Norman Mailer: “An Agreeable Proposal”

The next day at two thirty I started my walk to Norman Mailer’s house through yet another light snowfall. Commercial Street is the name of the main road that cuts a twenty-two-foot-wide swath through Provincetown. It is buffered from the beach by close-set old wooden homes, some sparkling, some ramshackle. It is the street on which both Mr. Mailer and I lived—albeit at opposite ends. It twists and turns at the whim of the shoreline, and the gaps between the houses allow the wind to cut through to assault passersby at irregular intervals. My walk was not a very long one, but it was a very cold one, as this April day was more obedient to the callous normalcy of February.

When I was four blocks away from Mr. Mailer’s house, I ducked into a restaurant to have coffee. I needed it to warm myself and quell my nerves. A well of apprehension had opened and begun to churn my insides over the previous ten hours, and with that jumble, my self-esteem plunged. I needed this break to relocate some balance. I considered ordering a stiff drink instead of coffee, but I knew that would be an altogether unintelligent decision. I was certain that this was not the time to bow to bottled bravery, no matter how happy the thought. I stuck to caffeine.

When I finally made it to the large three-story brick house I rang the bell with a small but lingering hesitance. I didn’t know what I was facing or the direction our talk would go, but I intuitively knew that whatever happened in this next hour would involve a shift to my life. Then again, there was the considerable chance that there would be no budge, no racket of change, and I would move on, left with only an anecdote to offer up to enliven future dull conversations.

A minute passed before he opened the door. That delay picked at my anxiety even more, until I reasoned that it was likely a struggle for Mr. Mailer to answer the door at any speed — if indeed he even answered his own door. Finally, it swung wide open to reveal him wearing what I would come to
know as the first of two uniforms: khaki pants and a denim blue work shirt. He invited me in.

“Hello, Mr. Mailer,” I said.

“You should call me Norman,” he declared as he closed the door. I always did after that.

He led me into the living room, where Norris was sitting in one of two large wicker chairs on the far side of the room. She was dressed warmly in what appeared to be a heavy robe and looked more tired than I had ever seen her before. She managed to muster a smile for me, however, and her beauty radiated. I knew she had endured some tough medical difficulties, and I was unsure about what to say or how to react now that I was in the same room with her. Her eighty-two-year-old mother, Mrs. Davis, had come to stay with them, and she was seated near her daughter.

Their white chairs were positioned at a slight angle just in front of two large picture windows that reached from floor to ceiling and nearly wall to wall. Through them, behind the women, Provincetown Harbor was splayed out like I’d never seen it from another home in town. Many people had nice views of the harbor from their living rooms — I’d been in many with windows facing the water — but this was the first time I’d seen a view that was so startlingly frank. Clearly, the ocean was the central draw.

Norris Mailer had inherited the most valuable of her mother’s features. She had modeled in the years after moving to New York to be with Norman and had continued with that career on and off well into her mid-forties. Her brown eyes flecked with grains of hazel struck me as intelligent. Her complexion, even in the midst of her difficult health struggles, was the most captivating element of her beauty; it spoke of porcelain and cream and fine Khmer silk. I noticed that her red hair was being tenderly and faultlessly stroked by the afternoon’s dimming rays. I bent to offer Norris a gentle hug at her urging. I hadn’t seen her in nearly half a year, and the rough months between then and now were evident, though the hard days had not chipped away at her beauty.

In the years since that first meeting at the restaurant, Norris and I had met each other several times socially. In Provincetown — in winter, particularly — the term socially can mean anything from sharing a drink at a cocktail party to bumping into somebody at the hardware store.

Now we exchanged a few words to catch up, and she introduced me to her mother, Gaynell. I shook the elderly woman’s hand and was reminded of my grandmother’s hands as she would walk me through my father’s gardens when I was six: strong but swathed in fragile paper lace. Gaynell said a gracious “Hello” with an infl ection that placed her clearly from the heart of Arkansas, and I was instantly taken in by her Southern way. Norman, witnessing all of this stone-faced, turned and walked toward the dining room without speaking. His single cane — he always used only one while in the house — clunked on the shiny hardwood floor as he left me with the women. A moment later he urged me to join him with a controlled call. He had already taken his seat.

