Rivals, Influences, & Affinities: A Selection of Letters

From The Selected Letters of Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon

TO BEATRICE MAILER

[Beatrice Silverman (b. 1922) was NM’s first wife. Much of his first, bestselling novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), was taken wholesale from the hundreds of letters he wrote to Beatrice while overseas.]

June 4, 1945

Sweet Darling,

[… .]

Today darling, was one of great moment of my life. I was given a machine gun. Your baby is awfully heavily armed now. Besides the machine gun, I have a Garand (or cannon)—such a heavy rifle after a carbine and pretty soon I’ll acquire a pistol. If you have to read my letters from now on through a haze of oil it’s only because cleaning the guns is worse than caring for three infants. But starting from today you may address me as Dear Machine-Gunner Mailer. All they have to do now is give me a mortar and flame-thrower, put me on wheels and I’ll be an armored car. Da-da—da-da-dah. Bobo is tickled when he thinks of toting that stuff over hills.

I’ve been reading a novel by Joseph Freeman called Never Call Retreat—one of those books which have the psychoanalyst frame—a neurotic refugee purges on the confessional couch his concentration camp trauma. It’s rather good for the fifty pages I’ve read but unfortunately it’s at the Red Cross in the rear and I have to read it in snatches. But I think you might enjoy it darling. Freeman is a rather famous Marxist literary critic of the 20’s, a contemporary of Max Eastman. Right now I think his attitude is probably pretty close to [Arthur] Koestler’s.

I’ve been trying to read Walden but I find it annoying and dull. The sad truth is that I am the world’s worst scholar. I would rather read an essay by an intelligent critic on some major philosopher or idea man than read the original. What I’m interested in, I’ve discovered, is not the man’s ideas but how stimulating they are to me as a springboard for my own ideas. And if I get them through another man’s mind I do not feel bothered by the necessary variance with the actual thought. I’m not interested in coherence or logic or proof—I think the value and meaning of thought ends with its creative flight. The last thing I care about is whether an idea is true—Ideas for Ideas sake, that’s me.

And while Thoreau is important, I don’t give a damn. His nature is alien to mine. Any man who is a vegetarian and preaches asceticism is failing to account for the double-faced coin of man’s nature. I suppose really the only main thing that excites my mind is paradox—there is something thrilling, dramatic, aesthetic, what have you about fundamental opposites in a basic interdependence. The awe-terror exaltation mood that comes so rarely and so intensely out of the dust of war rests of course on the bedmates of life and death—the roiled bodies and the crickets in the bright green grass, the smoking charred tank with the black stiff corpses like articulated wire dolls and the scarlet peas lying sweet and clean near the turret.

You feel a God spirit at times like that, but I guess it is always a God in your own image. I know I never think of God as all good—I see a being who is excited by the fascinating dualities he has created and very often sits back to see how the play will come out while at other times he must be the author and director. He is utterly without compassion; he is an artist. He would be in a way like a very intense Somerset Maugham.

[… .]

I love thee,

Norman

TO BEATRICE MAILER

October 30, 1945

Sweet Baby,

[… .]

I’ve been reading Anna Karenina, as I believe I told you, and I must confess, dear little schnoog, that “naïve” was a...