have this idea, there'll be no. No power. What if it snows? Well, I'll piss on it. You know that he has this idea because you say that after that, Mailer went to the parole board, I think it was, and said, I willing to gamble with certain elements of society to save this man's talent.
- [65:40]
Richard Bradford
Yeah. And then that's after he's committed the crime, actually written the book. Yeah.
- [65:46]
Dan Moran
And you say, what? Well, one more victim is good for future masterpieces. And you also point out, like, another. Like, it seems like it's. Mailer would make these ideas that you can deflate within three seconds. Because you point out that the waiter that Abbott killed was also an artist. He was a dancer, wasn't he? Or is.
- [66:00]
Richard Bradford
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
- [66:02]
Dan Moran
So that kind of art is different. Like, you know, it takes, you know, three seconds to find a contradiction or a hole in Mailer's argument. But by then he was already onto something else.
- [66:12]
Richard Bradford
In many ways. I mean, the point I made earlier, the stuff that all the material that Mehler was obliged to leave out of the Executioner's Song because it would have, in many ways, have ruined his methodology, to have Included it.
- [66:29]
Dan Moran
Right.
- [66:30]
Richard Bradford
It's almost as though that aesthetic took revenge on him with Abbott, because it came back to him with. And took control of what he thought was, you know, a project that could have been one that he'd invented, but which took. Which took on a life of its own, if you see what I mean.
- [66:52]
Dan Moran
Yeah, absolutely. That's. That's an interesting. There's a revenge of the aesthetic. That's a. That's a terrific way to put it. So Mailer continues writing. He dies in 2007 at the age of 84. Right. So it's 16 years later now. What do you see as the legacy of Norman Mailer? Why do you think people still read him? And why should they?
- [67:11]
Richard Bradford
Well, I think. I think. I think some. Some of his books are. Will endure as really important pieces of fiction and non fiction and hybrids, basically. And I have my doubts about many of them, but that's why I think they will endure, because people will continually argue over them for years to come. You can say that with some authors. They're fixed in the canon, if you want to put it that way, as classics. And in many ways it deadens them when they're like that. You can celebrate them and you can admire how the achievement came to be in this particular period. And eventually this becomes so boring that you just want to stop listening to it and contributing to it. But the point about Mehler, and this, I think, will ensure his legacy, is that he will never be boring, either as an individual or as a writer who never achieved a spectacular sense of creating a faultless classic. The fact that none of his work is faultless means that it will endure because you will end up arguing about, continually arguing about, why didn't he do that? Why on earth did he do that? What went wrong with that? Or why is that so brilliant? And why did it go downhill afterwards? And why on earth did he write something as completely mad as the white Negro? It's always why and how. There are very few writers like that. I think. I think his bizarre. I mean, the first questions you ask, you know, why did he become an outsider? The fact that he became an outsider, he was the person who wouldn't refuse to be categorized. And he stayed like that in the way he behaved with women, in the way he behaved with other people, the way he started fights, the way he was persistently drunk and bizarre and all the rest of it, that was reflected in his writing. So we'll never be able to make up our minds about the real nature of Mailer's writing. Because it reflects the way he was. That's why there'll be a legacy of Norman Mailer.
- [69:56]
Dan Moran
Yeah. That's great. I love how you said he challenges.
- [69:59]
Richard Bradford
The notion of a stable, classic piece of literature. Yeah.
- [70:05]
Dan Moran
He certainly challenges stability. Right. I love it because in the book, you point out, because I'm with you, that I remember reading Ancient Evenings Years ago or trying to finish it. I couldn't get through it. But then Harold Bloom does the review you quote. He says, it's one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. And I've met other people have said, no, that's his best book. And I'm like, what do you mean? That's his. That's like one of his worst books. And that's part of his legacy. Right. Is that people will still argue about these extremes.
- [70:30]
Richard Bradford
He was the only person to win the Literary View Bad Sex Award posthumously because even though he died before the jury came out, they said, well, you know, is it tasteless to give him the Bad Sex Award because he died three months ago. And they thought, no, this is the best piece of bad sex ever written. I mean, it takes some effort to achieve that.
- [70:52]
Dan Moran
I think it does a whole career. So, Richard, it has been absolutely great talking with you today. I urge all of our listeners to get a copy of Tough Guy, the Life of Norman Mailer. You can get it wherever books are sold. Like I said to you when we started, Richard, I enjoyed every page of this. It reawakened my interest in Mailer and in his zaniness and in his flaws and his artistic triumphs. Like we talked about the Naked and the Dead just being republished by the Library of America. So it's very timely. So thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [71:23]
Richard Bradford
Thank you, Daniel. Thank you. I've enjoyed it.