Mind of an Outlaw (48 page)

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.

Instead, Crockett came back with the seventy-fifth anniversary edition of
The Advocate
, a little work of love Crockett had gotten together by himself over the last year—in truth, a prodigious push of Pegasusmanship—collecting poems, pieces, and comment from the fine ranks of Wallace Stevens, Horace Gregory, Djuna Barnes, Marianne Moore, Robert Hillyer, Frederic Prokosch, Mark Schorer, John Malcolm Brinnin, Richard Eberhart, Bowden Broadwater, and William Carlos Williams, plus a poem by John Crockett, “The Sulky Races at Cherry Park.” It was a mammoth virtuoso literary crypto-CIA affair back in March of ’42, and none of us on
The Advocate
had had the first clue as to what Crockett was cooking. As for the issue with our stories—Crockett promised to get to that next. The expression on his young but sour face told us what he thought of our stories. Crockett, incidentally, while not as well-featured as John Dean, had a great resemblance to him—I remember his tortoiseshell glasses, high forehead, and thin pale hair.

Pete Barton had been agitated for weeks at the long wait on our first issue. Painfully aware of his father’s weight in the world, he was invariably overscrupulous never to push his own. He had suspended himself into a state of forbearance worthy of a Zen warrior considering the immense agitation the late appearance of the magazine had caused. When the anniversary issue appeared (to rich critical reception in the Boston papers, worse luck!), Barton finally demonstrated his father’s blood. He called an emergency meeting where he calumniated himself for his derelictions of attention, took the full blame for the financial
disaster of the issue (it had cost something like three times as much as more modest issues; our debt on the consequence had doubled overnight), and—Billy Budd to the last, absent even to intimations of a further notion to evil—stated that he would not ask for Crockett’s resignation if he could expect his cooperation on future projects.

Crockett replied with a nod of his head and a profound turning of our collective head. Having heard, he said, that Somerset Maugham would be in the Boston area during April, he had sent an invitation to Maugham to come to a party that
The Advocate
would be happy to throw in his honor, and Maugham had accepted. Maugham had accepted.

This piece of news ran around the ring of Cambridge like a particle in a cyclotron. Nothing in four years at Harvard, not Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, or the blitz, not even beating Yale and Princeton in the same season for the first time in years, could have lit Harvard up more. Not to be invited to that party was equal to signifying that one had mismanaged one’s life.

The literary grandees of the faculty sent their early acceptance: F. O. Matthiessen, Theodore Spencer, and Robert Hillyer in the van; the officers of
The Lampoon
sucked around; housemasters’ wives asked how things were
going
at
The Advocate
. On the night of the party, four hundred souls in four hundred bodies as large as Patrick Moynihan’s and as delicate as Joan Didion’s came to the small rooms on the third floor and packed themselves in so completely that you ended by bringing your drink to your lips around the wrist of the strange forearm in front of your face. The noise of cocktail gabble anticipated the oncoming shapings of time—one would not hear the sound again until the first jet planes fired up their engines at an airport. Drinks were passed overhead. If you did not reach at the right time, another hand plucked the drink. It did not matter. More was on its way. Glasses bounced like corks over white choppy Harvard hands. From time to time, word would pass like wind through grass that Maugham had just entered the building, Maugham was having trouble getting up the stairs, Maugham was through the door. Maugham was in the other room. We formed phalanxes to move
into the other room; we did not budge. A phalanx cannot budge a volume that is impacted. The lovely smile of resignation was on the lips of faculty wives: it is the establishment smile that says, “Life is like that—the nearest pleasures are not to be tasted.” After a half hour of such smiling into the face of a stranger as one brought one’s arm around her neck to get at one’s drink, the wind came through the grass again. Maugham, we heard, was at the door. Maugham was slowly going down the stair. Somerset Maugham was gone.

Hands passed drinks above the impacted mass. Eyes flashed in that hard gemlike smile of pride retained when opportunity is lost. In another half hour, there was a lessening of pressure on one’s chest, and bodies began to separate. After a while, one could walk from room to room. What was the point? Maugham was gone.

