A day earlier, on the press plane to Albany, Georgia, he had felt—what with a few drinks inside him—that he was coming closer to what he wanted to discuss with Carter in the interview that would be granted next day. The sexual revolution had come out of a profound rejection of the American family—it had been a way of saying to the parents, “If you say sex is dirty, then it has to be good, because your lives are false!” But Carter would restore the family. Faithful, by public admission, to his wife for thirty years, he was in every way a sexual conservative. Since his economic proposals would appeal to progressives, he might be undertaking the Napoleonic proposition of outflanking two armies, Republicans and Democrats, from the right and the left. Yes, there was much to talk about with Carter. Even on the airplane, Mailer could feel his head getting overcompressed with themes of conversation arriving too early.
Jimmy Carter’s home was on a side street, and you approached it through a barricade the Secret Service had erected. It was possible this was as unobtrusive a small-town street as the Secret Service had ever converted into an electronic compound with walkie-talkies, sentries, and lines of sight. The house was in a grove of trees, and the ground was hard-put to keep its grass, what with pine needles, pecan leaves, and the clay of the soil itself, which gave off a sandy-rose hue in the shade.
The rambling suburban ranch house in those trees spoke of California ancestry for its architecture, and a cost of construction between $50,000 and $100,000, depending on how recently it was built. The inside of the house was neither lavish nor under-furnished, not sumptuous or mean—a house that spoke of comfort more than taste. The colors laid next to one another were in no way brilliant, yet neither did their palette of soft shades depress the eye, for they were cool in the Georgia summer. Carter’s study was large and dark with books, and there were busts of Kennedy and Lincoln, and his eight-year-old daughter Amy’s comic book (starring Blondie) was on the floor. It was the only spot of red in all the room. Over his desk was a fluorescent light.
Maybe Carter was one of the few people in the world who could look good under fluorescent light. Wearing a pale blue button-down shirt open at the neck—pale blue was certainly his color—Carter had a quintessential American cleanliness, that silvery light of a finely tuned and supple rectitude that produces our best ministers and best generals alike, responsible for both the bogs of Vietnam and the vision of a nobler justice.
Now, sitting across the desk from Carter, he was struck by a quiet difference in Carter this Sunday afternoon. Maybe it was the result of church, or maybe the peril implicit for a politician in any interview—since one maladroit phrase can ruin a hundred good ones—but Carter seemed less generous than he had expected. Of course, Mailer soon knew to his horror that he was close to making a fool of himself, if indeed he had not done it already, because with his first question taking five minutes to pose, and then ten, he had already given a speech rather than a question. What anguish this caused, that he—known as criminally egomaniacal by common reputation, and therefore for years as careful as a reformed criminal to counteract the public expectation of him—was haranguing a future president of the United States. He had a quick recollection of the days when he ran for mayor and some fool or other, often an overly educated European newspaperman, would ask questions that consisted of nothing but long-suppressed monologues. To make matters worse, Carter was hardly being responsive in his answer—how could he be? Mailer’s exposition dwelt in the bowels of that limitless schism in Protestantism—between the fundamental simplicities of good moral life as exemplified a few hours ago in Bible class and the insuperable complexities of moral examination opened by Kierkegaard, whose work, Mailer now told Carter with enthusiasm, looked to demonstrate that we cannot know the moral role we enact. We can feel saintly and yet be evil in the eyes of God, feel we are evil (on the other hand) and yet be more saintly than we expect; equally, we may do good even as we are feeling good, or be bad exactly when we expect we are bad. Man is alienated from his capacity to decide his moral worth. Maybe, Mailer suggested, he had sailed on such a quick theological course because Carter had quoted Kierkegaard on the second page of his autobiography. “Every man is an exception,” Kierkegaard had written.
But it was obvious by the smile on Carter’s face—a well of encouragement to elicit the point of this extended question—that Carter was not necessarily one of America’s leading authorities on Kierkegaard. How foolish of Mailer to expect it of him—as if Norman in his turn had never quoted an author he had not lived with thoroughly.
