Barbary Shore

“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation.”

—The New York Times

“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”

—The New Yorker

“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”

—The Washington Post

“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”

—Life

“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”

—The New York Review of Books

“The largest mind and imagination at work [in modern] American literature … Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”

—The Cincinnati Post

P
ROBABLY
I was in the war. There is the mark of a wound behind my ear, an oblong of unfertile flesh where no hair grows. It is covered over now, and may be disguised by even the clumsiest barber, but no barber can hide the scar on my back. For that a tailor is more in order.

When I stare into the mirror I am returned a face doubtless more handsome than the original, but the straight nose, the modelled chin, and the smooth cheeks are only evidence of a stranger’s art. It does not matter how often I decide the brown hair and the gray eyes must have always been my own; there is nothing I can recognize, not even my age. I am certain I cannot be less than twenty-five and it is possible I am older, but thanks to whoever tended me, a young man without a wrinkle in his skin stands for a portrait in the mirror.

There was a time when I would try rather frantically to recall what kind of accident it had been and where it had occurred. I could almost picture the crash of an airplane and the flames entering my cockpit. No sooner had I succeeded, however, than the airplane became a tank and I was trapped within, only to create another environment; the house was burning and a timber pinned my back. Such violence ends
with the banality of beads; grenades, shell, bombardment—I can elaborate a hundred such, and none seem correct.

Here and there, memories return. Only it is difficult to trust them. I am positive my parents are dead, that I grew up in an institution for children, and was always poor. Still, there are times when I think I remember my mother, and I have the idea I received an education. The deaf are supposed to hear a myriad of noises, and silence is filled with the most annoying rattle and tinkle and bell; the darkness of the blind is marred by erratic light; thus memory for me was never a wall but more a roulette of the most extraordinary events and the most insignificant, all laced into the same vessel until I could not discern the most casual fact from the most patent fancy, nor the past from the future; and the details of my own history were lost in the other, common to us all. I could never judge whether something had happened to me or I imagined it so. It made little difference whether I had met a man or he existed only in a book; there was never a way to determine if I knew a country or merely remembered another’s description. The legends from a decade of newsprint were as intimate and distant as the places in which I must have lived. No history belonged to me and so all history was mine. Yet in what a state. Each time my mind furnished a memory long suppressed it was only another piece, and there were so few pieces and so much puzzle.

During one period I made prodigious efforts to recover the past. I conducted a massive correspondence with the secretaries of appropriate officials; I followed people upon the street because they had looked at me with curiosity; I searched lists of names, studied photographs, and lay on my bed bludgeoning my mind to confess a single material detail. Prodigious efforts, but I recovered nothing except to learn that I had no past and was therefore without a future. The blind grow ears, the deaf learn how to see, and I acquired both in compensation; it was
natural, even obligatory, that the present should possess the stage.

And as time possessed the present I began to retain what had happened to me in the previous week, the previous month, and that became my experience, became all my experience. If it were circumscribed it was nonetheless a world, and a year from the time I first found myself with no name in my pocket, I could masquerade like anyone else. I lived like the hermit in the desert who sweats his penance and waits for a sign. There was none and probably there will be none—I doubt if I shall find my childhood and my youth—but I have come to understand the skeleton perhaps of that larger history, and not everything is without its purpose. I have even achieved a balance, if that is what it may be called.

Now, in the time I write, when other men besides myself must contrive a name, a story, and the papers they carry, I wonder if I do not possess an advantage. For I have been doing it longer, and am tantalized less by the memory of better years. They must suffer, those others like myself. I wonder what fantasies bother them?

There is one I have regularly. It seems as if only enough time need elapse for me to forget before it appears again:

I see a traveller. He is most certainly not myself. A plump middle-aged man, and I have the idea he has just finished a long trip. He has landed at an airfield or his train has pulled into a depot. It hardly matters which.

He is in a hurry to return home. With impatience he suffers the necessary delays in collecting his baggage, and when the task is finally done, he hails a taxi, installs his luggage, bawls out his instructions, and settles back comfortably in the rear seat. Everything is so peaceful. Indolently he turns his head to watch children playing a game upon the street.

He is weary, he discovers, and his breath comes heavily. Unfolding his newspaper he attempts to study it, but the print
blurs and he lays the sheet down. Suddenly and unaccountably he is quite depressed. It has been a long trip he reassures himself. He looks out the window.

The cab is taking the wrong route!

What shall he do? It seems so simple to raise his hand and tap upon the glass, but he feels he dare not disturb the driver. Instead, he looks through the window once more.

The man lives in this city, but he has never seen these streets. The architecture is strange, and the people are dressed in unfamiliar clothing. He looks at a sign, but it is printed in an alphabet he cannot read.

His hand folds upon his heart to still its beating. It is a dream, he thinks, hugging his body in the rear of the cab. He is dreaming and the city is imaginary and the cab is imaginary. And on he goes.

I shout at him. You are wrong, I cry, although he does not hear me; this city is the real city, the material city, and your vehicle is history. Those are the words I use, and then the image shatters.

Night comes and I am alone with a candle. What has been fanciful is now concrete. Although the room in which I write has an electric circuit, it functions no longer. Time passes and I wait by the door, listening to the footsteps of roomers as they go out to work for the night. In fourteen hours they will be back.

So the blind lead the blind and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.

I
SUPPOSE
even a magic box must have its handle. Yet once the box is opened, I wonder if it is too unreasonable that the handle is then ignored. I am more concerned with the contents. If I begin with Willie Dinsmore, it is because he served as a handle; and I, who was to serve for so long as the sorcerer’s apprentice, forgot him quickly.

Let me describe how I was living at the time. I had a bed in one of those young men’s dormitories which seem always to be constructed about a gymnasium and a cafeteria. Since such organizations are inevitably founded on the principle that people should be forced to enjoy each other’s presence, I suffered through a succession of bunkmates, and found once again the unique loneliness which comes from living without privacy. I would hardly have chosen to stay there, but I had little choice. Through all that year, in which I received no mail and moved beyond a nodding acquaintance with very few people, I worked at a succession of unskilled jobs and with a discipline I would hardly have expected in myself put away regularly at the end of the week a sum of ten dollars. I was driven with the ambition that I should be a writer, and I was grubbing quite appropriately for a grubstake. My project was to save five hundred dollars and then find an inexpensive room: calculated
virtually to the penny, I found that if the rent were less than five dollars a week, I would have enough money to live for six months and I could write my novel or at least begin it.

The cash finally accumulated, I searched for a cheap place of my own, but the place was never cheap enough. I flushed corners for thirty dollars a month, for forty dollars, and more, but they would have exhausted my savings too rapidly. I was growing somewhat desperate until Willie Dinsmore, after weeks of jockeying me on a puppeteer’s string, gave me his room.

Dinsmore was a playwright. Being also a husband and a father, he found difficulty in working at home and therefore kept a small furnished cubicle in a brownstone house in Brooklyn Heights. Once, in passing, he told me he would let the room go when he went away for the summer, and I had coaxed a promise that I would get the vacancy. Since we knew each other only casually, I made a point afterward never to lose contact with him for very long. Dinsmore’s niche cost only four dollars a week, and there was not another so inexpensive to be discovered.

I would pay him a visit from time to time and note with all the pleasure of an eager customer each small advantage the house had to offer. Certainly I was easy to please. Although I would be situated on the top floor beneath a flat roof and have for ventilation but a single window, opening upon laundry lines and back yards to the fire escape of an apartment house upon the next street, it never occured to me how oppressive and sultry a hole this might become.