A Chance Meeting, page 25
He had been working at an Allied Control defense plant as his contribution to the war effort, and he found the place a great strain. But on the elevated-train ride to get there, he passed a small private zoo, and this zoo gave him “a profound feeling of consolation.” Often, when he passed it, he would think that “Miss Moore was the only other person in the world who could ever appreciate the birds and animals of a zoo to such an extent.” Please, he said in concluding his letter to her, keep the books, he “felt already repaid by your poetic phrases of acknowledgment.” People very often sent things to Marianne Moore in the hopes of getting back the language with which to talk about them, almost as if they were sending specimens to a zoological expert in order to find out the precise genus and Latin name. “Especially,” Cornell wrote, “‘inspired by-paths of romance’ in the last letter which brought into focus so sharply and clearly and helpfully the way that I feel about certain aspects of my research.”
•
Cornell sent his Valentine in April of 1944. In those years, Marianne Moore wrote no poems without thought of the war. “A Carriage from Sweden” paused in its contemplation of pine needles to interject “Denmark’s sanctuaried Jews!” And the closing of “In Distrust of Merits” held:
There never was a war that was
not inward; I must
fight till I have conquered in myself what
causes war, but I would not believe it.
“In Distrust of Merits” was collected as part of Moore’s book Nevertheless. When Nevertheless came out in the fall of 1944, Moore sent Cornell a copy, which he carried around with him in his jacket pocket so that he could read it on the bus. He wrote her a long letter about how much he enjoyed the poems, particularly “Elephants,” which recalled “a vivid and treasured recollection of Houdini making an elephant disappear on the old Hippodrome stage,” and the title poem, of which he said, “with what is going on to-day the privilege of being able to drink in so much beauty at will seems more priceless than ever.” Of “In Distrust of Merits,” he said simply, “I try to live up to [it] as best I can.”
There was a letter on May 30, 1945, three weeks after V-E Day, the text winningly surrounded by pictures of jerboas and giraffes, expressing his sympathy at hearing that she and her mother had both been so unwell. He wrote to her again later that year, eleven days after the bombing of Hiroshima, to ask if she would recommend him for a Guggenheim, which she did, though she thought his application lacked polish, as did the committee. By 1946, the letters, already sporadic, were less frequent, though a fragment of a letter from November of that year survived among Cornell’s papers. He sent on a quote from Balzac referring to faded chairs embroidered with stories from La Fontaine, whose animal fables Moore was then engaged in translating. Cornell often read in the French tradition, and, with regard to memory, his sensibility owed as much to Proust as it did to the surrealists. With the letter fragment was a diary entry:
Carlotta Grisi experi-
ence at Coney after
visiting Miss Moore +
mother
Carlotta Grisi, the first Giselle, was another ballerina famous in the 1840s who had, at one point, danced with Taglioni. Cornell’s private symbolic language was inordinately dense in its structure of referral—he seems to have recorded having the memory of the experience rather than the actual experience. Perhaps, after visiting Moore, his mind on girlish beauty of other centuries, Cornell had, walking along the boardwalk at Coney Island, seen a young woman or a paper doll or a shell on the beach that had taken him to his Carlotta Grisi experience.
•
In 1947, Moore’s mother, after almost a decade of trying illness, passed away. Even a few years later, Cornell was still hesitant to trouble his friend. He wrote to say that he had wanted very much to ask her to write an essay to accompany his “aviary” exhibit of boxes containing birds but hadn’t wanted to trouble her in the midst of her many burdens. Slow at first to recover from the loss of her mother, Moore eventually moved decisively forward. She lived twenty-five years longer and became one of the country’s best-known poets. She gave lectures and made public appearances and eventually left Brooklyn for Manhattan. She and Cornell no longer wrote to each other with any frequency, but she might have thought of him as she was working on her poem “For February 14th,” published in 1959, that began, “Saint Valentine, / although late.”
