This summer I was asked by a small Florida literary magaine -- the Hogtown Creek Review -- to write a short essay about the book that made me want to be a writer. Thinking about it took me back to a long-ago time in my life; what follows is the essay I wrote, on Norman Mailer's novel An American Dream. The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, nearly 81 years old as of this writing, is still at it; early in 2003 he came out with Why Are We At War?, a critique of the current U.S. administration's Iraq policy, that had much of the brio and zing of his late-1960s political writing. Alongside the essay are links to several of Mailer's books at amazon.com, in case you are curious. Some of his best work is currently either out of print or hard to find; volumes such as the essay collections Cannibals and Christians and The Presidential Papers, as well as his fantastic pieces on the 1968 presidential conventions, published as Miami and the Siege of Chicago, are worth hunting up for anyone interested in recent American history. Cheers.

One More American Dream

No, it’s not the greatest novel ever written. It’s not even the best novel he ever wrote – that would be The Naked and the Dead (I have yet to be persuaded that The Executioner’s Song is a novel, much less The Armies of the Night). But for sheer prose electricity, for obsessive, lurid and lucid attention to every turn and whorl and blip in the internal psychic state of a character, I don’t know that Norman Mailer ever beat An American Dream. Written in 1963 and 1964 in installments – a chapter almost every month – for Esquire, An American Dream reads as if it was written by someone running to stay one step ahead of a charging predatory beast.

I read it for the first time 25 years ago. I was just out of college, living in New York and playing jazz piano, and I had taken a job at the Barnes & Noble Sale Annex across from the main B&N on 5th Avenue and 18th Street. After a lackluster career as an English major, reading Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, I had begun to think that literature wasn’t really my thing. Jazz music was alive in every line – it depended for its rationale on being alive in every line, the sense of bets being entered, and antes increased as the soloist’s thought was spun out. Literature, I thought, couldn’t compete. Then, one day, bored shelving books, I picked up a hardback copy of An American Dream. I recognized the author’s name – had seen him on TV once or twice. The cover didn’t look like your standard literary book – it was loud and had primary colors and a picture of a beautiful woman (Mailer’s fourth wife, as it turned out) implanted in the design. I turned it over and there was his face – the shag rug of tangled curls, and the look in the eye, as if he had been caught in the middle of something, half-turned over his shoulder, a weird, violent, charming, slightly crazed light in those eyes.

Reading the book was like stepping on a land mine. The story itself was wild and barely credible: the narrator, Stephen Richards Rojack – war hero, author, TV personality, ex-congressman and college professor – kills his wife in a fit of anger, then manages to beat the rap after making love to the maid and a cabaret singer named Cherry, and having close encounters with detectives, mobsters and a jazz singer named Shago Martin. But the story wasn’t what did it for me; it was the voice.

When I had loved poetry, I loved it for the sharpness I found there, the economy, the imagery, the impact per line – like music, my real love – but my encounters with prose fiction up until An American Dream had left me cold. But this was different. Mailer brought you where he was – he didn’t just describe the sights and sounds and smells (what a nose he has) but supercharged those sense realities with the narrator’s extreme emotional states. You encountered lust and murderous rage, shrewdness and naivete, charm and clumsiness, close observation and paranoid projection, all mixed in together, stirred with a willingness, a manic desire, a need, to take risks – come on, the next installment’s due! – and all I could do was hang on tight. Wild foreshortenings of language and combinations of unlikely imagery set up constantly shifting holograms of mood. I didn’t know it was possible to get that kind of intensity in narrative prose.

An example, almost at random, this moment when the protagonist returns to his apartment on the afternoon after he has murdered his wife: “The phone sounded like some spoiled child screaming in the attic of a house…. I did not know how long I could bear this apartment – dread worked up through my middle like the grey water in the machines of a midnight laundry. In the bathroom, I could have been buried to the waist in this grease water of dread: only the touch of the razor was alive – it drew something clean across my cheek like the smell of the ocean on a summer morning. My cheek felt like a window looking out on such light while I remained a prisoner in the closet.”

Or this description of his wife’s voice: “Her face was large and all but honest; her voice was a masterwork of treachery. Clear as a bell, yet slithery with innuendo, it leaped like a deer, slipped like a snake. She could not utter a sentence for giving a tinkle of value to some innocent word.”

Well, you could pick a hundred quotes, some of them undeniably purple, overblown, some as precise and alive in the phrasing as that “tinkle of value to some innocent word” line. Mailer is a performer in his prose; the writing has a jazz musician’s moment-to-moment sense of surprises offered and grabbed, lost and found again at the last moment around an unanticipated corner of thought. Few writers have the improvisatory brio, the charm and wit, the willingness to blow it all in the interests of keeping things interesting, that Mailer does at his best. When I heard that sound in An American Dream, it changed everything for me.