Free The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer

took my car up to the Cape and lay around in Provincetown with my wife, trying to mend, and indeed doing a fair job, because I came off sleeping pills and the marijuana and came part of the way back into that world which has the proportions of the ego. I picked up on
The Magic Mountain
, took it slowly, and lowered
The Deer Park
down to modest size in my brain. Which, events proved, was just as well.
    A few weeks later we came back to the city, and I took some mescaline. Maybe one dies a little with the poison of mescaline in the blood. At the end of a long and private trip which no quick remark should try to describe, the book of
The Deer Park
floated into mind, and I sat up, reached through a pleasure garden of velveted light to find the tree of a pencil and the bed of a notebook, and brought them to union together. Then, out of some flesh in myself I had not yet known, with the words coming oneby one, in separate steeps and falls, hip in their turnings, all cool with their flights, like the touch of being coming into other being, so the last six lines of my bloody book came to me, and I was done. And it was the only good writing I ever did directly from a drug, even if I paid for it with a hangover beyond measure.
    That way the novel received its last sentence, and if I had waited one more day it would have been too late, for in the next twenty-four hours, the printers began their cutting and binding. The book was out of my hands.
    Six weeks later, when
The Deer Park
came out, I was no longer feeling eighty years old but something like a vigorous, hysterical sixty-three—I was actually thirty-three—and I laughed like an old pirate at the indignation I had breezed into being. The important reviews broke about seven good and eleven bad, and the out-of-town reports were almost three-to-one bad to good, but I was not unhappy, because the good reviews were lively and the bad reviews were full of factual error.
    More interesting is the way reviews divided in the New York magazines and newspapers.
Time
, for example, was bad,
Newsweek
was good;
Harper’s
was terrible, but the
Atlantic
was adequate; the daily
Times
was very bad, the Sunday
Times
was good; the daily
Herald Tribune
gave a mark of zero, the Sunday
Herald Tribune
was better than good;
Commentary
was careful but complimentary, the
Reporter
was frantic; the
Saturday Review
was a scold, and Brendan Gill, writing for
The New Yorker
, put together a series of slaps and superlatives, which went partially like this:
     … a big, vigorous, rowdy, ill-shaped, and repellent book, so strong and so weak, so adroit and so fumbling, that only a writer of the greatest and most reckless talent could have flung it between covers.
    It’s one of the three or four lines I’ve thought perceptive in all the reviews of my books. That Malcolm Cowley used one of the same words in saying
The Deer Park
was “serious and reckless” is also, I think, interesting, for reckless the book was—and two critics, anyway, had the instinct to feel it.
    One note appeared in many reviews. The strongest statement of it was by John Hutchens in the daily New York
Herald Tribune:
     … the original version reputedly was more or less rewritten and certain materials eliminated that were deemed too erotic for public consumption. And, with that, a book that might at least have made a certain reputation as a large shocker wound up as a cipher.…
    I was bothered to the point of writing a letter to the twenty-odd newspapers which reflected this idea. What bothered me was that I could never really prove I had not “eliminated” the book. Over the years all too many readers would have some hazy impression that I had disemboweled large pieces of the best meat, perspiring in a coward’s sweat, a publisher’s directive in my ear. (For that matter, I still get an occasional letter which asks if it is possible to see the unbowdlerized
Deer Park.)
Part of the cost of touching the Rinehart galleys was to start