Joseph Cornell fell in love many times; he was an episodic romancer. He was in love with a young Susan Sontag for a while in the 1960s. He gave Sontag a few of his prize boxes and then, having fallen out of love, sent a messenger to collect them again. When he heard about this, Cornell’s friend Robert Rauschenberg, whose own collage work was deeply influenced by Cornell’s, said laughingly that “[Cornell’s] heart was broken and mended so many times, he should have got used to it.” Cornell’s mother didn’t like Sontag much or any of the other attractive young women who came by their detaining tower on Utopia Parkway. It wasn’t until after his mother died that Cornell had the one physically intimate experience that’s a matter of record; he took a bath with a woman, that was all.
•
In 1969, Marianne Moore had a stroke and, though she lived three years longer, she wrote no more poems. Cornell and Moore both died in 1972. The year after Moore’s stroke, at two o’clock one August morning, Cornell recorded in his voluminous looseleaf notebook that he had dreamt about her: “dream of Marianne Moore & Coney Island and refreshment stands abutting into the water high up.”
28. JAMES BALDWIN AND NORMAN MAILER
JAMES Baldwin wasn’t sure he felt like going to another party. Jean Malaquais was always hospitable, but Baldwin wasn’t in the mood for one of his lectures on existentialism. He considered just going down to the bar where he’d been spending a lot of his time, but all the Americans in Paris would be at Malaquais’s, and Baldwin decided to go.
That evening, he walked into Malaquais’s apartment, said hello to his host, and accepted a drink. In the living room, drink in hand, he scanned the crowd, and saw that a very attractive man held the floor. It seemed possible that this man was talking nonsense, but he was charming and charismatic and had thrown himself entirely into whatever he was saying. Baldwin drifted over to the edge of the crowd. A dark-haired woman was standing a little behind the man; Baldwin recognized Adele Morales, whom he used to run into at parties in the Village. He had heard that she had married the man he now realized was the expounder, Norman Mailer. Mailer looked up when Baldwin joined the crowd, didn’t acknowledge him directly, but talked a little louder and more forcefully in recognition of his presence. This was a trick Mailer had when he was the center of a conversation; Baldwin would later write that he found it “endearing,” it was “so transparent.”
When they were finally introduced, they said complimentary things about each other’s writing. Mailer knew Notes of a Native Son and Go Tell It on the Mountain. Baldwin had read The Naked and the Dead, Mailer’s World War II novel that had made him famous. Now well into their third drinks, they circled each other warily. Baldwin did not want to be known, did not expect to be understood by a brash young white American; he was defensive: “I hung back, held fire, danced, and lied.” But “beneath all the shouting and the posing and the mutual showing off, something very wonderful was happening. I was aware of a new and warm presence in my life, for I had met someone I wanted to know, who wanted to know me.” Adele Mailer noticed the attraction Baldwin felt for Mailer; if Mailer felt something in return, he was less gracious about it.
Norman Mailer by Carl Van Vechten, 1948.
They began to see one another often, the three of them wandering the banks of the Seine and stopping in jazz clubs late at night. In the early hours of the morning, Baldwin, with something of the ache of being the third person, would venture out farther, drinking and sleeping with men he met—“It’s a wonder,” he wrote, “I wasn’t killed.” Much later, in an interview, Mailer said that in those years “I don’t think there was anyone in the literary world who was more beloved than Jimmy. . . . He had these extraordinary moods: he walked around with a deep mahogany melancholy when he was unhappy, and when things amused him it was wonderful to watch him laugh, because it came out of this sorrow he had.” Mailer saw that it was only the unwise who took Baldwin’s humor for the whole of him, and Baldwin was glad to be seen. He wrote that “my memory of that time . . . is principally of Norman—confident, boastful, exuberant, and loving—striding through the soft Paris nights like a gladiator.”
