The 40s: The Story of a Decade (57 page)

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Today, tomorrow, or some day not far off, the great wish, the long dream, will come true—the end of war in Europe. There may be no surrender, no last laying down of arms, but the victory will be there just the same, the bloody miracle which once seemed hardly possible will have come to pass. “You and eleven million other guys,” said the American sergeant to von Papen when he said he wished the war were over. President Roosevelt loved these eleven million other guys very much, and he was well aware that war’s end for the soldier in arms would be war’s beginning for all the rest of us combined, and for the soldier, too. The President knew this as well as any other man, or better. The guns that spoke in the Hudson Valley last Sunday morning, and Fala’s sharp answering bark, were the first salvo of his new fight—for freedom, human rights, peace, and a world under law.

NOVEMBER 1, 1941 (ON WALT DISNEY)

W
hile many of our readers were seeing Walt Disney’s new picture one day last week, we personally were sitting in a hotel room watching Mr. Disney himself imitate a bee. This is the age of journalistic privilege. “In the studio, I’m the bee that carries the pollen,” Mr. Disney told us. Rising, in illustration, he held out his two cupped hands, filled with invisible pollen, and walked across the room and stood in front of a chair. “I’ve got to know whether an idea goes here,” he said, dumping some pollen into the chair, “or here,” he went on, hurrying to our side of the room and dumping the rest of the pollen on our knees. “Do you draw any more at all?” we asked. “If I do, I don’t show my drawings to any of my artists,” he said, walking about restlessly. “I’ve got too many good artists out there. To draw, you’ve got to get off to yourself. You’ve got to have nothing else on your mind. I have to talk so much I can’t draw. Suppose I’m making a new character like Dumbo. Well, who the hell
is
he? What’s he like? What does he feel? Can you make him fly? You’ve got to keep experimenting, and you’ve got to keep talking and throwing away a lot of stuff.”

Mr. Disney, it developed, has been in South America for the last six weeks or so, gathering pollen for a series of shorts he intends to produce, based on that continent. He took with him, in addition to Mrs. Disney and a sister-in-law, a director and an assistant director, three artists to make sketches of typical South American scenes, three artists to make sketches of typical South American characters, two writers who concentrated on ideas for stories, a composer, and an animator. They flew to Rio and from there to Buenos Aires and on to Santiago, where the Disneys
took a ship for New York, leaving the rest of the troupe to fly on independently through Peru, Ecuador, etc. “We were getting lots of stuff,” Mr. Disney explained, “but when I saw that boat in Santiago I decided to let the boys finish up by themselves. I’ve got good men working for me. You know, the hardest thing to get is a good man who has a sense of humor. A man with a dramatic sense but no sense of humor is almost sure to go arty on you. But if he has a really
good
dramatic sense, he’ll have a sense of humor along with it. He’ll give you a little gag when you need it. Sometimes, right in the middle of a dramatic scene, you’ve got to have a little gag. I’m going to make these South American pictures simple and not arty. The best way is to work off the cuff. Don’t have any script but just go along and nobody knows what’s going to happen until it’s happened. That was the way we did with
Snow White.
I’d say to a songwriter, ‘Look, at this point we got to have a song that expresses love,’ and he’d write one. ‘What the hell happens next?’ the boys would ask me. ‘I don’t know, but let’s try this,’ I would say.

“After the South American stuff, I may try to make a picture with live actors in it. I’d like to do that. I’d cut out about half of the dialogue, first of all. Then I’d work animation in, only you wouldn’t know it was animation. I don’t want any more headaches like the
Nutcracker Suite.
In a thing like that, you got to animate all those flowers, and boy, does that run into dough! All that shading. That damn thing cost two hundred thousand dollars—just the one
Nutcracker Suite.
We’re getting back to straight-line stuff, like ‘Donald Duck’ and the ‘Pigs.’ But to do that you got to watch out for the boys with the dramatic sense and no sense of humor or they’ll go arty on you. You got to keep feeding them pollen.”