Having failed with the solemnity of this exposition, but his voice nonetheless going on, beginning to wonder what his question might be—did he really have one, did he really enter this dialogue with the clean journalistic belief that ultimate questions were to be answered by presidential candidates?—he now began to shift about for some political phrasing he could offer Carter as a way out of these extensive hypotheses. The sexual revolution, Mailer said hopefully, the sexual revolution might be a case in point. And he now gave the lecture he had prepared the night before—that the family, the very nuclear family whose security Carter would look to restore, was seen as the enemy by a large fraction of Americans. “For instance,” said Mailer, clutching at inspiration, “there are a lot of people in New York who don’t trust you. The joke making the rounds among some of my friends is ‘How can you put confidence in a man who’s been faithful to the same woman for thirty years?’ ”
Carter’s smile showed real amusement, as if he knew something others might not necessarily know. Of course, whether he was smiling to the left or right of this issue was another matter. Curiously encouraged by the ambiguous fiber of the smile, Mailer went on toward asking his first question. He had presented the joke, he suggested, to show the gulf of moral differences that awaited a Carter presidency—for instance, to talk of the drug problem just a moment, statistics reexamined showed that addicts deprived of heroin, or methadone, did not commit more crimes to get scarce heroin but instead took speed or barbiturates or pot, or even went to bourbon. The implication of this, Mailer said, is that there’s a chasm in the soul that might have to be filled, a need precisely not to be oneself but rather to give oneself over to the Other, to give oneself to some presence outside oneself; the real answer to drug addiction might not be in social programs but in coming to grips with the possibility that Satanism was loose in the twentieth century. One question he would like to ask in line with this was whether Carter thought much about the hegemony of Satan, or did he—yes, this unasked question was now being silently answered by Carter’s eyes, yes, Carter’s concern was not with Satan but with Christ. On and on went Mailer with considerable fever, looking, for instance, to propose that one difference between Carter’s religious point of view as he, Mailer, presumed to comprehend it, and his own might be that he had a notion of God as not clearly omnipotent but rather as a powerful God at war with other opposed visions in the universe—a ridiculous picture of God to present to Carter, Mailer told the candidate, except that going back to the Moyers interview, where Carter had certainly said that he felt he might be doing God’s will when he felt a sense of peace and self-assurance—did it ever bother Carter, keeping Kierkegaard’s Principle of Uncertainty in mind, if he, Mailer, could, heh heh, steal a title from Heisenberg—did it ever bother him that God might be in anguish or rage at what He had not accomplished across the heavens? For instance, there was the Hasidic tale of Rabbi Zusya, who begged God to reveal himself in reward for Zusya’s devotions to him, and God finally replied by revealing Himself, and Zusya crawled under the bed and howled in fear like a dog, and said, “O God, please do not reveal yourself to me.” Did that story, that image of God, strike any chord in Carter, was there any recognition that God, close to losing, could live in wrath and horror? Christ, when all was said, had died on the Cross, on a mission He believed would succeed and had failed.
Mailer ground down into silence, furious with himself for scattering prodigious questions like bucksh
ot. He looked across at Carter. He was realizing all over again that the only insanity still left in his head was this insane expectation he had of men in public places.
Carter nodded sadly. He looked a little concerned. He had every right to be. However would such an interview appear in The New York Times?