The Mailers went back to America; Baldwin stayed in France. Baldwin had told Mailer that he was anxious about the reception of his new novel, Giovanni’s Room, the story of a love affair between two white men; in the event, people did complain about a Black author writing white characters. Mailer published a kind reaction. Baldwin read the rest of Mailer’s work. He thought Barbary Shore and The Deer Park were imperfect, but he admired in them Mailer’s willingness to settle down with his characters. This was a quality to which Baldwin was always attracted and a reason he admired the work of his friends Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando at the Actors Studio, where he worked on a number of plays. In contrast to the Beats, whom Baldwin found solipsistic, Mailer’s characters did not “spend their lives on the road. They really become entangled with each other, and with life. They really suffer, they spill real blood, they have real lives to lose. This is no small achievement; in fact, it is absolutely rare.”
Mailer wasn’t so sure. Disheartened by the reviews of The Deer Park and blocked on his next novel, he began to wonder if even The Naked and the Dead—the novel that he had gone to war to write, “depressed,” he later said, that he had to go to the Philippines, so convinced was he that “the great war novel would come out of Europe”—had been any good. Later, he modestly claimed that what redeemed the book was that, as had been true of an earlier generation of American realists, he had been reading Tolstoy while he wrote it.
In all his calculations, Mailer had not been able to anticipate how it would transform him and his novels to be made a public figure forever at the age of twenty-five. Around the time he first knew James Baldwin, Mailer often had the feeling of being imprisoned in his personality; everyone he met knew who he was already. He had a sort of instinct that this could be sorted out in nonfiction, and he wrote “The White Negro,” in which he attempted to combine existentialism, Malaquais’s Marxism, an idea of the outlaw, and his own preoccupation with sex into a philosophy of the hipster. James Baldwin, who read the essay several times, said that he found it “downright impenetrable.”
Two of the great influences on Norman Mailer were Ernest Hemingway and Cassius Clay. Mailer said that he “learned from Cassius Clay that a fighter can be a genius—he broke every rule and turned it to his advantage.” Mailer drew on Clay’s style, too, agreeing that you are your own best promoter and that you can talk your adversary out of winning by clever insults before the bout that rankle and explode in your opponent’s mind during the fight. In 1959, Norman Mailer published Advertisements for Myself, a collection of essays and autobiographical ruminations that contained “The White Negro” and also the essay “Evaluations: Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room.” Anticipating a bitter struggle to be the Heavyweight Writer of America, Mailer issued a series of insults to anyone who might be a contender for the title. He wrote about his “competitors”: James Jones, William Styron, Truman Capote, Paul Bowles, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, and a number of others. Some of his comments were as insightful, if not as kind, as those of William Dean Howells, others were wide of the mark, but enough of them hit home to end several of his literary friendships.
Mailer wrote of Baldwin’s work that it was “sprayed with perfume” and that Baldwin was “incapable of saying ‘F—you’ to the reader.” (Mailer prided himself on being able to do this, and had in fact fought successfully to include thousands of “fucks,” not especially disguised for that time as “fug,” in The Naked and the Dead.) Most violently, Mailer said of his feeling for Baldwin that “one itches at times to take a hammer to his detachment, smash the perfumed dome of his ego, and reduce him to what must be one of the most tortured and magical nerves of our time.”
Baldwin was upset. Writing about his relationship with Mailer in an essay called “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” Baldwin said that when he read in “Quick and Expensive Comments” that he was “incapable of saying ‘F—you’” he almost fired off a telegram to Mailer that would “disabuse him of that notion, at least insofar as one reader was concerned,” but instead he avoided Mailer for a while. Eventually, Baldwin came back to the United States, girded himself, and caught up with Mailer at a party. He said, “We’ve got something to talk about,” and Mailer smiled and said, “I figured that,” and they went to a bar and had a drink, and Baldwin forgave him.
