June 10, 2024

Research, Day 3

Another humid day, even though it was overcast. I think I’m wetter than any of my previous days walking to the center. It’s approximately two miles from door to door. Today felt a bit longer. Probably because it’s Monday.

Finally, I got Box 12 first thing this morning, and it has the published version of “The Greatest Thing in the World” in The Harvard Advocate, 1941. I’m not sure how these boxes got out-of-order, but I’ll take it. Still, no manuscript for the story, but since it’s been published several times, this is likely not an issue. I wonder what happened to it? As “Greatest” is his first publication, Mailer doesn’t yet realize his future fame.

One of several notebooks from ca. 1952.

Box 21 has his manuscript for “Great in the Hay,” 2pp, written circa 1950. Mailer likes the name “Al.” This box also has an article by Harvey Breit, dated June 3, 1951, a kind of career-so-far piece, mostly about the writing of Barbary Shore: “A writer has to have a tough mind, the toughest mind of his time. And he has to have a great heart.”

Box 22 has a bunch of short stories. Jackpot! I know Phil has been through this box already, but that’s OK. The first folder contains a terrible Xerox of a cover sheet that reads “Short Stories, post-Barbary Shore, probably.” Quoted notations below are from this sheet.

• “The Blood of the Blunt,” 9 pp. undated, published in the The Mailer Review in 2012. “Break-up of a married couple obviously N+B probably an accident of hers . . . unfaithfulness.”
•  “The Bouquet of Victory,” 4 pp. undated, unpublished. “A section of something longer — A college freshman is promised an intro to a girl who ‘does it.’”
• “Bugger,” 4 pp., unpublished and undated.
• “Dr. Bulganoff and the Solitary Teste,” 7 pp. undated, published in the Review, 2017.
• “Duet”, 11 pp., unpublished.
• “Good to See You,” 4 pp., unpublished, undated.
• “Love-Buds,” 6 pp., published in the Review, 2013, but likely written post-war. It has another “Al.” Two manuscripts; both undated.
• “Mellie, Mellie, I Caught You,” handwritten 5 pp., unpublished. The note included says “fragment of a story, back to childhood.” Undated, but the note continues “it feels post-war.”
• “The One-Night Stand,” 2 pp. undated fragment, unpublished. “Hollywood actor story,” notes the title sheet.
• “La Petite Bourgeoise,” 3 pp. undated, published in the Review, 2014, “about a party.”
• “The Thalian Adventure,” 11 pp. undated, published in the Review, 2015.

This box also has a 13-page journal from the winter of 1952. There could be some definite nuggets in there. Also, it has manuscripts for published stories: “The Dead Gook” and “The Paper House.” Nothing too interesting in these. 

Also, there is an autobiographical sketch for Twentieth Century Authors, including a letter that solicits it, dated October 15, 1952.

Box 22 also has 15 or so notebooks, labeled The Deer Park. The image to the right is a sample. I image that this is the kind of notebook carried by the writer in “The Notebook.”

Box 23 begins with an early draft of “The Man Who Studied Yoga,” called “The Man Who Studied Yogi,” 7 pp., undated, ca. 1952. There’s a second draft, labeled “The Yoga Novel — Untitled,” 18 pp, which seems to contain the bulk of what will eventually be in the published story. Several more drafts and fragments follow.

Box 29 is some more DP miscellany, including a letter from John Aldridge to John Selby, the Editor-in-Chief at Rinehart, dated January 6, 1953. This four-page letter does not have a very good impression of DP and includes some commentary about the “Prologue”:

“ In structure, the book badly needs going over, if, indeed you feel that there is anything left to salvage. The Prologue, while the best sustained piece of writing, and the most convincing, in the whole novel, cannot possibly stand alone, even though it undoubtedly will be made integral when the other books in the series are completed. Taking the novel as an entity, as it will be taken if published, the reader is merely confused by the incidents in the Prologue and spends valuable time trying to fit the clues it gives him into the remainder of the story. He never learns why the psychiatrist-God Sergius becomes the narrator or Cassius O’Shaugnessy is identified with Sergius O’Shaugnessy or Eleanor (With an experience with two men in her past) with Elena who has an identical experience, or why there are two pornographic movies and two copulations inspired by them etc. etc. These ends would have to be tied together somehow; but I imagine it would be easier to drop the Prologue altogether. ”

How fun. While his is sorry to have to say it, Aldridge concludes by recommending that Rinehart should “decline to publish the novel in its present form.” He is very nice about it, and as history tells us, Rinehart actually didn’t publish DP.

In an Esquire piece, “Backstage with Esky,” (April 1953), Mailer discusses short fiction—that he finds “stories easier” than novels. He also talks about how writing “The Language of Men” recalled much of Mailer’s own experience after the war as a cook in Japan. He concludes that writing made the experience more real: “the experience of being an Army cook was a lot more real for me while I was writing than when it had happened.”

Box 29 also has manuscripts for “The Language of Men” (whose protagonist was originally named Sanford Cohen, rather than Sanford Carter in the published version) and “The Notebook.” 

There's a handwritten notebook on bullfighting, dated July 22, 1954. Not too interesting to me by itself, but it may be connected to Sergius in “Her Time” as a teacher of bullfighting.

OK, that’s a good amount to go over for today.

                    

I started watching the new Netflix documentary series Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial. No matter how many documentaries I watch or books I read on Hitler, it’s always good to have a reminder of how he wanted to make Germany great again. And while this series does make some valid comparisons to contemporary America nearly 100 years later, it shows what a shrewd and calculating politician Hitler was, yet who was ultimately blinded by his own shortcomings and hatreds. All ’Rump has are this shortcomings and hatreds, but that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t inspired a Hitler-like populism or cultish followers and sycophants in this contemporary stupid movement. I’m about half-way through the series, and I put William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich on my reading list. Check it out.