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by literary means instead of a search for just one holy grail, and that, we may as well assume, was to his benefit. Maybe it is good to be aware early that society can be as much of a mystery as the individual, that Marx offers no more of a final answer than Freud, and that Satan is as profound an enigma as Jesus.
    I stray, however. The point is that despite all its flaws, I am probably glad to see
A Transit to Narcissus
published. I cannotpretend to like it, but curiously, I respect the profundity of its impulse. Like a badly twisted arthritic who nevertheless engages in rock-climbing, I respect the effort, the confidence, and the peculiar bravery (since I do not feel I am speaking about myself) of a young man who was living in some private depth of the psyche and so comprehended early, as some people never do, that the unsayable was indeed all that would save him. That can be a lot for a young man to know—that even in our chaos we are individual works of art, maybe even of design—it is, indeed, a theme to live with for your life, and I have lived with it, or tried to, and now feel, I suppose, that we may as well reveal where it all began.
    Soon after finishing
A Transit to Narcissus
, I entered another existence. It lasted for hardly more than two years but felt like a decade. I was a private in the Army. That gave real experience as opposed to the too-quick experience I was searching for in the week I spent working in the mental hospital. It’s the life you can’t escape that gives you the knowledge you need to grow as a writer.
    STEVEN MARCUS: Can you say something about your methods of working?
    NORMAN MAILER: They vary with each book. I wrote
The Naked and the Dead
on the typewriter. I used to write four days a week—Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.
    SM: Definite hours?
    NM: Yes, very definite hours. I’d get up about 8:00 or 8:30 and I’d be at work by 10:00. And I’d work until 12:30; then I’d have lunch. I’d get back to work about 2:30 or 3:00 and work for another two hours. In the afternoon, I usually needed a can of beer to prime me. But I’d write for five hours a day. And I wrote a great deal. The average I tried to keep was seven typewritten pages a day, twenty-eight pages a week. The first draft took seven months; the second draft, which was really only half a draft, took four months. The part about the platoon went well from the beginning, but the Lieutenant and the General in the first draft were stock characters. If it had been published at that point, the book would have been considered an interesting war novel with some good scenes, no more. The second draft was the bonus. Cummings and Hearn were done in the second draft. If you look at the book, youcan see that the style shifts, that the parts about Cummings and Hearn are written in a somewhat more developed vein. Less forceful but more articulated. And you can see something of the turn my later writing would take in the scenes between Cummings and Hearn.
    SM : Well, how did the idea of
The Naked and the Dead
come to you?
    NM : I wanted to write a short novel about a long patrol. All during the war I kept thinking about this patrol. I even had the idea before I went overseas. Probably it was stimulated by a few war books I had read: John Hersey’s
Into the Valley
, Harry Brown’s
A Walk in the Sun
, and a couple of others I no longer remember. Out of these books came the idea to do a novel about a long patrol. And I began to create my characters. All the while I was overseas a part of me was working on this long patrol. I even ended up in a reconnaissance outfit which I had asked to get into. A reconnaissance outfit, after all, tends to take long patrols. Art kept traducing life. At any rate, when I started writing
The Naked and the Dead
I thought it might be a good idea to have a preliminary chapter or two to give the readers a chance to meet my characters before they went on patrol. But the next six months and the first 400