The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer Page A

advance you’re headed for trouble. Obviously, with a book about ancient Egypt, everyone would have been happier if some unknown author had written it. There might have been then a lively curiosity about the author. Who is this unknown and most curious talent? One hurdle I had to overcome with
Ancient Evenings
was knowing in advance that a lot of people would pick it up and spend the first fifty pages saying, “What is Norman Mailer up to?” It makes them uncomfortable, because these days we all pride ourselves on our acumen. We want to think we’re in control of the scene. When someone refutes our expectations, it does irritate the hell out of us.
    MS: How do you deal with it?
    NM: Professional confidence. Not arrogance—professional confidence. If I’m not, in the literary sense, smarter than the reviewer, I’m in a lot of trouble. After all, I should know more about my book than he or she does. So, I can read a very bad review and shrug it off. That works until it
doesn’t
work. If all the reviews are bad, it could feel like a catastrophe.
    It usually doesn’t matter if your book is good or bad. Across the country, you’re going to get more or less the same number of good and bad reviews. A dreadful book will probably get three good reviews in ten, and a very good book may get six. Occasionally, a work will receive all good or all bad reviews across the board and this happens because something in its pages outragesor soothes some part of the national temper to which the media is sensitive.
    Crude example: a work that is insensitive to 9/11.
    Large literary success is so often a matter of fortuitous publication.
The Naked and the Dead
had the luckiest timing of my career. By 1946, people were no longer that interested in novels about the Second World War. But
The Naked and the Dead
didn’t come out until 1948, and by then readers were ready. If it had appeared earlier, I don’t know that it would have had equal impact.
    On the other hand, when I wrote
Ancient Evenings
(and that novel took eleven years), I ended up wishing I had been a bit more productive on a few of those working days and so could have come out twelve months earlier. That might have offered me a following breeze. There was large interest in the Egyptian dynasties just the year before. New York had had a massive museum exhibit at the Metropolitan that then proceeded to travel all over the country. By the time
Ancient Evenings
appeared, I was in the wake. The curious had, for the most part, lost interest.
    Something of the same happened with
Harlot’s Ghost.
When it was published in 1992, the Cold War was over. Much direct attention was gone. When I’d begun seven years earlier, people were still fascinated (as I certainly was) by the CIA. My point is, don’t write a book with the idea people are going to be attracted by the subject and therefore you have a good chance to do well with your sales. The situation is bound to be different by the time the work is ready to show itself. No need to calculate. It’s a crapshoot.
    Ah, publicity! One has written a book and the publisher intends to do a bit with it—the faint hope arises that it will become a best-seller—and so the author is ready to do a tour and excite some attention.
    I think for any novelist who’s had a great deal of early success, as Capote did and Vidal did and Styron and I did, it was not automatic or easy to look upon other people with simple interest, because, generally speaking, they were more interested in us. One is never more aware of this vanity than when on a publicity tour. You are the center of attention. But there is a price. You are alsoan object to be manipulated as effectively as possible. The career of media interviewers conceivably rises or falls a little by how well they handle you.
    Moreover, count on it: Three out of four interviewers will not have read your book. That tends to make them ask questions which cost them 2 percent and you 98 percent. For example: