October 15, 2021

“It Might Not Be Unpleasant to Live”:
The Transitional Short Fiction of Norman Mailer

“ D.J. is like Mailer's other narrators who have identity problems, doubt their maleness, fear the feminine in themselves, and try to strike out on their own. Mailer's narrators, when they succeed, do so by finding an identity in the roles they play. ” — Carl Rollyson, The Lives of Norman Mailer

The mid-1950s were a difficult time for Norman Mailer. His second novel Barbary Shore had not been as well received as he would have liked, one critic calling it “evil-smelling” and another “paceless, tasteless, and graceless.” The Deer Park had publishing difficulties, recounted in “Mind of an Outlaw,” until Knopf, after a lengthy consideration, ultimately refused because Blanch Knopf was “almost irra­tionally terrified” of consequences to the publishing house. Even though these trials had Mailer considering that his breakout novel The Naked and the Dead might have been “an imposture,” Walter Minton of Putnum’s finally agreed to publish The Deer Park in 1955, but only after Mailer’s dark night of the soul forced him to take a long, critical look at himself and to pick up the mantle of the artist/rebel to transform himself and his work.

Mailer’s views at the time were expansive. He longed to be something great, and he knew he had the capacity and desire to prove himself a “major writer,” though he was tired of playing “the comic figure” running “the circuit from Rinehart to Putnamn.” Even before Minton accepted The Deer Park, Mailer had been ready to self-publish the novel “to make a kind of publishing history” and as an act of defiance against the “gentlemen” of the publishing industry that had become too conservative and spineless. He writes: “I was finally open to my anger. I turned within my psyche I can almost believe, for I felt something shift to murder in me. I finally had the simple sense to understand that if I wanted my work to travel further than others, the life of my talent depended on fighting a little more, and looking for help a little less.” Mailer’s conviction to become a “psychic outlaw” has its genesis in his negative experience in publishing The Deer Park, but his thoughts were leaning in this direction even before: specifically in his transitional short fiction that acts as a proving ground for ideas he workshopped in Lipton’s Journal and published in Advertisements for Myself—specifically in “The White Negro.” The group of short stories dating from the winter of 1951–52 allowed Mailer a space to explore the dissident and subversive ideas that would characterize his work after Advertisements for Myself.

Mailer saw many social forces as strong and oppressive toward the individual, attempting to shape them in its image, and enslaving in a stagnant and ultimately lifeless existence. The struggle is the only constant for Mailer, and this idea was reflected in his fiction and the conflicts of his protagonists to assert their individualism in the face of great opposition. Mailer saw himself as a “peronality-in-progress” which found its way into his work during this time in the form of the ubiquitous forces of conformity that attempt to “bury the primitive” and to shape the individual into socially acceptable forms—generic, castrated, benign, and out of touch with something essential. Later in The Presidential Papers, Mailer writes: “What is at stake in the twentieth century is . . . the peril that they will extinguish the animal in us.” In an attempt to resist these forces, Mailer turned to self-analysis during the winter of 1954–55 in what he called Lipton’s Journal.

In Lipton’s, Mailer posits a dichotomy of opposition between external regulating forces—which he calls “sociostatis”—and the essence of the individual, which he calls “homeostasis,” then “homeodynamism.” The former he likens to the forces that regulate social order while the latter he sees as an individual’s energy, movement, and creativity in resisting those forces that would homogenize and oppress him—a conscious movement that Mailer claims is “the most healthy act possible at any moment for the soul.” In biology, homeostasis is the body’s internal balance of physical and chemical conditions that help protect against external influences, yet in Mailer’s evolving thought, he replaces “stasis” with “dynamism” suggesting that constant movement resists the imposed stasis of society and is a necessary action for realizing the individual. This dualism comes to represent a major disconnect in the contemporary world and a key struggle for Mailer and his protagonists. In other words, his work in Lipton’s propels him to write: “I must trust what my instincts tell me is good rather than what the world says is good.” Perhaps most germane for Mailer, he opines that “sociostatic repression always allows the writer the least dangerous (to society) expression of his vision” and that the “homeodynamic demands the most.”

