The Controversial Life of Norman Mailer Quiz

Answer: Brooklyn, New York

In "The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing", Mailer recalls writing his first novel at age seven, a science fiction novel about people on Earth taking a rocket ship to Mars. He goes on to relate that he decided he wanted to be a writer after reading "Studs Lonigan", because it made him realize that everyday lives could be interesting enough to write about.

Answer: Harvard

During his college days Mailer wrote an unpublished novel, called "No Percentage", about a rich kid who goes hitchhiking to discover the world. He also won a national short story contest, and met his first wife, Bea Silverman, during his Harvard days.

Answer: engineering

In Peter Manso's book, "Mailer: His Life and Times", Mailer is interviewed by the author and explains: "I never switched from engineering to English for the very good reason that I wasn't that interested in eighteenth-century English poets. If I stayed with engineering I'd have more time to write."

Answer: The Philippines

Mailer saw little actual combat, and spent a lot of time taking notes and interviewing his fellow GI's. Many who read "The Naked and the Dead" marveled at how well he captured the way soldiers actually talk.

Answer: Henry Wallace

All of the four choices ran in the 1948 election, won of course by Truman. Mailer spoke at a number of rallies and parties for Wallace, including some in Hollywood, where he was treated as a celebrity due to the recent success of "The Naked and the Dead".

As recounted by Peter Manso in "Mailer: His Life and Times", many progressives at that time still embraced communism, as Stalin's horrors had not yet registered with the public in the west. Mailer, however, rejected that approach and embraced what was called the "Trotskyite line", which was that both the east and the west were evil.

Answer: his father

Mailer's father, who worked as an accountant for the army, received a letter claiming there was "reasonable doubt" about his loyalty, based on his "continuing close association" with a "concealed Communist", namely, Norman. Besides the obviously lunacy of this type of charge, there was an overriding irony to this as Mailer had by this time adopted a 100% public persona, and there was really no dividing line between his public and private lives.

Not only did Mailer not "conceal" anything about himself, he seemed to go out of his way to make himself a public figure.

The idea that he could be a "concealed" anything was, therefore, ludicrous. Mailer submitted a two-page affidavit, and that was the end of the fiasco.

Answer: He got attacked with a hammer by some neighborhood kids.

Three or four neighborhood punks came by looking for a girl, and one of them had a hammer and hit Mailer on the head. Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift were both there, but by all accounts neither lifted a finger to help.

Answer: called his dog a queer

Mailer came back home all beaten up, and said "nobody's gonna call my dog a queer."

Answer: a typo

In one of his columns Mailer used the phrase "the nuances of growth". This came out in the paper as "the nuisances of growth". Mailer blew up and left the paper.

Answer: Advertisements for Myself

At first glance "Advertisements for Myself" is a huge mess, consisting of miscellaneous bits and pieces of commentary about everything under the sun. However, it marks the start of Mailer's reinvention of himself as more of a journalist and a commentator than a novelist, an approach which served him well over the rest of his life.

The other choices listed were books Mailer published later in the same vein, but "Advertisements" was the start of it all.

Answer: Esquire

In Manso's book about Mailer, Clay Felker, "Esquire's" features editor, explained how the assignment came about. Felker went to a crowded jazz club in Manhattan and was seated at Mailer's table, the owner assuming they knew each other though they did not. Norman and his wife were fighting, as usual, and out of embarrassment Felker asked Norman if he'd be interested in doing a political piece for "Esquire".

Although Mailer's piece for "Esquire" was well-received, it was not without controversy from Mailer's point of view, as he was upset that his title of "Superman Comes To the Supermarket" had been changed without him being consulted. Nevertheless, this job marked the start of Mailer's work as a journalist, not a traditional journalist, but rather one who injected himself into events, in complete rejection of the myth that there is such a thing as an "objective reporter".

Answer: He stabbed his wife.

The exact details of what led up to the stabbing are murky, and don't really matter. Everyone agrees that Mailer had been going downhill for the past decade, getting more and more into marijuana and alcohol. Everyone also agrees that his wife, Adele, had a knack for egging him on and picking fights with him, with many going so far as to say she had it coming. People who were at the party that night all say the atmosphere seemed terribly poisoned, and Mailer seemed not to be himself.

After the stabbing he spent seventeen days at the Bellevue psychiatric facility, and he and Adele went their separate ways. Mailer was adamant that his attorney not interpose a psychiatric defense, as he feared that would call into question the legitimacy of his work. Adele later wrote about the incident in her book, "The Last Party".

Answer: poem fragments

Mailer was drinking heavily during this period, and in "Existential Errands" he recalls: "One modest reality used to save such hours from dipping too quickly into too early a drink. It was the scraps of paper I would find in my jacket. There were fragments of poems on the scraps, not poems really, little groupings of lines, little crossed communications from some wistful outpost of my mind where, deep in drink the night before, it had seemed condign to record the unrecoverable nuance of a moment."

