The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online Page A

without a request for a single change. I had a victory, I had made my point, but in fact I was not very happy. I had grown so wild on my diet of polite letters from publishing houses who didn’t want me that I had been ready to collect rejections from twenty houses, publish
The Deer Park
at my own expense, and try to make a kind of publishing history. Instead I was thrown in with Walter Minton, who has since attracted some fame as the publisher of
Lolita.
He is the only publisher I ever met who would make a good general. Months after I came to Putnam, Minton told me, “I was ready to take
The Deer Park
without reading it. I knew your name would sell enough copies to pay your advance, and I figured one of these days you’re going to write another book like
The Naked and the Dead,”
which is the sort of sure hold of strategy you can have when you’re not afraid of censorship.
    Now I’ve tried to water this account with a minimum of tears, but taking
The Deer Park
into the nervous system of eight publishing houses was not so good for my own nervous system, nor was it good for getting to work on my new novel. In the ten weeks it took the book to travel the circuit from Rinehart to Putnam, I squandered the careful energy I had been hoarding for months; there was a hard comedy at how much of myself I would burn up in a few hours of hot telephone calls; I had never had any sense for practical affairs, but in those days, carrying
The Deer Park
from house to house, I stayed as close to it as a stage-struck mother pushing her child forward at every producer’s office. I was amateur agent for it, messenger boy, editorial consultant, Machiavelli of the luncheon table, fool of the five o’clock drinks. I was learning the publishing business in a hurry, and I made a hundred mistakes and paid for each one by wasting a new bout of energy.
    In a way there was sense to it. For the first time in years I was having the kind of experience which was likely to return someday as good work, and so I forced many little events past any practical return, even insulting a few publishers en route as if to discover the limits of each situation. I was trying to find a few new proportions to things, and I did learn a bit. But I’ll never know what that novel about the concentration camp would have been like if I had gotten quietly to work when I came back toNew York and
The Deer Park
had been published on time. It is possible I was not serious about such a book, it is also possible I lost something good, but one way or the other, that novel disappeared in the excitement.
    The real confession is that I was making a few of my mental connections those days on marijuana. Like more than one or two of my generation, I had smoked it from time to time over the years, but it never had meant anything. In Mexico, however, down in my depression with a bad liver, pot gave me a sense of something new about the time I was convinced I had seen it all, and I liked it enough to take it now and again in New York.
    Then
The Deer Park
began to go like a beggar from house to house and en route Stanley Rinehart made it clear he was going to try not to pay the advance. Until then I had had sympathy for him. I thought it had taken a kind of displaced courage to be able to drop the book the way he did. An expensive moral stand, and wasteful for me; but a moral stand. When it turned out that he did not like to bear the expense of being that moral, the experience turned ugly for me. It took many months and the service of my lawyer to get the money, but long before that, the situation had become real enough to drive a spike into my cast-iron mind. I realized in some bottom of myself that for years I had been the sort of comic figure I would have cooked to a turn in one of my books, a radical who had the nineteenth-century naïveté to believe that the people with whom he did business were 1) gentlemen, 2) fond of him, and 3) respectful of his ideas even if in disagreement with