Norman Mailer : a double life

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After delivering the manuscript of his war novel The Naked and the Dead to his publisher, Norman Mailer sailed to Europe with his wife, Beatrice, on October 3, 1947. Having for most of his life known only the Depression and the war in the Pacific, he had always viewed with romantic envy the expatriate pasts of the Lost Generation writers he admired: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Henry Miller. So to go to Europe on the GI Bill as he now could seemed like a miraculous opportunity. Paris was the bull’s-eye destination for aspiring writers, including Stanley Karnow, a Harvard graduate and veteran who arrived there a few months before Mailer. His memoir, Paris in the Fifties, opens with the question: “Porquoi Paris? Its name alone was magic. The city, the legendary Ville Lumière, promised something for everyone — beauty, sophistication, culture, cuisine, sex, escape and that indefinable called ambience.” Mailer partook of all of these pleasures during his ten-month stay there. He differed from most of his countrymen, however, in one respect: he was a writer when he arrived: besides Naked, he had written two unpublished novels in college. While enjoying Paris and taking trips to other countries, he was trying to get a new novel going. It was one of the happiest seasons of his life, shadowed only by his anxiety about the future.

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