Local Anecdotes and Recent Interview Shed Light on Towering Local
Soon after Norman Mailer died on Nov. 10 of acute renal failure at the age of 84, reports and assessments of his career poured in from all corners of the globe – all declaring his monumental stature in American literature and many making a point to emphasize the robustness of his well-documented ego.
For residents of Brooklyn Heights, the controversial writer — a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner — was a neighbor and one of the brightest stars in the constellation of writers who have dotted the historic brownstone neighborhood — a group that includes Walt Whitman, Truman Capote, Thomas Wolfe, Arthur Miller, Henry Miller, Hart Crane, Carson McCullers and W.H. Auden – to name a few.
Brooklyn Heights resident Len Frost frequently worked in Mailer’s home as a carpenter. “To me, he was a regular, independent, good guy,” he said. “Most people I worked for, they had nothing to do with me. Norman talked to me. He discussed the kind of job I was doing for him — he wanted to be into it. He also tried to ‘handel’ [bargain] me down in price... which is something I do all the time.”
Mailer made the harbor-front neighborhood his home for decades, at various points living on Pierrepont Street, Willow Place and for the longest time on Columbia Heights – and indeed the no. 4 buzzer at 142 Columbia Heights still bears the name “Mailer.”
The Village Voice once reported that Mailer “designed the waterfront apartment to resemble the innards of a ship, with rope ladders and high suspension walkways leading from one room to the next.”
Though the apartment appears to still be in the family, Mailer confided in a January 2007 interview with the Eagle, “ I haven’t been back much in 10 years. I spend most of my time in Provincetown, Mass. We get to Brooklyn maybe a week or two a year now.”
Three of Mailer’s sons live in Park Slope and kept him up to date with the borough, he said. “They fill me in. They love the town, they’re Brooklyn patriots. Even though they don’t love basketball they’ll probably end up loving the Nets.”
Though often associated with Greenwich Village, as co-founder of the Village Voice, Mailer’s career began in the Heights, where he completed his first novel, “The Naked and The Dead.” Poet and fellow Heights resident Norman Rosten recalled in a 1983 interview in the Brooklyn Heights Press that he helped Mailer lug the manuscript of the celebrated war novel uptown on the subway to his publisher. “We each carried big boxes under our arms,” he recalled, marveling, “Little did subway riders know. In fact, little did we know …”
At one point, Mailer actually lived in the same building on Pierrepont Street as playwright Arthur Miller, where each completed definitive works, for Mailer it was “The Naked and The Dead” and for Miller “Death of a Salesman.” In a 1963 interview with the Brooklyn Heights Press, Mailer recalled that period, saying, “We didn’t know each other then. We used to pass each other on the stairs and each would think, ‘That guy doesn’t have much!’
Miller recalled one specific encounter with the cocky Mailer. “He had just seen my play [“All My Sons”]. ‘I could write a play like that,’ he said. It was so obtusely flat an assertion that I began to laugh, but he was completely serious and indeed would make intermittent attempts to write plays in the many years that lay ahead.”
Although born in Long Branch, New Jersey on Jan. 31, 1923, Mailer was raised in Brooklyn near Eastern Parkway. He attended P.S. 161 and graduated from Boys High School in 1939. He became seriously interested in writing as a 16-year-old freshman engineering major at Harvard University where he completed his studies in 1943. During World War II he served as a rifleman in Leyte and Japan, which served as a basis for “The Naked and the Dead.”
Mailer went on to write approximately 40 books, the latest released only this year, “The Castle in the Forest.” Though perhaps most celebrated for his novels [His two Pulitzers are for “Armies of the Night” (1968) and “The Executioner’s Song” (1979)], Mailer wrote a great deal of non-fiction, plays, essays, screenplays and poetry. His prolific pen was matched by an active political and social life. He was married no less than five times and had nine children. He was an antiwar activist during Vietnam and made frequent, volatile appearances on talk shows [He once head-butted Gore Vidal backstage of “The Dick Cavett Show”]. He also once ran for Mayor of New York City.
Mailer still had strong opinions on how to run the city as of earlier this year when he told the Eagle’s Nathan Versace, “I’ll tell you one thing that really pisses me off, Manhattan could use three cross-town expressways at least. Otherwise the entire town is gonna choke in another 10 years, instead of building three new stadiums. That they need like I need a new cane. It’s ridiculous. Years ago, when I ran for mayor, we were gonna have an L train that would run around the borough … the idea was that it would run around the borough to certain spots and then there would be buses. And that would get rid of traffic in Midtown Manhattan.”
Never short on opinions, Mailer shared his thoughts on many other Brooklyn Heights writers in “Evaluations: Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room.” He considered Carson McCullers one of “the talented women who write today” — a shockingly winning endorsement from the notoriously chauvinist Mailer. He called another 7 Middagh Street writer/resident, James Baldwin, “doomed to be minor.” He considered Truman Capote a “contemporary” and was actually something of a fan of Thomas Wolfe and Henry Miller.
When asked in 1963 why he liked living in Brooklyn Heights, Mailer responded,” Because I have a small, sneaking affection for the neighborhood.” By the 1980s, he said, “I feel much more for the Heights than that.”
This week, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz released a statement saying, “Norman Mailer was a fighter and a true Brooklyn boy.”
He was certainly more than that, as described in the writer’s own words in “Armies of the Night:”
“[The] warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter … had … a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable — the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.”
— Phoebe Neidl
With reporting by Nathan Versace, Brad Lockwood, Vernon Parker and Mary Frost
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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