Norman always sat at the side of the table because it did not face the bay window that capped the south-facing room. The dining room window, with its sprawling ledge, was only one quarter the size of the ones in the living room, but it offered the same extensive panorama of our harbor and Long Point, the final curling finger of Cape Cod. He told me his eyes had become sensitive to sunlight in recent years and logic dictated he sit facing the wall.

“Except for dinner. I sit there at dinner,” he said, nodding his head toward my chair, at the head of the long table, just to his left.

Norman brought our talk right to the point. His purpose in asking me over was that he wanted me to assist him with research on a “project.” Again, that word. I figured the “project” he was talking about must be a book. Considering the largeness of that, I was intimidated, intrigued, and petrified all at once. What the hell, I wondered, could I possibly do to assist Norman Mailer on a book? I did my best to conceal the curiosities that were holding a boxing match in my stomach from climbing to my face.

He soon answered my questions. My tasks would vary from light “secretarial” work— Xeroxing pages from books he’ dread and keeping them in good order and sorting through his mail — to more demanding things. He said he would ask me to familiarize myself with a host of assorted subjects in order to be closer to the track of his work. “Later,” he said, “I’ll tell you more about what I could be needing.”

Then he brought up the prospect that I could perhaps assist him in other areas. He mentioned the possibility of driving him to appointments, conceivably making travel plans, and, “You never know, maybe speaking to reporters.” Again, he listed no rigid specifics. “Oh, about the appointments. You do drive, don’t you?” he asked.

“I have a crappy old Volvo,” I said. “Yes.”

“And I’m correct that you’ve done a fair amount of research work in the past? You said you worked at a newspaper, didn’t you?”

“Until it went out of business,” I said. “Then I got a job working in television. As far as I know, they’re still in business.”

“Too bad,” he said. “Of the two, I would have hoped for a different outcome.”

I would, in later days of course, hear many rants from him about his loathing of television. It first struck me as outlandish, since I knew that Norman was among the first writers in America to meticulously exploit the medium to elevate his status to the level of Literary Rock Star. Truman Capote and Gore Vidal had used TV also, but Norman Mailer perfected the game. I came to appreciate his altered opinion over time, though. Television,he said, had atrophied into a series of vile interruptions to the “maturity of concentration.” Corporate broadcasts eviscerated the minds of children and adults even as they alleged to inform or entertain. In Norman’s view, television’s principal god was commerce, hence its rabid selling of soap or cars every nine minutes with false promises rhymed in soulless drivel. Like every cultural element he commented on, he had studied television methodically before coming to his conclusion. In 2006, when we were researching a piece for Parade magazine concerning children and education, he told me about a stretch of months many years before when he was at a crossroads in his own life. During that period, he devoured television, absorbing all it had to offer. “The only valuable knowledge I brought from that experience was that I learned I should have shut it off sooner,” he told me.

“So, does this proposal sound like something that might be agreeable to you?” he asked, despite my confession about working for the tube.

If this was an interview, it was unlike any other I had experienced. No one had ever asked me if the potentials of a job were “agreeable.”

Nonetheless, while assessing Norman’s calm enthusiasm as he listed the possibilities, there appeared to be no doubt in his mind that I would be “agreeable” without reservation. He seemed confident that I would want to assist him with the “project” and, apparently, any number of other things. He went on to inform me in a surprisingly temperate manner that as his writing progressed, I would be “of great use” to him.

“You may find yourself with lots of reading to do, a good amount of filing to take care of, certain errands in need of attention, and sometimes getting my desk back in order. I can be terrible about doing it myself. Your responsibilities could be varied,” he said.

