Where is Lompoc? (Mailer Part II)

Norman Mailer’s Unanswered Question

Final Book Poll: Which cover is better?

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Writing allows me to get it all down, to say what I feel needs to be said in its highest, boldest essence. I want you to see me and I want to tell you that I see you. We’re both human beings, alien as I sometimes feel in this naked, aggressive world. Everything has always felt backwards and topsy-turvy in life, to me. This, again, is part of what motivates me to write.

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Lompoc—of all places!—is actually mentioned in Norman Mailer’s collected letters. Yeah. Late seventies, from a correspondence with Jack Henry Abbot, a man locked up in prison, presumably in the institution in Lompoc. As in: The town where I currently reside. Actually, someone in Britney’s family even works at the prison here. My eyes just about jumped out of my skull when I saw the word Lompoc. Incidentally—and humorously—Mailer wrote, “Where is Lompoc?” Believe it or not this line made me feel “seen and heard”—to use my silly [Millennial] generation’s lingo. It seemed as if Mailer—that egocentric, megalomaniacal genius—were reaching forward from the past and patting my shoulder saying, Look, man, You won’t be here forever.

Is Lompoc that bad? Yes. And no. It’s physically gorgeous; that is undeniable. Highway 1 slices right through it like God took a knife and dragged it through the spectacular lush green valleys. Hills surround it, those splendid, classic California hills which have always felt like home to me. (Ojai, Santa Barbara, etc; the Los Padres Mountain Range.) Those green and brown hilly and jagged mountains which layer against and above and below each other and are sharp and high and low and look like sparkling brown diamonds when the sun is setting in orange and red rays of light, like peering at the lowering sun through the bottom of a thin clear wine glass, splattering pinks and ambers and crimsons all around.

But it’s not where the culture is, and I need culture. Things aren’t happening here with writing, with art, with intellectual discussion, with the attempt to understand the nuanced, deep complexities of being a human. For that you need Manhattan, or Los Angeles or Seattle or San Francisco or Boston, etc. The city.

Madrid, Spain, where we now hope to move by the end of the year.

Mailer lived in several places, from Maine to Provincetown to Brooklyn. He took trips for months at a time to places like Mexico City. He traveled to Italy for a film by Sergio Leone he’d written a script for (“Once Upon a Time in America”). Brooklyn was often homebase, but his true love was Provincetown, Massachusetts. Here he felt he could write, both letters, essays, nonfiction books and novels.

In the late 1970s Mailer became obsessed with the famous Utah killer, Gary Gilmore. He’d been chopping away—fiction a la a calculated, slow war of attrition—at his “Egypt novel,” which would finally be published in 1983 as Ancient Evenings. For this massive novel—which took him many years to complete and which was thousands of pages long—he’d received a million-dollar advance. (He pulled huge advances by the later 1960s.) Yet the million stretched over the many years he knew it would take to write his epic Thomas-Mann-like tome was actually lower than his standard per-word rate. Plus—and this is one of the gargantuan, satirical absurdities of Mailer the man in his fecund time—he had, get ready for this, fourteen dependents: He was the sole financial supporter of eight children and five ex-wives, plus his current one.