Not too long after this, in 1960, Mailer announced that he was going to run for mayor of New York City—in 1969 he would run again with newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin as his running mate. The 1960 campaign was inspired, and lunatic, and when Baldwin first heard about it he thought it was a joke. Mailer had some positions that made good intuitive and emotional sense, even if he had very little practical idea about their execution, but when Baldwin realized Mailer was serious, he got angry. He wrote in his essay on Mailer that he had thought to himself, “You son of a bitch, you’re copping out.” You’re one of the few writers who might help “excavate the buried consciousness of this country, and you want to settle for being the lousy mayor of New York. It’s not your job.” That Mailer was, in fact, out of his mind became clearer when, at a campaign party, Mailer, strung out on booze and pills and violence and megalomania, took a penknife and stabbed Adele Mailer three times in her back and near her heart. She had emergency surgery and was hospitalized for a month; he went to Bellevue.
Generously, Baldwin referred to this less forgivable moment simply as “that monstrous, baffling, and so publicized party.” Baldwin wrote that he thought the world came caving in on Mailer that night and that he fought to save himself. And, he said, he hoped that Mailer would save himself, for Mailer had the ability to see the complexity of human relationships, their inescapability, and their importance. Mailer “has a real vision of ourselves as we are.” And, Baldwin concluded, “it cannot be too often repeated in this country now, that, where there is no vision, the people perish.” In his sense that there was a political value to self-knowledge, James Baldwin was indebted to W. E. B. Du Bois, but in his concern with spiritual experience and in his capacity to investigate his own emotional life in the company of a reader, James Baldwin was an inheritor of William James.
•
Mailer did not take his friend’s advice well. Underneath Baldwin’s title, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” was a more violent reference, to the Floyd Patterson–Ingemar Johansson fight, which had just happened, and in which a Black boy had fought a white boy. Baldwin said at the very beginning that his essay was a “love letter,” and added that “Norman is my very good friend, but perhaps I do not understand him at all,” and published it in Esquire, which had a dedicated following of both Baldwin and Mailer readers. It upset Mailer, who, in an interview, said, “He had me strong where I wasn’t strong and weak where I wasn’t weak”—which perhaps meant that Mailer would have preferred to have been praised for his violence than for his tenderness, or that he was uncomfortable with the idea that Baldwin was a little in love with him or the implication that he might be a little in love with Baldwin.
Some years before, in the early 1950s, when Mailer had been asked by the magazine One, a journal of homosexuality, for a contribution, Mailer felt obliged to be principled and accept. In that essay, he said, in a somewhat defensive fashion, that he regretted having made homosexuals—General Cummings in The Naked and the Dead and Leroy Hollingsworth in Barbary Shore—the villains in his novels, and he said that he was only now realizing that this particular prejudice was closing him off “from understanding a very large part of life.” “The writer,” he said, “can become a bigger hoodlum if need be, but his alertness, his curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish.” In 1963, writing about another Patterson fight, the famous bout with Sonny Liston, in a long essay called “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” Mailer discussed the fighter Emile Griffith, whose adversary, Benny Paret, had suggested that Griffith was homosexual: “There is a kind of man who spends every night of his life getting drunk in a bar, he rants, he brawls, he ends in a small rumble on the street; women say, ‘For God’s sake, he’s homosexual. Why doesn’t he just turn queer and get his suffering over with.’ Yet men protect him.” Mailer seemed to hope that such a man could choose “not to become homosexual,” though he could certainly see how defensive the man might be and how violent he might become if his sexuality was ever made a subject for public scrutiny. To Mailer, it was practically the moral of this story that Griffith killed Paret in the ring with eighteen rights in a row. Mailer said that Paret’s death changed boxing for him and for everyone. But, he said, boxing would never be banned unless the “Establishment” found a better way to siphon off the violence of young men, otherwise so dangerous for society. Why else would we need “sports-car racing, war, or six-ounce gloves?,” which is a little different than what Baldwin wrote about the Liston-Patterson fight, which he also covered, for the men’s magazine Nugget. Baldwin saw in Liston a man “aching for respect and responsibility.” And he added, “Sometimes we grow into our responsibilities, and sometimes, of course, we fail them.” Mailer identified with Griffith not so much because of Griffith’s fear of homosexuality—Mailer was afraid but not that afraid—as for the way he believed Griffith preferred to kill someone rather than to come to terms with himself.
