The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer is a 1967 anthology of short stories by Norman Mailer. It is grouped into eight thematic sections and contains nineteen stories, many appearing in one of Mailer's miscellanies; thirteen were published in periodicals or other anthologies before appearing in this collection. The collection was reprinted in hardcover in 1980 and some of the stories were reprinted in other volumes.
The collection ranges from stories that are only a couple of sentences, like "It", to longer novellas, like "A Calculus at Heaven". All included texts represent Mailer's early career, from his first published short story in 1941 while an undergraduate at Harvard to experimental stories from the mid-sixties. The tales range in content from war to urban life to science fiction, each managing to address the conflict between the individual and the social demands that echo throughout Mailer's oeuvre. Styles differ between stories, ranging from his early narrative approach of The Naked and the Dead to the more mature form found in Advertisements for Myself. The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer illustrates Mailer's early development as an influential voice in 20th-century American letters.
Background A prevalent theme throughout Mailer's stories is the individual's struggle against forces that seek homogeneity and conformity. Gabriel Miller states that "Mailer's early fiction clearly warns that modern man is in danger of losing his dignity, his freedom, and his sense of self before the enormous power of politics and society". Reflecting a recurring theme in Mailer's work, "repetition kills the soul", Mailer's short fiction illustrates the attempts to keep the individual spirit alive against the twentieth-century forces of consumerism, technology, and totalitarianism. Often, Mailer sees psychoanalysis as a negative social force that dulls the senses and the psyche, as Andrew Gordon observes: "Mailer has used psychoanalysis in a very conscious and sophisticated way in his fiction. He also has carried on a crusade, both in his essays and his fiction, against the power of psychoanalysis in popular culture." In many ways, Mailer's early short fiction represents his quest to find a voice "compatible with his recurrent themes and emerging vision."
Introduction In his introduction, Mailer details his conflicted attitude toward the short story and casts doubt on his own abilities to write a good one. This claim, however, might just be a way for Mailer to mitigate any negative criticism and show modesty by denying his abilities, or as a ruse to get us to discover for ourselves whether Mailer can write a good short story. Yet, Mailer had a general dislike for short stories, and tended to write them when the more serious occupation of writing novels was not going well, or when he had doubts that he was ever meant to be a writer. In fact, Mailer states, that his own short fiction is "neither splendid, unforgettable, nor distinguished" and implies that he is more a "novelist, philosopher, essayist, journalist, personality, cathartic, spark, or demiurge". J. Michael Lennon states that Mailer had an idea that if he was not able to finish a story in a day or two, it was never meant to be written. While it's true that Mailer's reputation as a novelist and a practitioner of new journalism are his chief claims to fame, Eric Heyne suggests that, contrary to Mailer's perhaps disingenuous claims, his short fiction is important, as it demonstrates a distinct arc in his development as a writer from his early work to his more mature style, and shows its literary and historical importance in the transition from modernism to postmodernism.
The Disappearance of the Ego
Part one consists of two short stories written in 1960.
The Killer: A Story
First published in Evergreen Review in 1964, "The Killer: A Story" is a first-person account of a male prisoner's parole hearing. The prisoner's thoughts consider his moral character and perspectives on life, like what qualities one needs to be viewed favorably: "Good to be slim, trim, shipshape, built the way I am, provided you are modest". He focuses on the negative parts of being on parole; however, he is happy to be out of prison because he has to be a repetitive drone in order to remain unnoticed.
Truth and Being: Nothing and Time
Subtitled "A Broken Fragment from a Long Novel", "Truth and Being: Nothing and Time" first appeared in Evergreen Review 26, 1962. Mailer wrote it after being released from Bellevue for the stabbing of his wife Adele. In "Truth", Mailer writes a fictitious, first-person account about having cancer, or as he describes the story: "an odd, even exceptional, essay about: shit. Literally". This short story is an extended metaphor and reminiscent of Borges about a "rebellion of the cells". Lennon explains that this story is best understood in the context of Mailer's Manichean view of the cosmos: feces is one of the battlegrounds in the fight between good and evil.
The Air of the Dying The second part consists of two short stories.
A Calculus at Heaven Mailer wrote Calculus during his senior year at Harvard for Robert Hillyer's English A-5 when he was 20-years-old. It was originally published in 1944 in Cross-Section: A Collection of New American Writing, his first publication in a book. In the style of Dos Passos, A Calculus at Heaven is a third-person novella that Mailer said "is not of the first quality", but makes "an interesting contrast to The Naked and the Dead," his first novel about World War II. What he meant, explains Merrill, is that this version of combat is informed only by popular culture—by what he deems "the liberal mentality"—that can only guess and has not experienced. Even though he had yet to be drafted, Mailer was keen to engage the war in his writing, especially since he had been reading Malraux and Hemingway. Like NAD, it is set in the Pacific Theater during World War II, and shares its "hovering, brooding, sympathetic narrative consciousness". Inspired by the drawn-out battle for Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, its mood is somber.
