The Spooky Art (29 page)

I
t is painful to admit that study of the CIA may not lead to exposure of facts so much as to the epistemology of facts. We will not get the goods so quickly as we will learn how to construct a model that will tell us why we cannot get the goods.

If half the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle are missing, the likelihood is that something can still be put together. Despite its gaps, the picture may be more or less visible. Even if most of the pieces are gone, a loose mosaic can be arranged of isolated elements. The possibility of the real picture being glimpsed under such circumstances is small but not altogether lost. It is just that one would like to know if the few pieces left belong to the same set.

Maybe it is the splinters of a mirror rather than the scattered pieces of a jigsaw that provide a superior ground for the model. We are dealing not with reality, after all, but that image which reaches the surface through the cracked looking glass of the media.

A novelist ought to be able to pick up a good bit about a subject just by going into a room. If, for example, you visit an auto-sales showplace with the idea you might buy a car, you could end by deciding to write about the people who work there. One difficulty—you don’t know a great deal about the milieu. All the same, you have an insight that feels as if it is your private insight, no one else’s. In this good state, it is not that hard to pick up collateral material. Everything you witness is illumined by this private perception. Sometimes, however, you really have to do the research. If it’s a large subject, you can spend ages reading related books.

Ancient Evenings
, a novel about ancient Egypt, took over a decade to finish. In the beginning, all I knew was that I had certain instincts about death—these intimations had curious similarities to Egyptian notions. The ideas of the ancient Egyptians were certainly not identical with mine, but one element was near. In death, believed the Egyptians (and so did I), you entered upon a second set of adventures, which brought you to a better place or a worse one. That was stimulating. But I had to learn just about everything else on the subject. It’s a hell of a way to spend all those years. In fact, I was unfaithful, because, believe me, if you become a serious novelist—dare I say it?—it’s almost easier to steal a march on your beloved than on your manuscript. The real question is who or which is more unforgiving, the book or the lady? It can well be the book. In the case of
Ancient Evenings
—and I do speak of that work as a creature
—she
ended up being immensely forgiving. I left her for two years to write
The Executioner’s Song.
And it’s as if when I came back, she only said, “Hmmm, you look tired. Do your feet hurt? Here, I’ll wash them.” And there I was right back in Egypt. But often, if you desert a big project, that’s the end. It does not come back to you.

There’s an enormous commitment to writing a long novel. If you take on something that’s larger than yourself, you can end up seriously beached. It’s more agreeable to work on a subject about which other authors have already written well. Part of the difficulty of doing my opus was that most Egyptologists had just the sort of style you would expect, and so you not only had to absorb reams of fact but also delouse your literary synapses from the style of the worst and heaviest scholars (who, half the time, were the most essential to read).

That’s the worst, this cleaning-out. It is kin to the problem
young writers face after they have grown up with bad prose in books and in
newspapers.
They, too, have to pick themselves clean of second-rate texts.

Larry Schiller, who is justly famous for getting people to agree, despite all objections, to interviews, was collaborating with me on research in Russia when I was doing
Oswald’s Tale.
We spent most of our time in Minsk, because there were still about thirty people living in the city who had known Lee Harvey Oswald well. (He had lived there for more than two years.) These putative witnesses had never spoken to any reporter about him. For good cause. Right after the assassination, the primal reaction of the KGB, given their mind-set, was that President Kennedy had probably been assassinated by American powers on high and Oswald had been framed because the United States wanted to start a war with Russia. Oswald would, indeed, have been the perfect American for such a purpose. He was in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962 and had gone over as a self-declared Communist. So the KGB spread the word to anyone in Minsk who had known him: Don’t say a word about Oswald. And for thirty years, no one had spoken. Schiller and I, there in 1992 and 1993, discovered that the Russians who had spent time with him in 1960, ’61, and ’62 made wonderful witnesses to what Oswald had been like. They hadn’t opened their mouths since then, so he was minted in their memory.

The point I’m working toward, however, is that Schiller would sometimes, for a variety of reasons, have trouble obtaining an interview. Then he would pull out all the stops. He would say to the person who did not wish to meet with us, “You
must
be interviewed by Norman Mailer! He is our American Tolstoy!” Astonishingly, that worked when all else failed. As a good Russian, one cannot refuse to speak to Tolstoy—even when he is a pale American reflection.

One time, a very nice middle-class woman, a teacher, was being interviewed by us. But when two interrogators are doing an interview and each is working in a different direction on that day, then each gets infuriated. The interview is going in the wrong direction. We’d interrupt each other at critical moments. Before long, we were roaring at each other, “You’re asking the wrong question.” “Go screw!” The poor woman was sitting there saying to herself,
This
is the American Tolstoy?

A
lready there have been a number of remarks made in this book (nearly all derogatory) about television, but there was a time in the early Fifties when I watched it religiously, and the piece that follows underlines the intensity of the adverb attached to “watched.” In any event, the piece sets up a nice contrast between the black-and-white TV of that period and the big color palette of the present. Television has changed so much. Intrinsically it remains the same. In fact, the piece from which this extract is taken is titled “Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots.”

