Norman Mailer in Provincetown -- Friend remembers late author
<span style="color: navy;">"There could be no other town like it. If you were sensitive to crowds, you might expire in summer from human propinquity. On the other hand, if you were unable to endure loneliness, the vessel of your person could fill with dread during the long winter . . . </span>
<span style="color: navy;">"Conceived at night (for one would swear it was created in the course of one dark storm) its sand flats still glistened in the dawn with the most primeval innocence of land exposing itself to the sun for the first time."</span>
<span style="color: navy;">- Norman Mailer, Tough Guys Don't Dance, 1984</span>
In pursuit of his work, he became a Provincetown year-rounder. Perhaps Norman Mailer and I had much in common, after all.
Mailer had first ventured to the tiny town at the tip of Cape Cod in 1943 because his hero, John Dos Passos, had done so. Norman returned, on and off, for the next six decades, and was waked and buried there last week at age 84.
The Mailers moved to Provincetown full-time a decade and-a-half ago, allowing Norman to focus on his writing without the distraction of the New York social scene. Of his more than 30 books, at least 8 in whole and 18 in part were written in Provincetown. "Tough Guys Don't Dance" was set there.
In that seaside settlement, Norman and Norris were royalty and a dinner invitation to the big brick harborfront house in the East End meant a command performance. Margaret and I cherished many such occasions over the seventeen years I served as town manager there, and where Margaret worked for a time as publisher of Provincetown Arts Magazine, to which Mailer frequently contributed.
Mailer had once run for mayor of New York, and there had been idle talk that he might run for selectman in Provincetown. But Mailer was never one of five. He was one-of-a-kind.
In 17 years, I saw him attend precisely one Town Meeting. His hearing and the Town Hall auditorium's acoustics together proved insurmountable obstacles to his participation, he told me, even though he felt Provincetown was "the last democratic place on earth."
His returns to that auditorium did include many benefit performances, staged readings, and political discussions. For one such benefit - a staged reading of "Don Juan in Hell" -- the Mailers had even flown in Gore Vidal to play the part of the Devil. Norman Mailer and the Devil at Town Hall. Another time, he walked out mid-way through a joint appearance with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, because she'd talked much too long before introducing him, and he had an 8:30 p.m. dinner reservation at nearby Front Street Restaurant. What a devil.
After our lunch once at Napi's - where he advised me not to pursue a town manager's job in snooty Chatham ("why in hell would you want to work for a bunch of old people?") - I guided him on a private tour of the then-mothballed Heritage Museum building, to satisfy Norman's curiosity about whether it would work as the location for The New School to offer a graduate program in the performing arts. Well, that didn't work out - the building became the Town's new library with a recently restored cupola - but I had a memorable afternoon with Norman and cane ably exploring the familiar landmark's innards.
Earlier this decade, friends, associates, and admirers formed The Norman Mailer Society, which held a weekend-long conference each Fall at the Provincetown Inn. Margaret and I became inaugural members and took advanced training in Everything Mailer. Mailer the Novelist. Mailer the Political Writer. Mailer the Filmmaker. Well, the novels and political writings were good, anyway.
Provincetown was a very special place for us to raise our two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth - and in no small degree because it was the place that Mailer, like Dos Passos before him, had come to be part of the vibrant artists and writers colony.
When my younger daughter was 9 years old, I took her to a benefit reading at the Fine Arts Work Center, bringing along a copy of Mailer's recently published anthology, "A Time of Our Time." Norman cheerfully inscribed it "to my Provincetown neighbor, Elizabeth," but only after taking me aside -- as one father to another -- with the caution that the volume contained material perhaps inappropriate for such a young reader. In a thousand representative pages of Mailer's first half century of writing, that was highly likely. Fear not, I said. I shall hold the book in trust for Elizabeth until she reached an age of appreciation. Well, Liz is a college freshman now, devours Mailer's writings, and treasures the keepsake Dad procured for her a decade ago. Score one for Dad.
When she was 10, my older daughter, Mary, had first come with me to see Mailer do a benefit reading in the nave of the St. Mary of the Harbor Episcopal Church. Mailer read from "The Gospel According to the Son," an account of Jesus which Norman had written in the first person. Both of their mothers thought they were God, Norman had quipped at dinner.
Mary was there again on Norman's 80<sup>th</sup> birthday, which was a singular distinction. With the unanimous indulgence of the Board of Selectmen, January 31, 2003 had been proclaimed as "Norman Mailer Day." In a simple ceremony in the big brick house attended only by the Mailers and the Bergmans, I read the proclamation I'd penned, which favorably compared Norman to the town's first celebrity visitors: "in the nearly sixty years since his first landfall in Provincetown, Norman Mailer proved he was made of stronger stuff than the Pilgrims . . . by ultimately becoming-- as they did not-- a Year-Rounder." Norman was touched. "It took me 80 years to get my own f---ing day!" he cried, and then stood and recited from memory the only good poem he ever wrote- celebrating Provincetown's commercial fishing fleet ("I know a town where light is dry and boats come home with silver in their hold / where boats come home with silver in their hold.)" Margaret presented Norris with flowers (it was Norris' birthday, too, although Norman had a quarter century head start on his sixth wife).
Last Christmas, he sent us over a signed advance reader's edition of "The Castle in the Forest" -- which was to be his last novel -- "with a salute for the fine work you've given the town / Cheers, cheers / Norman Mailer."
The Bergmans had their last dinner with Norman at the beginning of this summer. It was our farewell. Mary was home from Smith College, and she and Margaret served the meal that evening at the big brick house. And we all learned the right way to drink single-malt scotch.
Margaret and I were in Provincetown last weekend, and the news quickly spread around town, and around the world, that Norman Mailer had died. Our neighbor, Mike Lennon, Norman's literary executor, archivist, society founder, official biographer-- and the other half of the "uncommon conversation" in Mailer's just published, On God-- e-mailed me that "it's been a difficult month. He was such a fighter," and invited us to the wake on Monday. We live right across from McHoul's Funeral Home, so our last mile was a short walk. It was an open casket and it could have been any Provincetown family. All the regulars were there. We all needed to say good-bye to our friend and neighbor, Norman. Cheers, tough guy.
Keith A. Bergman is Town Administrator for the Town of Littleton. From 1990 to 2007, he was Town Manager for the Town of Provincetown.