The Spooky Art

A PREFACE

WITH THREE WARNINGS

AND ONE APOLOGY

During the seven years I worked on Harlot s Ghost, I perceived the CIA and its agents as people of high morals and thorough deceit, loyalty and duplicity, passion and ice-cold detachment. So many writers, including myself, have a bit of that in our makeup. It is part of what has made us novelists, even as intelligence agents are drawn to their profession by the striking opposites in their natures.

Let me assert from the outset, however, that The Spooky Art is not a book about intelligence agents. A work of that sort I might call The Art of the Spooks. This book, however, as the subtitle states, is about writing, its perils, joys, vicissitudes, its loneliness, its celebrity if you are lucky and not so very lucky in just that way. Needless to add, it speaks of problems of craft and plot, character, style, third person, first person, the special psychology of the writer. (I do not think novelists good novelists, that is are altogether like other people.) We novelists, good and bad, are also closet philosophers, and one is ready therefore how not? to offer one s own forays into the nature of such matters as being and nothingness, the near-to-unclassifiable presence of the unconscious and its demonic weapon writer s block. En route, one looks into the need for stamina in doing a novel, and the relation of stamina to one s style. There are discussions of the differences and similarities between fiction and history, fiction and journalism, and, of course, I have often thought about the life of action and the life of meditation as it affects one s work. I have talked and written about the pitfalls of early success and how to cope with disastrous reviews and how we each do our best to live with the competitive spirit of the novelist rather than be eaten out by it. There is talk about identity and occasional crises of identity, as well as the presence of the unconscious in relation to the novelist, taken together with

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Norman Mailer was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.

Praise for The Spooky Art
 
The Spooky Art shows Mailer s brave willingness to take on demanding forms and daunting issues. . . . He has been a thoughtful and stylish witness to the best and worst of the American century. The Boston Globe
 
At his best as artists should be judged Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure. There is enough of his best in this book for it to be welcomed with gratitude. The Washington Post
 
[The Spooky Art] should nourish and inform as well as entertain almost any serious reader of the novel. Baltimore Sun

The richest book ever written about the writer s subconscious. The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
Striking . . . entrancingly frank. Entertainment Weekly
 
Praise for Norman Mailer
 
[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation. The New York Times
 
A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent. The New Yorker
 
A devastatingly alive and original creative mind. Life
 
Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance. The New York Review of Books
 
The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book. Chicago Tribune
 
Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream. The Cincinnati Post