Cannabis, the “tea” from which Lipton’s gets its name, might have been an essential catalyst in uncovering this primal revelation for Mailer, for “Lipton’s . . . destroys the sense of society and opens the soul.” Smoking tea may have been the integral taboo action that facilitated the transition from his earlier work to his more mature style beginning with “The White Negro” and Advertisements for Myself. It certainly allowed him to conclude that the post-Enlightenment state of society, that associated with reason and rationalization, is antithetical to the health and well-being of individuals when reason can weaponized by the state. In turn, “life fights back by having people become monsters and mystics” and embrace the irrational and the violent, for “it is possible that at this moment in history the irrational expressions of man are more healthy than the rational.” Mailer’s hipster figuration and his writer-in-opposition persona which would appear later in “The White Negro” and Advertisements for Myself are engendered in Lipton’s, but they really begin in his short fiction from the winter of 1951–52.

For Mailer, short fiction was not to be taken as seriously as novels—or as a shameful pastime between novels, as he complains in a letter to Mickey Knox: “I’ve given up temporarily trying to write my damn novel, and have started doing short stories. (Don’t spread this around.)” In the “deadest winter of the dead years 1951–52,” Mailer would write a handful of short stories as antidote to his troubles in writing The Deer Park, but these stories were written quickly and, he comments, were characterized by “sadness in the prose” that suggested to him that “I had nothing important left to write about, that maybe I was not really a writer—I thought often of becoming a psychoanalyst.” Indeed, the short stories coming out of this time were all characterized by beaten protagonists and provide a transition from Mailer’s early work to his new voice exemplified by Advertisements for Myself. This group of five stories Mailer collects in Advertisements under part two: “Middles.” It includes three stories about World War II written by the author of The Naked and the Dead—“The Paper House,” “The Language of Men,” and “The Dead Gook” (all written by the end of 1951)—and two in the city: “The Notebook” (also at the end of 1951) a scene inspired by an argument with his wife Adele, and “The Man Who Studied Yoga” (April 1952). In addition to similar protagonists, these stories are also interested in the psychology of the individual, the external forces that influence one’s psyche, and the correct actions a man must take in relation to his environment.

This group of five stories concern a central figure and his struggles with his identity vis-à-vis external forces, usually feminine or feminized that acts as the major antagonistic force against the growth of the protagonist’s identity. “The Man Who Studies Yoga” stands apart in several ways and acts as a transitional story, both narratively and stylistically to his later short fiction. By living dangerously and confronting existential situations, Mailer’s protagonists attempt to define their identities. In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer writes: “Masculinity is not something given to you, something you’re born with, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honour.” These small battles are the crucial moments in life that define the experience of Mailer’s characters and could be likened to the protagonists’ struggles to transcend their oppression. They are risky and dangerous, push beyond safe boundaries often through sexual and/or violent encounters, and are necessary for continued growth.

In Norman Mailer: A Double Life, J. Michael Lennon cites Nietzsche’s work as an influence on Mailer’s ideas, particularly a section called “Live Dangerously” in Walter Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre: “For, believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities under Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you lovers of knowledge!” So, Mailer’s “honor,” here, could be read as a courage to accept the challenge, to look danger in the face, and try to be ready for whatever comes next. It’s a part of Mailer’s concept of American existentialism where the outcome is both serious and uncertain that his later Hipster lives by in his “uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.” In his essay “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer writes “you are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place, and you do not know how it is going to turn out.” Living dangerously, then, defines the protagonist on his own terms—not as other external, sociostatic forces might compel him too be. The existential situation pits the protagonist against external forces, and the outcome of these small battles shapes the protagonist’s identity in subtle and profound ways.

While Mailer theorizes the liberating power of living dangerously, the protagonists in these transitional stories are all overwhelmed by their situations and ultimately fail in finding their individual identities that would be appropriate and healthy for embracing life in their current situations. In other words, these protagonists might catch a glimpse of freedom, but are never able to quite capture it for very long, if at all. These protagonists are all frustrated, beaten, and impotent in confronting the overwhelming forces they are up against. However, with these stories, Mailer seems to rid his own psyche of its reluctance to stand defiant and oppose the totalizing forces of sociostatis that can lead toward homeodynamic expressions.

“The Paper House”

Taken from an anecdote told to him by Vance Bourjaily, “The Paper House” seems to be an updated and more mature version of “Love Buds,” an earlier short story Mailer wrote during his senior year at Harvard in 1942–43.

“The Dead Gook”

The setting of “The Dead Gook” is an island in the Philippines occupied by Japanese and American forces near the end of World War II who are in a kind of stalemate. Both sides are waiting for the war to be “determined elsewhere” and “They were satisfied to let events pass in the most quiet manner possible.” The story concerns an American military patrol led by a group of Filipinos sent on a vague mission. It turns out, the mission is to find out what happened to a missing Filipino guerrilla. It becomes much more than routine for one of the squad that day.

The protagonist of “The Dead Gook” is Private Brody—a man oppressed by the reality of the war, but more so by a Dear-John letter he received from his fiancée and what he sees as a pointless patrol that the “buck sergeant” Lucas agreed to undertake at the request of island’s native Filipinos. The soldiers on this island are in a sort of limbo, oppressed by the war, the interminable patrols that “went nowhere,” tropical diseases, and heavy equipment: “It was dreary. There was danger, but it was remote; there was diversion, but it was rare. . . . There were better things to do, but there were certainly worse.” While interminable, there was a quotidian regularity to their shared situation that seemed to give them a certain numbness that’s necessary to survive the situation while life was put on hold. In other words, the soldiers were seasoned and therefore numb to the fact that the war would likely kill them. This survival technique allows the soldiers to function, but it diminished their thoughts and senses making life “mild and colorless.”

However, an encounter with a dead Filipino soon disrupts this “quiet manner” for Private Brody and precipitates his existential crisis. “The Dead Gook” distinguishes between the everyday reality of death that a soldier encounters in war and that of an existential awareness of death that Brody has in the story. Brody’s crisis comes to a head when he encounters Luiz, the dead Filipino, “who was the first dead man who was completely dead to Brody, and it filled him with fright.” 

Mailer suggests that in this sense Brody is a sort of everyman—that this rage sooner or later affects “each of them at different times” when “everything he did expressed a generalized hatred toward the most astonishing people and objects.” Today’s bad day belongs to Brody, but Mailer seems to say that these crises are individual moments of rage, but are shared by all soldiers at one time. Poignantly, then, Brody’s imminent existential crisis precipitated by his encounter with the “completely dead” guerrilla suggests that this sort of feeling, like death, will ultimately affect us all. Maybe, Mailer seems to posit, we can learn something about how to react to our individual crises by seeing how Brody reacts to his.

Circumstances align just right in “The Dead Gook” to give Brody a bad day. His somewhat lax sergeant Lucas, “a big relaxed man who spoke slowly and thought slowly” agrees to accompany a group of Filipinos for some unknown purpose, unnecessarily risking the entire squad, thinks Brody, for the undeserving “Gooks.” Brody’s initial dis-ease begins when the letter breaks the “quiet manner” of the war and reminds “him of how he lived, and that was unbearable.” Brody’s existential moment “destroyed his armor” and “made Brody wonder who he was, and what it would mean if he would die.” The letter from Brody’s ex triggers something in him, making him feel that “it might not be unpleasant to live”—initiating his existential crisis. Suddenly, Brody is confronted with the meaningless of his life and identity in the face of a likely death, and he is filled with rage that he takes out on the Filipinos: “I hate the Gooks.”

Works Cited

• Dienstrefy, Harris (1964). "The Fiction of Norman Mailer". In Kostelantz, Richard. On Contemporary Literature. New York: Avon. pp. 422–436.
• Gordon, Andrew (1980). An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer. London: Fairleigh Dickinson UP.
• Lennon, J. Michael (2021). "JFK and Political Heroism". In McKinley, Maggie. Norman Mailer in Context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• — (2013). Norman Mailer: A Double Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
• Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam.
• — (1966). Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dell.
• — (1972). Existential Errands. New York: Little, Brown.
• — (2013). "Love Buds". The Mailer Review. 7 (1): 17–22. Retrieved 2021-10-23.
• — (2020). Lennon, J. Michael; Lucas, Gerald R.; Mailer, Susan, eds. "Lipton's Journal". Project Mailer. The Norman Mailer Society. Retrieved 2021-09-13.
• — (2013). "Mind of an Outlaw". In Sipiora, Phillip. Mind of an Outlaw. New York: Random House. pp. 83–106.
• — (1963). The Presidential Papers. New York: Putnam.
• — (2014). Lennon, J. Michael, ed. Selected Letters of Norman Mailer. New York: Random House.
• — (1967). The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer. New York, N.Y.: Dell.
• Poirier, Richard (1972). Norman Mailer. Modern Masters. New York: Viking Press.
• Rollyson, Carl (1991). The Lives of Norman Mailer. New York: Paragon House.