Norman Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007)
Author Norman Mailer was interviewed in the 30th anniversary edition of High Times about his views on marijuana when his son John Buffalo Mailer was the magazine's editor in 2006.
Though Mailer said he hasn't smoked in a decade, he credited his past marijuana use with opening him up to the consciousness of a "higher power" and music appreciation, especially jazz. "I'd been listening to jazz for years, but it had never meant all that much to me. Now, with the powers pot offered, simple things became complex; complex things clarified themselves," he said.
Mailer said after smoking pot, "I began to write for the sound of what I was writing" rather than just the sense. He said he liked pot for editing but thinks it got in the way of his novel writing. "I'd have brilliant insights on pot but could hardly remember any of them later," he said. Although he calls sex on pot "fabulous" he thinks it made him detached from the other person. (Since his first pot experience came during a "crazy" ménage à trois, it seems perhaps Mailer had this detachment going before smoking pot.)
He was critical of modern-day pot smokers, whom he compared to religious fundamentalists. "There's too much dead-ass in the thinking of pot smokers now," he said. He reportedly told his children to learn all they could before smoking pot, because it would make the connections in their brains more interesting after smoking. He said, however, he doesn't know if they took his advice.
Norman Mailer served in army in the Philippines, and his novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) was hailed by many as one of the finest American novels to come out of WWII. In 1955 Mailer co-founded the Village Voice, and he was editor of Dissent from 1952 until 1963. His novel Armies of the Night, a recollection of his experiences at the Washington peace rallies of 1968, won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer in 1980.
A hard drinker, as was his second wife Adele, Mailer stabbed her with a penknife in 1960 after she reportedly called him a "faggot." According to Adele's autobiography, at 13, when her mother took her to see a production of Carmen, ''I decided I was going to be that beautiful temptress who ate men alive, flossed her teeth and spit out the bones, wearing an endless supply of costumes by Frederick's of Hollywood.''
In a remarkable interview in 2003, the year Mailer turned 80, Charlie Rose asks him why he included in his latest book this quote from Thoreau:
Just as active as I become to virtue, just so active is my remaining vice. Every time we teach our virtue
a new nobleness, we teach our vice a new cunning. When we sharpen the blade it will stab better as well as
whittle. The scythe that cuts will cut our legs. We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice.
Possibly marijuana substituting for alcohol saved him from more such terrible incidents involving scythes during his life. Setting out to ignite "a revolution in the consciousness of our time," he told Rose that he'd ignited a few skirmishes, and that America to him has become "less noble, less exciting, as a country; more loutish, more corporate driven...Fascism is a natural state because it's easier. If you have resentment, that resentment can be focused. The hardest thing in Democracy is knowing whether your resentment has any point to it or not...What makes terrorists? It's a feeling that you're in the minority, and you would die for that minority."
Asked about a pending war in Iraq, Mailer replied, "I'm worried that we start something we can't finish without changing the nature of American Democracy by the time we're done....How did the war in Vietnam change the nature of American Democracy? You had a lot of soldiers over there who began to realize the idiocy of that war, and began to realize that drink and pot were the only way to fight that war. And so it became a wilder war than the war I was in. And they came back with that. And the very people that decry that drugs on the upbeat now, and are in America all over the place and children can't read, and stuff like that, are precisely the people who are now pushing to have a war in Iraq and endanger things even more, because there's such disbelief in the need for this war."
Watch Mailer speak on marijuana in a clip from the 2010 documentary Norman Mailer: The American, where he remembers smoking "reefers" and feeling "wonderfully criminal" in the 40's and 50's at a time when "the middle class had an intensely antagonistic attitude towards marijuana. I had friends who broke company with me because I was smoking it...I in turn felt outraged that my friends wouldn't smoke it. I was an advocate for it...We would take it to get psychedelic experiences...And I had extraordinary experiences on it and I learned all about the world. Marijuana has this rather lovely quality at its best of removing one's stale habits of mind temporarily so that one perceives a little better, one hears a little better... the sense of time passing becomes slower...." The documentary also has a clip where Mailer explains the famous last line of his 1955 novel The Deer Park as being inspired by mescaline.
In January 2022, it was announced that John Buffalo Mailer began working on a collection of his father's essays when many people asked him what his father might make of the moment after January 6. The forthcoming book from Skyhorse Publishing is titled, A Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy. He is also working on a television series adapted from J. Michael Lennon’s 2013 biography Norman Mailer: A Double Life. His father would be in favor of the debate over his life and work, and excited about “the reckoning going on right now,” Buffalo Mailer said. His mother Norris Church Mailer's memoir, A Ticket to the Circus describes her 30-year marriage to Norman, including being searched for marijuana everytime they traveled overseas, after customs in Hawaii found a tiny roach in their luggage when the couple returned from the Phillipines in 1975.