Well, answered Carter soberly, thoughtfully, he was not certain that he could reply to everything that had been raised since their points of view were not the same in many respects. He was not, for instance, as devout and as prayerful as the press had perhaps made him out to be. Religion was something he certainly did and would live with, but he didn’t spend as much time as people might expect exploring into the depths of these questions; perhaps—he suggested politely—he ought to be more concerned, but in truth, he did not think his personal beliefs were to be carried out by the government; there were limits to what government could do, yet in those limits, he thought much more could be done than was now being done. For example, he would recognize that there is little that government could do directly to restore the family. Welfare payments might, for example, be revised in such a way that fathers would not be directly encouraged to desert their families, as they were most ironically now encouraged to do, but he would admit that this, of course, was to the side of the question. He supposed, Carter said, that the answer, as he saw it, was in turning government around so that it would be more of a model. There was a yearning in this country for the restoration of something precious. “There’s been a loss of pride in this country that I find catastrophic.” The deterioration of family values was linked, Carter thought, to that loss of pride. It would be his hope that if he could get the actual workings of the government turned around, so that government was at once more efficient and more sensitive, then perhaps it could begin to serve as more of a model to counteract the fundamental distrust of people in relation to government, that is, their feeling they won’t find justice. “The real answer is to get those of us who are running the government going right.” You see, Carter went on to say, he was not looking to restore the family by telling people how to live; he did not wish to be president in order to judge them. “I don’t care,” he said in his quiet decent voice, as if the next words, while not wholly comfortable, had nonetheless to be said, “I don’t care if people say ——,” and he actually said the famous four-letter word that the Times has not printed in the 125 years of its publishing life.
He got it out without a backing-up of phlegm or a hitch in his rhythm (it was, after all, not the easiest word to say to a stranger), but it was said from duty, from the quiet decent demands of duty, as if he, too, had to present his credentials to that part of the twentieth century personified by his interviewer.
No, Carter went on, his function was not to be a religious leader but to bring the human factor back into economics. The same economic formula, he suggested, would work or not work depending on the morale of the people who were doing the work.
Mailer nodded. He believed as much himself. But he was still dissatisfied with his lack of contact on questions more fundamental to himself. Like a child who returns to the profitless point (out of obscure but certain sense of need), Mailer looked to return their conversation to Kierkegaardian ambiguities and so spoke of marijuana, for it was on marijuana, he told Carter, that he had had the first religious experience he had ever known—indeed, marijuana might even pose the paradox of arriving at mystical states for too little. One began to feel the vulnerability of God about the time one recognized a little more clearly in the unwinding of the centers of one’s consciousness that one was consuming one’s karma, possibly stripping—for no more than the pleasure of the experience—some of the resources of one’s future lives. He asked Carter then if he had any belief in reincarnation, in the reincarnation of karma as our purgatory here on earth? And Carter said no, Carter said he believed we had our one life and our judgment. And then with that gentle seductiveness all good politicians have, Carter mentioned that his understanding was not wholly alien to drugs, his sons had experimented with marijuana a few years ago and had later done some work in the rehabilitation of addicts. He felt as if their experiences had helped them in such work.
Mailer was thinking morosely of the meeting of Sam Goldwyn and George Bernard Shaw to discuss making a film. Goldwyn had spoken of his admiration for Shaw’s work, of his love of fine dramatic subjects, of the pleasures of aesthetics, and Shaw had finally replied, “Mr. Goldwyn, the difficulty is that you care only about art, and I am interested only in money.” He had certainly been playing Goldwyn to Jimmy Carter’s George Bernard Shaw—no, worse!
Mailer was finally beginning to feel the essential frustration of trying to talk about religion with Carter on equal terms. Carter had more troops, which is to say he had more habits. If you go to church every Sunday for most of your life, then you end with certain habits. You live in a dependable school of perception. In the case of Baptists, it might be living with the idea that if you were good enough and plucky and lucky and not hating your neighbor for too little, Christ was quietly with you. Certainly, if you had the feeling He was with you at all, He was with you in church on Sunday. So you could form the habit over the years of thinking about Him in a comfortable way.
Maybe Carter saw God in the little continuing revelations churchgoing offered on the personalities of one’s friends. It was like enjoying a film or a bestselling novel. Cause and effect lived in a framework you could perceive. A good man had his character written on his face.
Whereas Mailer’s love of God (we must assume he has some) owed too much to Kierkegaard, who could have said that a good man would have his character written on his face unless he wasn’t a good man but an exceptional bad man with a good face—Mailer saw no reason why the Devil could not be the most beautiful creature God ever made. Yet, equally, a man could develop an evil face and a loving heart. There was the difference. Carter might be able to see hints of God in his neighbor; Mailer was forever studying old photographs of Gurdjieff and Rasputin.
