June 11, 2024

Research, Day 4

I feel like I’m going through these archive boxes too quickly. There’s a lot of handwritten stuff that is difficult to read, and much of it I’m just not trying to. Fortunately, Mailer typed much of what I’m interested in, but I’m sure there might be a gem or two in the written notes. I’ve found a couple, but I do have time to go back to some boxes later, if I want. My goal is to get through an initial viewing of everything I must look at, first. I already feel like there are a couple of boxes I need to see again.

Today, I have two boxes left of my original requests, beginning with Box 30:

• “The Necrophiliacs,” a three-page, typed fragment of a story, undated, ca. 1956.
• A one-page, typed commentary on Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Interesting, because Mailer remarks that Baldwin’s white characters are convincing:

“ [Baldwin] has succeeded in being the first serious Negro novelist I have read to create portraits of white people so convincing, so perceptive of more than passing or common psychological insights, that to anyone who does not understand the exciting and imaginative transpositions of key which good novelists can make at times, the conclusion would be almost overwhelming that the author must of necessity have been a white man. Since the aim of any artist of interesting ambition is to explore in his work the opposite of his own origins, to cross the spectrum of his personality from the known and familiar experience of his own roots to the more mysterious and therefore more aesthetically absorbing experience of people very different from himself, I would like to call attention to the head-on courage and the partial but dramatic success of Giovanni’s Room. ”

Fascinating insight, especially when one looks at “Right Shoe on Left Foot” and Mailer’s attempt to cross that aesthetic spectrum of the other. Hm, I wonder why he calls GR only a “partial” success?

• Two fragments labeled “The City of God,” one 5 pp. and one 3 pp., with the handwritten note: “These papers were all written in Bridgewater around 1956 or 57.” Apparently, this is Mailer’s first attempt to write The Castle in the Forest, according to Mike Lennon.

This box also contains fairly mixed-up drafts of “The White Negro.” One labeled “First draft” is a typed 26 pp. manuscript called “Dialectic of the American Existentialist,” undated, ca. 1957.

There’s a 28-page draft called To Love and To Murder, “a novel by” NM, dated Dec. 3, 1957. It seems like an early draft of “Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out.” Another folder is labeled “Unrealized Epic Novel” (ca. 1958), and seems to contain three, typed early drafts of “The Time of Her Time”—or they are at least linked to The Deer Park, as they contain the same or similar character names. The last folder contains drafts of “Her Time,” with a couple of interesting fragments and overviews. The image on this page was the first item in folder 31.7.