MAILER IN EGYPT

Walter Clemons

A Novelist Builds a Pyramid

Norman Mailer in the Land of the Pharaohs is such an odd notion that a put-down almost writes itself before one opens Ancient Evenings, his 700-page novel with a cast of thousands, ten years in the making. Swotting up on Egyptian gods and dynasties to try to locate myself in the book’s mysterious opening chapters, I found a handy quote in Paul Johnson’s The Civilization of Ancient Egypt: “Surprise is often expressed at the fact that the major pyramids combine huge size with very high standards of workmanship. The answer is that the greater the size the higher the quality of workmanship demanded. The blocks had to be beautifully squared to ensure that they touched evenly, distributed the weight equally, and prevented crumbling; accurate stone-dressing was also required to ensure that the internal weight-forces were properly distributed. Otherwise the pyramid might explode outwards and enormous quantities of stone crash down the sides.” Very high standards of workmanship, proper distribution of internal weight-forces: can Mailer—the wildswinging, free-form American champ of the demotic, self-advertising personal style—build a pyramid?

I think he’s done it. The first thing we all noticed in his last book, The Executioner’s Song, was the way Mailer had subdued himself to the material he worked in: “I” was conspicuously absent, though everywhere present. Ancient Evenings (Little, Brown) is a far stranger and equally personal book, in which Mailer’s expected, longed-for, individual voice is nowhere heard but his obsessions—ambition included—are everywhere visible. “Pyramid,” an impressive monument to a finished reign, is a discardable image for a work full of vital juices, smells, mud, excrement, violence, sexuality, delicate observation, occult intuition, and rebirths. Whatever you decide about it, and I warn you it can be hard going, Ancient Evenings is a convincing refutation of the remark that there are no second acts in American lives. Mailer is into at least Act 4.

His novel opens spookily and effectively with a man waking from the dead, uncertain who and where he is. He gradually realizes that he is in the tomb of a dear friend, whom he mourns; before long he knows that this friend was himself and that he is now the ghost of Menenhetet II, who died at twenty-one under sordid circumstances he can’t recall and will remember only at the end of the novel. Menenhetet II is joined by the specter of his great-grandfather, Menenhetet I, who was thrice reincarnated and was, during his fourth life, the lover of his own granddaughter, Hathfertiti, Menenhetet IPs mother. The paternity of Menenhetet II will be disputed during the book, for his mother made love to three men on the day of his conception: her grandfather, her brother (and husband, Master of Cosmetics to the Pharaoh), and the young Pharaoh himself, Ramses IX.

Have you got that? I would guess not, but try to ride with it. “Should we say I was like a boat poling my way into the harbor through the openings of a fog?” Menenhetet II asks on an early page. One of the things I like—and you are perfectly entitled to dislike—is the obscurity of destination in Mailer’s novel. It isn’t even clear for a long time why Menenhetet II has been wakened: for his journey to the Land of the Dead or for a new life? His paternity, which might baffle a modern lab technician, will be decided by his mother. His cryptic flashes of shame—at having made love to a priest and the priest’s sister, at having been forced to perform a humiliating act of fellatio on his great-grandfather—will be clarified, if you wait.

The four lives of Menenhetet I will constitute the novel’s main narrative. But before the two wraiths start out on their journey together from the necropolis of Thebes, the rewakened, memory-damaged Menenhetet II is instructed by his great-grandfather in the theology that governed their existences: “With hardly a warning, he became most disrespectful of the Gods, even scandalous in what he had to say as if They were all his brothers in a large and disreputable family.” The sun god, Ra, “could change the shape of His prick to any of the forty-two animals: ram, ox, hippo, lion—just pick the beast!—but He once made the mistake of telling Nut that He did not like to make love to a cow. So She chose to live in the body of one. It is always that way with marriage.” The love story of the sister and brother Isis and Osiris; the birth of the goddess of balance, Maat, as a result of Ra’s fornication with a fragile bird that flew too near the sun; the murderous battle between the uncle and nephew Set and Horus, grappling for slippery holds for three days and three night-s in a swamp and transforming themselves into hippopotamuses when the going got rough—Mailer tells these and other tales in a tone that successfully combines Homeric sweep, the cynical ribaldry of the crack-voiced Egyptian elder, and a kind of boys’-book-of-wonders naivete.