Answer: Benny Paret

The tragedy occurred on March 24, 1962, in the third fight between Paret and Emile Griffith, who was allowed to hit Paret repeatedly while the latter was helpless on the ropes, before the referee finally stopped the fight. Mailer wrote: "As he took those eighteen punches something happened to everyone who was in psychic range of the event.

Some part of his death reached out to us, One felt it in the air. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half-smile of regret, as if he were saying, 'I didn't know I was going to die just yet,' and then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe about him.

He began to pass away. As he passed, so his limbs descended beneath him and he sank slowly to the floor.

He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns on end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith's punches echoed in the mind like a heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log."

Answer: an anti-war demonstration at the Pentagon in 1967

Mailer himself participated in this demonstration and was arrested and jailed. His book developed the new writing style called the "non-fiction novel"; he refers to himself in the third person throughout this book. Credit for creating this new genre is usually given to Truman Capote for his 1965 book "In Cold Blood", but certainly Mailer deserves much credit also for taking the genre to a new level.

Mailer continued in the same vein with his next book, "Miami and the Siege of Chicago", about the 1968 Republican and Democratic Conventions.

Answer: Faces

Mailer financed these films himself and lost a fortune. He was determined to use a strictly improvisational approach, which meant there was no script and only the barest outline of a plot. He would simply get the actors all together and film whatever happened.

"Faces" is a 1968 film by John Cassavetes, who also liked to use improvisation, but not quite to the extent Mailer tried to take it.

Answer: Rip Torn

Mailer was playing the role of a movie director who was running for president in his movie "Maidstone", and the plot outline called for an assassination attempt. However, something went horribly wrong and Torn actually hit Mailer, resulting in a huge fight which ended in utter chaos.

Answer: Jimmy Breslin

Flaherty was his campaign manager. Flaherty's book "Managing Mailer" is an excellent account of this ill-fated campaign. The turning point was an abusive, profanity-laced tirade which Mailer delivered to his supporters during a speech at the Village Gate. Mailer ended up finishing fourth out of five candidates in the race.

Answer: Making New York City the fifty-first state.

Mailer talked about the fifty-first state idea at every campaign appearance. Another favorite topic was the idea of giving neighborhoods greater autonomy.

Answer: Life

Mailer leads into his long narrative by stating: "It was a decade so unbalanced in relation to previous American history that Aquarius, who had begun it by stabbing his second wife in 1960, was to finish by running in a Democratic Primary for mayor of New York." Note that he still used the third person here to refer to himself.

Answer: Utah

Gilmore elected not to appeal and demanded to be put to death. Utah obliged him, doing so by firing squad on January 17, 1977. Mailer spent many months in Utah interviewing Gilmore's family and friends, as well as family and friends of the victims Gilmore had killed.

The result was incredible, a book with the tone of the part of the country he was writing about. As one reviewer wrote: "The authentic Western voice, the voice heard in 'The Executioner's Song', is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down.

The very subject of 'The Executioner's Song' is that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience."

Answer: Research for a book on Lee Harvey Oswald

Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962, living in the city of Minsk. The KGB had prohibited anybody from talking about him, and with the break-up of the Soviet Union and the demise of the KGB, people were now free to talk for the first time. Mailer found about thirty people in Minsk who had known Oswald well.

In addition, the KGB had monitored Oswald's every movement, because he was suspected of being a CIA agent, and Mailer was given access to those files. The result was his book, "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery", which came out in 1995.

Answer: Vidal's review of "The Prisoner of Sex".

In his review Vidal had compared "The Prisoner of Sex" to "three days of menstrual flow", and he compared Mailer to Charles Manson, saying that those two plus Henry Miller represented "a continuum in the brutal and violent treatment of women". Mailer responded by head-butting Vidal in the green room before the show began, and then by laying into him verbally once on the air.

Mailer had many other famous feuds with fellow writers. He feuded with William Styron for bad-mouthing his wife, with Truman Capote for saying he had no talent, and with Kate Millett for coining the phrase "male chauvinist pig" to describe him.

Answer: finger bowls

Mailer never did explain this remark. He has written since that he does not seem to come across well on television. The title of his piece on television, called "Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots", pretty much expresses his distaste for the medium.

Answer: six

Mailer's first four marriages were tempestuous to say the least. All of his friends say he and whichever one of his first four wives he was married to at the time were constantly arguing. He married his fifth wife, Carol Stevens, solely to legitimize the child they had had together, and they were divorced immediately afterward so that he could marry his sixth wife, Norris, a marriage which was considerably more solid than the others and which survived until his death in 2007.