It was only on the next day, after the claims of liars had been checked against the quiet evidence of reliable witnesses who had found themselves analogously empretzeled in every room and on the stairs, that the news came back. By every sound measure of verification, Somerset Maugham had never been in the
Advocate
building that night. Crockett, now confronted, confessed. Out of his unflappable funds of phlegm, he allowed that he had known for weeks Somerset Maugham was not coming—the great author had been kind enough to send a telegram in answer to the invitation. “Certainly not,” it said.

It was too late to ask Crockett to resign. Due to the war and an accelerated graduation, our term as
Advocate
officers was up; the new president and Pegasus were in. Because of the party, we left with a debt that had just doubled again.
The Advocate
has never been solvent since.

A postscript: Pete Barton became a Navy officer and commanded a ship, came home, worked as quietly for
Time
as if he had been a
Lampoon
man, and died before he was forty. The only time I saw John Crockett again was about ten years ago in New York on a reunion at the Harvard Club. He was now in the State Department
and had been stationed for years in Yugoslavia. He told delicious stories about idiotic conversations with Madame Tito at banquets in Zagreb. He looked to be as wicked as ever. Our cause was being well served in Yugoslavia. It occurs to me that the mag across the street never knew what a talent it missed when
The Advocate
got Crockett. Rest in peace, Pete Barton.

1980s

PROSECUTOR:
Your Honor, our first and only witness will be the defendant, Norman Mailer.

THE COURT:
He has waived his rights?

PROSECUTOR:
Yes, Your Honor.

THE COURT:
All right, let’s put him on.

[The defendant is sworn]

Mr. Mailer, I will remind you of the charge. It is criminal literary negligence. On this charge, the court may find against you for censure in the first or second degree, or for reprimand. You may also be exonerated.

MAILER:
I am aware of the charge, Your Honor.

PROSECUTOR:
Mr. Mailer, I am holding in my hand a work entitled
Of Women and Their Elegance
, which has your name on the cover as author. Would you describe it?

MAILER:
It is a book of photographs by Milton Greene, with a text of fifty thousand words by myself.

PROSECUTOR:
Fifty thousand words is the length of the average novel?

MAILER:
Maybe half to two-thirds the length.

PROSECUTOR:
Would you say this work presents itself as an autobiography by Marilyn Monroe?

MAILER:
Originally, I wished to title it
Of Women and Their Elegance, by Marilyn Monroe as told to Norman Mailer
, but it was decided the title could prove misleading to the public, who might think the interview had actually taken place. I suppose it would be better to describe the text as a false autobiography. Or an imaginary memoir, since the story, but for a few recollections, only covers a period of three or four years in her life.

PROSECUTOR:
It is made up.

MAILER:
More or less made up.

PROSECUTOR:
Could you be more specific?

MAILER:
Much of the book is based on fact. I would say some of it is made up.

PROSECUTOR:
Are you prepared to offer examples of fact and fiction as they occur in your pages?

MAILER:
I can try.

PROSECUTOR:
Let me read a passage to the court, written in the first person, which purports to be Marilyn Monroe’s voice. The Amy she refers to is one Amy Greene, Milton Greene’s wife. I will enter it as Exhibit A. It is taken from page 24 of Mr. Mailer’s book.

THE COURT:
All right, go ahead.

[The prosecution reads Exhibit A, page 24]

PROSECUTOR:
Now, Mr. Mailer.

MAILER:
Yessir.

PROSECUTOR:
Did this scene occur?

MAILER:
Yes. Mrs. Greene told me that hordes of shoppers did indeed gawk at Marilyn.

PROSECUTOR:
And ripped open the curtain to the dressing room?

MAILER:
It is my recollection that Mrs. Greene told me something of the sort.

PROSECUTOR:
In a tape-recorded interview?

MAILER:
[
Pauses
] Perhaps, in casual conversation. I am old friends with Mr. and Mrs. Greene, and we have had many unrecorded conversations about Marilyn Monroe as well.

PROSECUTOR:
And you drew your impressions of Miss Monroe from these conversations, recorded and unrecorded?