A special thank you to Suzanna Calev and the Farley Library for providing the image scans of Norman Mailer’s editorial comments to the Introduction of Pieces and Pontifications.
In August of 1977, my wife and I drove up to Mt. Desert Island, Maine, where Mailer was summering. During our visit, I encouraged him to let me assemble a collection of his interviews. He liked the idea, but at the time was completely absorbed in researching a new book about the murderer, Gary Gilmore, who had been executed in Utah on January 17, 1977. He told me he wouldn’t have much time to take a look at what I had put together until the Gilmore book was published. The Executioner’s Song came out in October 1979, and won Mailer his second Pulitzer. By this time I had located about 30 interviews.
The day after his November 11, 1980 marriage to Barbara Norris (later Norris Church), Mailer and his new, sixth wife went to England where they had roles in Miloš Forman’s film Ragtime, based on E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel of the same name. Norris had a bit part as a chorus girl who is with the flamboyant Gilded Age architect, Stanford White, played by Mailer, when he is shot dead by a jealous husband. Mailer had never been in a feature film before, and found the long waiting periods and re-shooting of scenes to be tedious. After completing his acting stint, he flew to Munich to take part in a documentary with me as his interviewer. For the next five days, we enjoyed the spontaneity of unrehearsed conversation on river boats, beer halls and university classrooms. Edited down, these talks became part of the film, Norman Mailer: The Sanction to Write. Back in the States, my wife, Donna Pedro, transcribed our week-long conversation, and then Mailer and I cut out three chunks for the interview collection, which was shaping up.
Around that time, Mailer realized that he had published a number of pieces in various magazines and journals over the previous few years. These included his review of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris in the New York Review of Books; a long essay on television, written at the request of an Esquire editor, Gordon Lish; a rambling piece, “Rounding Watergate,” in New York; a touching memoir of his friend and mentor, Jean Malaquais, in Partisan Review, and his comic memoir of his time on the Harvard Advocate, “Our Man at Harvard,” also published in Esquire. It would become the leadoff piece in the collection. He had not collected any of his fugitive prose since his 1972 miscellany, Existential Errands. As he sifted through the material for what would be his fifth miscellany (Advertisements for Myself published in 1959, was the first), he became increasingly selective, dropping the Watergate essay, for example. I proposed including two dozen brief excerpts from minor interviews in the collection, but he felt the spirit of his exchanges with his interlocutors would be damaged by doing this, and vetoed the idea.
The larger editorial problem was that the collection was really two books, one containing 12 essays, some quite long, and the other, 20 interviews, with no apparent bridge between them. Mailer faced the problem directly, writing in his preface that the book was “the work of a divided man,” namely, an essayist, who sought “refinement” of his art, and a “street debater,” speaking “in the loudest voice,” in the interviews. Reflecting his “bicameral personality,” he came up with a title for the combined volume, “Spooks, and the Mad Butler,” and separate titles for the essays and the interviews: “Sinking in the Seventies,” for the former, and “After The White Negro” for the latter. All of these were dropped late in the editing process, fall 1982, when he came up with the final title, Pieces and Pontifications—one of his most accurate, most memorable titles.
Mailer dashed off his preface and, after much head-scratching and several false starts, I wrote an introduction. I brought it with me to Provincetown, and showed it to him—this would be on July 13, 1981. The large waterfront place at 637 Commercial Street that he’d rented was crammed with family and friends, and there was a lot going on, eating, drinking, roistering, and water sports out the back door. An editor from Playboy, Art Kretchmer, was there, along with Mailer’s close friend Buzz Farbar, Norris and most of his children, and at least one ex-wife. There was no possibility of having an editorial chat in this rumbustious venue, so we repaired to the second-floor bathroom. Mailer brought in two chairs, and a small table, which he put over the toilet. Then he locked the door and we sat down to an editorial session, although he did all the work. In 30-40 minutes, with me looking on in wonder, he worked over my prose with a pencil,* trimming it by about 25 percent. He sounded every one of my sentences (his inveterate practice), tweaking or gutting them as need be to capture the missing beat, the rhythm and the roll. It was an amazing bit of literary dexterity. Then we went below and joined the party.
The collection was published on June 21, 1982. To address the bifurcation of the text, Little, Brown issued it simultaneously as a 400-page hardback, and as two 200-page soft cover volumes, one titled Pieces, and the other, which contained his preface and my introduction, as Pontifications. The reviews were generally good, although the tragic murder of a waiter the previous year by Jack Abbott, an ex-convict sponsored by Mailer, Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books, Jason Epstein of Random House, and other literary figures, dampened its reception. Michiko Kakutani, later Mailer’s bête noire, but then a fledgling reviewer for the New York Times, interviewed him and wrote a warm pre-publication profile, with comment on the collection, in the New York Time Book Review two weeks before publication day.
The following document is in the E. S. Farley Library at Wilkes.
[The nine pages of the typescript, with Mailer’s comments, are reproduced in a separate galley, “Typescript,” on this article’s page at mailerreview.org.]