Sitting in front of him, listening to him recite this laundry list of potential duties, the main character of Herman Melville’s tale Bartleby the Scrivener suddenly popped into my mind. Bartleby, who after being hired by a man of distinction, soon finds himself paralyzed, able to answers his employer’s requests only with the simple statement “I would prefer not to.” I prayed I wouldn’t become similarly ensnared weeks or months down the road.

that were far beyond my abilities? The man had two Pulitzers, the National Book Award, and forty books to his name. How the hell would I get myself out of that embarrassing quagmire? Nevertheless, I had to admit I was intrigued at the prospect of working with him on his “project,” even if I seemed to be—to myself, at least—less than the ideal candidate for the job. I knew I was far from stupid, but I wasn’t exceptionally well educated, either. At the time I was merely a competent waiter with hip-high aspirations living in a community that harbored only a few disciples of ordinary success. I had relocated to Provincetown after the age of thirty to avoid all of those normal expectations, finding it easier to simply abstain from the game. One could hunker down in this abnormally tolerant place and spin one’s wheels in idyllic limbo without having to prove anything to anyone — including oneself. Nevertheless, I had to admit I was intrigued at the prospect of working with the man who single-handedly elevated, among other things, writing about boxing to the ranks of high art, and who had once sparred with Joe Frazier. When we spoke, Norman knew nothing of the bumpy road that had led me to his dining room table. He wasn’t privy to my personal failure to discover worth or reason in past employment. He also didn’t know how I’d shunned the usual track to adulthood by bolting from college and squandering myself for months in Europe to “find myself.” This deficit was a potentially large problem.

Only after I got close to him did I figure out that Norman had known all along that I was craving consistency. My life to that point had been an experiment in freedom—or that’s how I described it—but the truth was I had not found anything to care enough about to allow myself to take root. Somewhere along the way I had crossed the line from being fashionably bohemian to terrified of responsibility. That in itself was not unique, but I had also mastered the ability to fritter away days into forgettable years without deference to growth or accountability. It could be said that the last train of my youth was pulling from the station and I was finally hearing a piercing whistle that sounded a lot like “Maaaiiiilerrrrrrrr.” Until then, I had insulated myself from all alarms with old daydreams and immediate escapism.

When we first sat at his dining room table together, Norman was three months into his eightieth year. The physical evidence of that was that he was stooped slightly and his face was furrowed with the normal allocations of time. His canes had become celebrated accessories, and with them he was anything but swift. Old age, however, was in no way apparent in his vigorous voice or refined thinking. He was stunningly alert and dead-on precise. His years were only noteworthy when he cocked the right side of his head slightly toward you to ask,“What?” He was half deaf, and it would be about a year and a half before he used his hearing aids regularly and without debate. His age was apparent also when he switched glasses from reading to distance, and exhibited bewilderment as to which pair was which if he happened to pause in the act for a moment. In the years to come, I always forgot Norman was eighty years old until he got up to meander to the bathroom at a snail’s pace or mistakenly answered the wrong phone line and blamed the mix-up on the device itself. (“If we have two goddamn lines, then why are the rings exactly the same?” They were not, but to his fatigued ears perhaps they did sound similar.)

Norman was gracious toward me on that first meeting, which lasted about an hour, and almost always thereafter. At the end of the conversation we both seemed reasonably content with where we stood. To me, where we stood was that I should be open to any number of surprises from then on, and the ambiguity of that seemed curiously comfortable. In Norman’s mind we had agreed that I would show up each weekday to help him with whatever he thought needed attention. We’d refine the details as the days went. For him, allowing an association to develop organically meant both parties would “learn on the curve.” Despite my reservations and insecurities, I had no choice but to agree with his proposal.

I began to start my goodbye, but before I could stand, he hastily said, “You’re fond of cooking, aren’t you.”

Once again, what he said was not so much a question as a declaration. He was redirecting our conversation and hinting at what would become a principle function of my tenure with him. The recollection of him scoping out my shopping basket the night before returned, and I realized that right there by the banana bin he had recognized that not only could he get a literary assistant but he could also finagle himself a cook. I settled back into my chair.

