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writing
Barbary Shore?
    NM :
Barbary Shore
was built on the division which existed then in my mind. My conscious intelligence, as I’ve indicated, became obsessed by the Russian Revolution. But my unconscious was much more interested in other matters: murder, suicide, orgy, psychosis, all the themes I discuss in
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Since the gulf between these conscious and unconscious themes was vast and quite resistant to any quick literary coupling, the tension to get a bridge across resulted in the peculiar feverish hothouse atmosphere of the book. My unconscious felt one kind of dread, my conscious mind another, and
Barbary Shore
lives somewhere in between. That’s why its focus is so unearthly. And of course the difficulty kept haunting me from then on in all the work I did afterward. But it was a book written without any plan.
    Barbary Shore
, however, taught me one thing about myself: I could get up off the floor. The reviews were unbelievably bad. After all, I’d taken myself a little too seriously after
The Naked andthe Dead.
Do that, and the book-review world will lie in wait for you. There are a lot of petty killers in our business. So there it was. My God,
Time
magazine’s review of
Barbary Shore
ended by saying, “Paceless, tasteless, graceless, beached on a point of no fictional or intellectual return.” When you realize that it didn’t succeed in draining all your blood, you actually decide you’re stronger than you thought you were. It’s the way a young prizefighter with a promising start can get knocked out early in his career and come back from that to have a good record. The time he was knocked out has become part of his strength. You start writing a novel and think, This could end up badly, but then you shrug: All right. I’ve been down before. It won’t be the end of the world. That’s important. I’m fond of
Barbary Shore
for this reason—not its in-and-out merits.
    STEVEN MARCUS: What about
The Deer Park?
    NORMAN MAILER: For
The Deer Park
I didn’t have much of a method. It was agony; it was far and away the most difficult of my three novels to write. The first and second drafts were written with the idea that they were only the first part of an eight-part novel. I think I used that enormous scheme as a pretext to get into the work. Apparently, I just couldn’t sit down and write a nice modest Hollywood novel. I had to have something grandiose, in conception, anyway. I started
The Deer Park
with “The Man Who Studied Yoga.” That was supposed to be a prologue to all eight novels. It went along nicely and was done in a few weeks. And then I got into
The Deer Park
and I forget what my methods were exactly; I think they varied. In the revisions of
Barbary Shore
, I had started working in longhand; as soon as I found myself blocked on the typewriter, I’d shift to longhand. By the time I got to
The Deer Park
I was writing in longhand all the time. I’d write in longhand in the morning and type up what I’d written in the afternoon. I was averaging about four–five pages a day, I think, three days a week; about fifteen pages a week. But I found it an unendurable book to write because I’d finish each day in the most profound black mood; as I found out later it was even physical. I was gutting my liver.
    SM: It wasn’t alcohol?
    NM: No, I wasn’t much of a drinker in those days. The liver, you see, is not unlike a car battery, and I was draining mine. I waswriting with such anxiety and such fear and such distaste, and such gloom and such dissatisfaction that …
    SM : Dissatisfaction with what?
    NM : Oh, everything. My work, my life, myself. The early draft of
The Deer Park
was terrible. It had a few good things in it, but it was slow to emerge, it took years, and was stubborn.
    For those who are interested, a long and detailed description of the anxiety, ambition, confusion, and fury that went into the
rewriting
of
The Deer Park
now follows.
THE LAST DRAFT OF
THE DEER PARK

    I n his