September 13, 2021

“ I was working my way toward saying something unforgivable . . . that my vision . . . was leading toward the violent and the orgiastic. I do not mean that I was clear about where I was going, it was rather that I had a dumb dull set of intimations that the things I was drawn to write about were taboo. ”

Norman Mailer ended his short story-writing career by blowing up the world. “The Last Night: A Story” was published in the December 1963 edition of Esquire and provided an apocalyptic transition between a struggling artist of the 1950s and the more mature and seasoned “author who takes himself seriously.” The Mailer signing off in the pages of Esquire had discovered a new voice in Advertisements for Myself after a difficult decade had him questioning his own competence as a novelist. 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, 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 later 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 and those that followed allowed Mailer a fictional space to explore the dissident and subversive ideas that would characterize his breakthrough work of the 1960s.

For Mailer, short fiction was not to be taken as seriously as novels. Many of these works from this time period would not even be short stories in the traditional sense, while others pushed the limits of the genre, seeming to act as transitions from one state to another. They, like their author, longed to be something grander, more provocative, weighty and significant. His somewhat tongue-in-cheek introduction to his 1967 collection The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer, he begins by stating that he agrees with his critics that his short fiction nothing “splendid, unforgettable, nor distinguished,” and ends by claiming that “The Time of Her Time” and “The Man Who Studied Yoga” are “superior to most good fiction.” He is a “journeyman” who considers the short story easy to write and who “is seduced more by method than by gold or gem.” For him, “the hearty protagonist” and short story prospector, his concern is experimentation: “short stories are imperfect artifacts—various drillings, diggings, tests, and explosions on the way to finding a certain giant mine, well-advertised over the years by the prospector.” The collection, when considered together, truly does appear as a sounding board for Mailer’s desire to push the limits of short fiction not only in form but in content. Mailer’s short fiction, particularly his later stories, are emblematic of his desire as a writer to see just how far he could stretch the genre and himself.

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Works Cited

• Lennon, J. Michael (2013). Norman Mailer: A Double Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
• Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam.
• — (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.
• — (1967). The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer. New York, N.Y.: Dell.
• Rollyson, Carl (1991). The Lives of Norman Mailer. New York: Paragon House.