“Yes, I like to cook very much,” I said. While I had never cooked professionally (my work in restaurants had always been limited to the front of the house), I was skilled, and always cooked at home for friends and devoured cookbooks like they were pulp novels. Cooking was a knack I had acquired as a kid and developed a small talent for as an adult. Somehow Norman had sensed this, and he’d set out to lasso it along with my other skills.

“I was hoping that you might consider doing the cooking a few nights a week,” he said. “Norris is on the mend, and it would be a great help to all of us around here. As you can imagine, her mother is not much help. Keep in mind this wouldn’t be always, just sometimes.” There he was, greasing the road. I
had to love it.

When he asked me this, I didn’t know Norman loved food and thought himself a fine cook (he wasn’t, generally). He was inventive when it came to theories about fl avors and combinations,and over time I became the ideal collaborator.

I agreed to this latest addition to his proposition not because I sensed that to decline would have been a deal breaker, but because it would have violated the optimistic air of our meeting up to that point. Besides, the large kitchen behind me, with its six-burner stove, dual ovens, and black granite prep
island, was a small apartment dweller’s dream. I told him I’d be happy to give the cooking a shot.

“I know you’re a good cook,” he said with a smile. “I was a cook when I was in the army. Remind me to tell you about it sometime.” I never did ask him directly to tell me about it, but I heard scraps of the tale countless times over the next five years.

As I finally stood, he swiveled slightly in his straight-backed chair. “Barbara?” he shouted. He always called Norris by her birth name, Barbara, unless he was referring to her in conversation, a habit that also slipped into my ways after years of tenderness between us.

Norris hollered back from the living room: “What?”

“Darling, where are the books?” The books he was asking about were copies of his latest hardcover, The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing, which had been released earlier that year. Norris said they were in the bar, which was just off the dining room.

Norman asked me to go in there and grab a copy for him. I did, and with a black Pilot pen, he wrote in it and handed it to me. Instead of cracking it open in front of him to read the inscription, I decided to hold on to it to read later. I didn’t know if there was a standard etiquette when an author handed you an inscribed copy of his work. I still don’t. I suppose it depends if you like the author or like his book. In this case I liked both, but it was the first time a writer had given me a book in person. To be safe, I squirreled it under my arm and timidly said, “Thank you. You know, Matt Lauer recommended this several weeks ago.”

“Who?” Norman asked.

So went my introduction to Norman Mailer’s selective lack of familiarity with popular culture, and television personalities in particular. I might as well have plucked a random name from the phone book for all the relevance “Lauer” held for Mailer. Norman was so unschooled in the TV viewing habits of America that when I mentioned Jerry Seinfeld’s show, after it had been off the air for more than six years, Norman said, “Yes, I know his show. He is not funny. I can’t believe it’s been on this long.”

On the way home I stopped again in the restaurant up the street to have a drink, at long last, and consider the previous hour. I was to begin working with Norman Mailer and had no idea what his book was going to be about or where the journey would end. What I did have was a sense that I’d landed on something resembling solid ground. I saw a potential end to my days of restlessness and realized that this work would demand effort that I had seldom tapped before. I also had the feeling that this association would be one of equal exchange. I would help Norman Mailer with whatever he wanted, and he would in turn clarify some of the large questions we all grapple with and that I did not understand at all. That may sound like a broad assumption, but I instinctively knew that being around him and listening to his words was not the same as being in the company of any other people I’d ever known. Certainly I would learn a great deal from him through the work, but more indefinable lessons would undoubtedly be illuminated simply by being around his astonishing intellect. When you found yourself close to Norman, you had no choice but to be a sponge to his authority and advanced knowledge about issues. I didn’t know this conclusively as I left his home that first day, but I held tight to the suspicion. Certainly, I knew, I was entering into an uncommon situation.

I ordered an Irish coffee and opened the book he had signed. Scrawled on the title page in a difficult-to-decipher script were the first ten of the countless words Norman would write to me over the years. Those words would comprise notes, directions, ideas, suggestions, criticisms, subjects to research, vitamins to find out about, doctors to investigate, books to order, and gracious inscriptions within the covers of three of the four books. I would assist him on. The inscription read: