The Spooky Art Read Online Free PDF Page B

and he burned with excitement as he wrote. He hardly knew whether he should stand in the shadow of Tolstoy or was essentially without talent. He was an amateur.
    He was also a writer of what soon became a big best-seller. Indeed,
The Naked and the Dead
was his only prodigious best-seller. It had a good story that got better and better, it had immediacy, it came out at exactly the right time, when, near to three years after the Second World War ended, everyone was ready for a big war novel that gave some idea of what it had been like—it thrived on its scenes of combat—and it had a best-seller style. The book was sloppily written (the words came too quickly and too easily), and there was hardly a noun in any sentence not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly available adjective
—scalding
coffee and
tremulous
fear are the sorts of things you will find throughout.
    The book also had vigor. This is the felicity of good books by amateurs. They venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.
The Naked and the Dead
took chances all over the place and more of them succeeded than not. It was rightly a best-seller; it fulfilled one of two profiles of such a category—for invariably these books are written by bold amateurs or by niche professionals, who know more about a given subject than they ought to.
    All this said, one may now ask the professional what virtue he might ascribe to the work he did as an amateur. The answer is that he had the good luck to be influenced profoundly by Tolstoy in the fifteen months he was writing the opus back in 1946 and 1947—he read from
Anna Karenina
most mornings before he commenced his own work. Thereby, his pages, through thelimited perceptions of a twenty-four-year-old, reflect what he learned about compassion from Tolstoy. For that is the genius of the old man—Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say that we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful. In any case, good or bad, it reminds us that life is like a gladiators’ arena for the soul and so we can feel strengthened by those who endure, and feel awe and pity for those who do not.
    That fine edge in Tolstoy, the knowledge that compassion is valueless without severity (for otherwise it cannot defend itself against sentimentality), gave
The Naked and the Dead
whatever enduring virtue it may possess and catapulted the amateur who wrote it into the grim ranks of those successful literary men and women who are obliged to become professional in order to survive—no easy demand, for it would insist that one must be able to do a good day’s work on a bad day, and indeed, that is a badge of honor decent professionals are entitled to wear.
    STEVEN MARCUS: What methods did you pursue in your second novel?
    NORMAN MAILER: Well, with
Barbary Shore
, I began to run into trouble. I started it in Paris about six months after I finished
The Naked and the Dead
and did about fifty pages. It was then called
Mrs. Guinevere
and was influenced by Sally Bowles in Isherwood’s
Berlin Stories. Mrs. Guinevere
never went anywhere. It stopped, just ground down after those first fifty pages. I dropped it, thought I’d never pick it up again, and started to work on another novel. Did all the research, went to Indiana to do research.
    SM: On what?
    NM: On a labor novel. There was a union in Evansville with which I had connections. So I stayed for a few days in Indiana, and then went to Jamaica, Vermont, to write the novel. I spent four to five weeks getting ready to begin, made a great push on the beginning, worked for two weeks, and quit cold. I didn’t have the book. I didn’t know a damned thing about labor unions. In desperation (I was full of second-novel panic) I picked