OCTOBER 23, 1948 (ON NORMAN MAILER)

W
e had a talk the other day with Norman Mailer, whose novel
The Naked and the Dead
has been at the top of the best-seller lists for several months now. We met him at Rinehart & Co., his publishers, in a conference room that had, along with other handy editorial equipment, a well-stocked bar. We’d heard rumors that Mailer was a rough-and-ready young man with a strong antipathy to literary gatherings and neckties, but on the occasion of our encounter he was neatly turned out in gray tweeds, with a striped red-and-white necktie and shined shoes, and he assured us that he doesn’t really have any deep-seated prejudices concerning dress. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve got all the average middle-class fears.” He thinks the assumption that he hasn’t got them grew out of his meeting some of the literati last summer when he was wearing sneakers and an old T shirt. He’d just come from a ball game, and it was a very hot day. “I figured anybody with brains would be trying to keep cool,” he said.

Mailer is a good-looking fellow of twenty-five, with blue eyes, big ears, a soft voice, and a forthright manner. Locating a bottle of Scotch in the bar, he poured a couple of drinks. “If I’m ever going to be an alcoholic,” he said, “I’ll be one by November 2nd, thanks to the rigors of the political campaign. I’ve been making speeches for Wallace. I’ve made eighteen so far and have another dozen ahead of me. I’m not doing this because I like it. All last year, I kept saying that the intellectuals had to immerse themselves in political movements or else they were only shooting their mouths off. Now I am in this spot as a result of shooting my mouth off.” In general, Mailer told us, the success of his novel has caused
him to feel uncomfortably like a movie queen. “Whenever I make an appearance,” he said, “I have thirty little girls crowding around asking for my autograph. I think it’s much better when people who read your book don’t know anything about you, even what you look like. I have refused to let
Life
photograph me. Getting your mug in the papers is one of the shameful ways of making a living, but there aren’t many ways of making a living that aren’t shameful. Everyone keeps asking me if I’ve ever been psychoanalyzed. The answer is no, but maybe I’ll have to be by the end of another five years. These are rough times for little Normie.”

Mailer’s royalties will net him around thirty thousand this year, after taxes, and he plans to bank most of it. He finds apartments depressing and has a suspicion of possessions, so he and his wife live in a thirty-dollar-a-month furnished room in Brooklyn Heights. He figures that his thirty thousand will last at least five years, giving him plenty of time in which to write another book. He was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, but his family moved to Brooklyn when he was one, and that has since been his home. He attended P.S. 161 and Boys High, and entered Harvard at sixteen, intending to study aeronautical engineering. He took only one course in engineering, however, and spent most of his time reading or in bull sessions. In his sophomore year, he won first prize in
Story
’s college contest with a story entitled “The Greatest Thing in the World.” “About a bum,” he told us. “In the beginning, there’s a whole
tzimes
about how he’s very hungry and all he’s eating is ketchup. It will probably make a wonderful movie someday.” In the Army, Mailer served as a surveyor in the field artillery, an Intelligence clerk in the cavalry, a wireman in a communications platoon, a cook, and a baker, and volunteered, successfully, for action with a reconnaissance platoon on Luzon. He started writing
The Naked and the Dead
in the summer of 1946, in a cottage outside Provincetown, and took sixteen months to finish it. “I’m slowing down,” he said. “When I was eighteen, I wrote a novel in two or three months. At twenty-one, I wrote another novel, in seven months. Neither of them ever got published.” After turning in the manuscript of
The Naked and the Dead
, he and his wife went off to Paris. “It was wonderful there,” he said. “In Paris, you can just lay down your load and look out at the gray sky. Back here, the crowd is always yelling. It’s like a Roman arena. You have a headache, and you scurry around like a rat, like a character in a Kafka nightmare, eating scallops with last year’s grease on them.”

Mailer has an uneasy feeling that Dostoevski and Tolstoy, between
them, have written everything worth writing, but he nevertheless means to go on turning out novels. He thinks
The Naked and the Dead
must be a failure, because of the number of misinterpretations of it that he has read. “People say it is a novel without hope,” he told us. “Actually, it offers a good deal of hope. I intended it to be a parable about the movement of man through history. I tried to explore the outrageous propositions of cause and effect, of effort and recompense, in a sick society. The book finds man corrupted, confused to the point of helplessness, but it also finds that there are limits beyond which he cannot be pushed, and it finds that even in his corruption and sickness there are yearnings for a better world.”