Five American soldiers who are heavily outnumbered by the enemy have direct and strict orders to maintain complete control of the nearby coastal road at all costs. Surrounded by the Japanese on the fictional island of Trinde, the soldiers contemplate their seemingly inevitable demise. Its ending seems inspired by Hemingway. As they smoke what might be their last cigarettes, the captain notices that it will be a sunny day. "Yes," someone answers, "sometimes you want to look pretty carefully at it".
Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out Subtitled "Prologue to a Long Novel", this story was originally published in Partisan Review 25, fall 1958, and is told from the perspective of Marion Faye, the protagonist of Mailer's novel The Deer Park, in Provincetown, MA. J. Michael Lennon states that this story "emphasizes the perilous, confused, or mutable condition of its teller". The protagonist, like many of Mailer's narrators, sees himself as disembodied: a "ghost, geist, demiurge, dog, bud, flower, tree, house, or some lost way-station of the divine", that Lennon sees as an attempt, God-like, to figure out or create his destiny.
Poor Kids The third part consists of two short stories.
The Greatest Thing in the World Written during his sophomore year at Harvard, "The Greatest Thing in the World" was Mailer's first publication. It appeared in the Harvard Advocate in 1941. In a 1944 letter, Mailer confessed the story was inspired by a real-life "hitch-hiking tour which [he] embarked on quite Byronically, and in retrospect, masochistically". It contains strong characterizations, a fast-paced plot, and a tension through the protagonist's tempting of fate. It won Story magazine's eighth annual college contest in the same year, which Mailer later stated was the "first powerful and happy event of my career" and gave him the certainty that he was "meant to be a writer". In a 1964 interview, Mailer said this honor "fortified him," leading to his writing No Percentage in two months: "It was just terrible. But I never questioned any longer whether I was started as a writer". In a 1948 interview, Mailer opined that "Thing" would "probably make a wonderful movie someday", and later said "it reads like the early work of a young man who is going to make a fortune writing first-rate action, western, gangster, and suspense pictures".
This Depression-era story begins with Al Groot bargaining for coffee and a doughnut. He reminisces about having more money then hitches a ride with three strangers. He lies to them and says he has more money than he actually has. After gambling on a pool game and winning, Groot angers the other men when he insists on quitting. The men beat him up, threaten him, and drive off with him in the car. He escapes by jumping out of the car. In this naturalistic world, Mailer depicts the occasional sensual victory as all that individuals can hope for. The "greatest thing in the world", then, is the individual's little win in the face of ostensibly mightier forces.
Maybe Next Year "Maybe Next Year" was written at Harvard for Theodore Morrison's English A-3 and published in Harvard Advocate in 1942. It depicts young boy's observations of his contentious parents. Mailer wrote this story during his junior year and combines his reading of Faulkner and his feelings about family and childhood in a coming-of-age story in which the young boy must prove his masculinity in a world dominated by his mother's oppression. "Maybe Next Year" might begin Mailer's life-long obsession with dirt and anal imagery in a quest to "dirty himself in freedom". Ultimately, states Rollyson, it's about longing for power and control.
The narrator continuously runs away from his nagging and domineering mother and defeated father by retreating into the nearby woods where he encounters hoboes on the railroad. Due to the statements made by his mother, "They're filthy old things, you'll get sick and die, they're diseased, they're diseased", the boy insults and stones an injured tramp. The boy feels satisfied and grown-up seeing two men cry. In the story's reprint in Advertisements for Myself, Mailer states that its "prose is Salinger-ish, but the inspiration was by Faulkner".
Sobrieties, Impieties The fourth part consists of five short stories about World War II, written 1951–53. While "The Notebook" and "MacDougal Alley" are not war stories, they were written about the same time, so are included in this section.
The Paper House "The Paper House" was first published in New World Writing: Second Mentor Collection in 1952 and is based on an anecdote told to Mailer by Vance Bourjaily. The story is set in occupied Japan in 1951, and Hayes and Nicholson are American Army men stationed there. Nicholson is the narrator and plays second fiddle to Hayes, who has misogynistic and violent tendencies. The two frequent a geisha house where they meet Yuriko and Mimiko. Hayes becomes a regular of Yuriko's, but ends up hitting her one night after having too much to drink. Yuriko then tells Hayes that she will commit hari-kari because of her dishonor. Hayes and Nicholson return to the geisha house to stop her, but it was all a ruse to get back at Hayes for his mistreatment.
The Notebook Originally written, according to Mailer, in "an hour," "The Notebook" was first published in Cornhill Magazine in 1953. According to his biographer, Mailer turned a real-life situation with Adele Morales, his second wife, into this story and underlines a credo for Mailer: "a promise never to hide his motives from himself, no matter how ignoble".