In the years before he ever went on TV himself, he used to watch it religiously; after a while, sacrilegiously. It started in the winter he was first smoking marijuana. He smoked it with all the seriousness of what was then his profoundly serious heart. It was 1954, and the drug was more important than any love affair he had ever had. It taught him more. Making love to different women, he would attempt to find that place where marijuana had last left him. It was the arena of the particular sensation he chased, as though he had been given a lovely if ineluctable emotion while watching a bullfight, and so went to the Plaza the following
week to look for the same emotion—it did not matter altogether who the bullfighter was.

Since he was then in the opening-out of a career that would later provide a false legend of much machismo, he was still timid. Being deep in pot, and relatively full of life, certainly full of every intimation about himself, he was nonetheless too timid to go out late at night and see what the bars would provide. Since his second wife, not unlike himself in her jangled relations to bravery and cowardice, had usually and prudently gone to bed, he would be up alone at night, his mind teeming, and he would watch TV till the stations shut down. In those days, he made monumental connections on pot. He had to see no more than one animated spiral inserted by a commercial into the guts of a washing machine, a lively spiral that would tunnel right up the tube, and he would try to explain to his friends next day that the advertising agency was promoting the idea that their washing machine was congenial to a housewife’s cunt. His friends thought him mad. He examined automobile commercials by the same light and saw that they were no longer selling the car by way of the pretty girl sitting on the fender as once they did; now, they were selling the car itself. The car was the fuck. “Dynaflow does it in oil,” the announcer would say of an automatic transmission. So, he would tell his friends. His friends would think him mad and try to dissuade him from smoking too much pot. Marijuana was regarded differently in those days; it offered echoes of
Reefer Madness.

He would watch Ernie Kovacs and Steve Allen late at night and would recognize that they knew what he knew. They saw how the spiral worked in the washing machine commercial, and why Dynaflow did it in oil. Years later, when Motivational Research was presented to the world, and everybody was ready to tell everybody at a party that an automobile was not used by a man to get a mistress but was the mistress, and a housewife liked to identify the health of her washing machine with her own genito-urinary harmonies—speak no ill of the bowels!—Mailer was merely glad that Vance Packard had done the job. He was behind on too many of his own jobs. Marijuana had flung the separate parts of his brain into too many vivid places. In those days he had perceptions on every subject; was convinced, on the consequence, that he was a genius. He was getting very little writing done.

Still, he clung to his set. It explained the world to him. He was getting hip to everything, and the beauty was that he did not have to venture out.

It would not occur to him until six years later, when he would stab his wife, that it was not timidity which had been his first vice, but violence, a murderous nest of feeling so intransigent that he did not dare to go out at night for good cause, and did not know how to sleep at night without Seconal for even better cause—there was too much hatred at the distance between what he wished to do and what he was able to accomplish. Since his wife, faced with the choice of going to sleep early or entering on a claustrophobic quarrel, would, of course, go to sleep, he would sit by himself from midnight until two in the morning, when the last show would go off the air, the flag would ripple in the wind, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” would be played. In those days, he got to hate “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It sounded like the first martial strains of that cancer he was convinced was coming on him, and who knows? If he had not stabbed his wife, he might have been dead in a few years himself—our horror of violence is in its unspoken logic.

So, through those early mornings in the middle of the night when television was his only friend, he knew already that he detested his habit. There was not enough to learn from watching TV. Some indispensable pieces of experience were missing. Except it was worse than that. Something not in existence was also present, some malignancy to burn against his own malignancy, some onslaught of dots into the full pressure of his own constricted vision. Often, when the stations would go off the air and no programs were left to watch, he would still leave the set on. The audio would hum in a tuneless pullulation, and the dots would hiss in an agitation of strange forces. The hiss and the hum would fill the room and then his ears. There was, of course, no clamor—it was nearer to anti-noise dancing in eternity. And watching the empty video, he would recognize it was hardly empty. Bands of gray and lighter gray swam across the set, rollovers swept away dots, and something like sun-spots crackled forth. Then the set went back to the slow scan of the waves and the drone of the audio. He discovered at last that such use of TV was a species of tranquilizer and could deaden the rawest edge of his nerve. Blunted, impalpably bruted by a half-hour of such odorless immersion, he would with the aid of his Seconal be a little more ready to go to sleep.

A few years later, when McLuhan would torment the vitals of a generation of American intellectuals with the unremovable harpoon that “the media is the message,” Mailer could give his agreement. The message of TV was the scan of gray on gray and the hum of the sound when there was neither music nor a voice. Much later, in the fall of ’72, he would set out to make audiences laugh by comparing President Nixon’s then featureless but disturbing personality to a TV screen that is lit when nothing is on the air. Nixon was there, he would remark, to deaden the murderous mood of the Republic. Indeed, it was the best explanation for why a man so unpopular was going to win by so great a majority. If Nixon did not make anyone very happy, neither did the TV set. Its message was equal to Nixon’s: I am here to deaden you—you need it!