They had come to the end of their hour. The author was feeling a dull relief that he would have, at least, another hour tomorrow. How fortunate that that had been scheduled in advance. He started to apologize in some roundabout form for how the first hour had gone, and Carter replied with his gracious smile: it was all right, he said, they had needed the first hour to loosen up, to become acquainted. Mailer left with the twice dull sense that he liked Carter more than Carter had any reason to like him.
Our Man at Harvard
(1977)
LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT the Somerset Maugham party that we gave at The Advocate in the spring of 1942. The magazine was housed then in a dark gray flat-roofed three-story building across the street from the stern of The Lampoon (and indeed we were much aware of being in their wake—Lampoon editors usually went to Time; ours to oblivion). In those days The Advocate building was as ugly from the exterior as it is now. A few small and dingy stores occupied the ground floor; some mysterious never-seen tenants were on the second; and The Advocate offices took up the third. They were beautiful to me. One climbed a dull, carpeted staircase as dusty as a back road in Guerrero, used one’s Advocate key to go through the door at the top, and opened the suite, an entire floor-through of five rooms, five mystical chambers full of broken-down furniture and the incomparable odor that rises from old beer stains in the carpet and syrup-crusted empty Coke bottles in the corners. It is a better odor than you would think, sweet and alcoholic and faintly debauched—it spoke of little magazines and future lands of literature, and the offices were almost always empty in late afternoon, when the sunlight turned the dust into a cosmos of angels dancing on a pin. Magicians would have felt a rush of aphrodisia amid all this pendant funk and mote. Maybe I loved the Advocate offices more than anyone who was taken in my competition—I spent the spring of sophomore year at Harvard drinking Cokes by a table at the window that faced on The Lampoon, and I read old issues of the magazine. Once I was an authority on the early published work
in The Advocate of T. S. Eliot, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Van Wyck Brooks, John Reed, Conrad Aiken, E. E. Cummings, and Malcolm Cowley—it must have been the nearest I ever came to extracting genealogical marrow from old print. Occasionally Marvin Barrett, the president, or Bowden Broadwater, Pegasus, would come through the office, give a start at seeing me at the same chair and table where he had glimpsed me on the last visit, and go off to do his work.
The following academic year, ’41–’42, Bruce Barton, Jr., was elected president and John Crockett became Pegasus. We had troubles instantly. Barton, called Pete, was the son of Bruce Barton, Sr., an advertising magnate as well known in his period as was Nicholas Murray Butler, and for that matter one could find similarities. (Barton must have been the last of the advertising tycoons who believed passionately in a strenuous Jesus with muscles.)
His son, in compensation, was a gentleman. Pete Barton was the nicest guy a lot of us met at Harvard, and with his blond hair, good if somewhat pinched features and fundamental decency, he could have passed for Billy Budd if (1) he had not gone to Deerfield, which left him a little more patrician than yeoman in manner, and if (2) he had had more beef. But he was gentle, he was quietly literary, and his father had millions. Since The Advocate was in its usual cauldron of debt, no other man would have been so appropriate to serve as president. Barton might even have had a benign, well-financed, and agreeable administration if not for the new Pegasus, John Crockett, a man as talented as Claggart and equally riven in his soul by detestation of our Billy Budd.
Being innocent of Crockett’s propensities for literary evil, we were a happy group coming into the office. The magazine would be ours. We would print what we wished. Our first issue, therefore, consisted of each of us putting in his own story. Crockett then took our gems to a printer in Vermont. This was, I think, in November. By February we still did not have a magazine. Crockett kept assuring us the printer would soon deliver. None of us ever called him. Crockett had promised us that the inexpensive rate he had managed to extract from the Linotype mills of the Vermont woods would be ruined forever if we broke any of our voices on the printer’s ear. Therefore, we waited. Nervously, impatiently, suspiciously, we waited for the issue with our stories.