During this preliminary survey of incest, murder, mutilation, and warfare among the disorderly gods, the two Menenhetets are on their way to relive an audience with the Pharaoh Ramses IX that the younger Menenhetet attended at the age of six with his parents and great-grandfather. It is a convention of Mailer’s novel—indeed its organizing psychological theory—that his Egyptians can enter one another’s heads and read thoughts. The boy Menenhetet II was especially adept at this, and one of his promptest intuitions is of the Pharaoh’s sense of inferiority to his mighty predecessors: “Do not mock Me with the feats of the Great Ramses, dead for these ninety years, but let us speak of My true qualities which are prudence, wit, and the power to receive in calm the worst of bad news. Let us ask if such is worthy of a Pharaoh.” The rule of Ramses IX is precarious. During dinner he is called from the table to be warned that a favored candidate for the post of Vizier may be mounting a coup against him tonight. Tomb robberies are a prospering racket; officials are faking the grain accounts; the Overseer of the Golden Bowl, the Pharaoh’s chamber pot, is selling its precious contents on the black market. “I feel like a prisoner,” says Ramses IX. “So much am I bound by the habits of my ancestors. Sometimes I think that the ills of our Two-Lands may begin with these customs that bind me. . . . There are nights when I do not believe that the Gods are indeed my ancestors. ”

Now please hold on for one more complicated piece of information—you’ll need it—and then I promise to let up. On this state visit, the boy’s great-grandfather is sixty years into his fourth life and bucking for the job of Vizier. His credentials for the post are that during his first incarnation, more than a century earlier, he lived through the sixty-seven-year reign of Ramses II. Menenhetet I’s task, in his all-night narrative of his services (and treachery) during that period, will be a delicate one: to show that his knowledge of a heroic age can be useful, and not merely intimidating, to a weaker Pharaoh of a corrupted dynasty. In his candor, Menenhetet runs a further risk. If the legendary Ramses II did not command his unquestioning loyalty, is he a candidate on whom the insecure Pharaoh who has summoned him can rely? This gives a particular edge to Menenhetet’s lengthy, luxurious tale-spinning; I think we are meant to be alert to this throughout. Menenhetet is both venerable and disreputable: the least of the scandals about him is that he is said to be an eater of bats’ excrement, for arcane experimental purposes. A commoner, he was a charioteer at the great battle of Kadesh against the Hittites, into which the young Ramses II rode with his pet lion. The animal is expertly characterized and guaranteed by Menenhetet to have existed as more than a heraldic figment in the wall paintings of the war. Menenhetet walked by moonlight with the lion in the aftermath of battle, heard the beast burp from the excess blood it had drunk, and witnessed its death from stomach perforations after consuming the severed hands of Hittite prisoners of war.

Menenhetet became exalted gofer to Ramses II: supervisor of his harem, minister to his queen, Nefertiri, eventually a conspirator in plots to kill him. Sexual revenge is a primary motive in Menenhetet I’s story. Early in his career, he was sodomized by his Pharaoh, an event described in an extravagantly bad piece of Mailer prose:

I heard a clangor in my head equal to the great door of a temple knocked open by the blow of a log carried forward at a run by ten good men, it was with the force of ten good men that He took me up my bowels, and I lay with my face on the stony soil of the cave, while a bat screamed overhead....! was no longer myself but His, and loved Him, and knew I would die for Him, but I also knew I would never forgive Him, not when I ate, not when I drank, and not when I defecated. Like an arrow flew one thought through my mind: It was that I must revenge myself.

Anal intercourse between men, though it fascinates Mailer, is imaginable only as an act of violation, to be repaid with vengeance (“Instead of a thank-you note, you mean?” said a gay novelist to whom I described this aspect of the book). Between men and women, it is exquisitely acceptable and pleasurable to both parties. But sex is seldom an expression of affection in Mailer’s novel: it is a power play, even a wrestling match. Menenhetet I, having been penetrated by Ramses II, must revenge himself, first upon a thief he kills in a chance encounter, later upon Ramses IPs queen. Menenhetet must have Nefertiri not because he wants her, though he does, but because he must prove himself a victor. I wish Mailer had left it at “wants her,” since Nefertiri is so witty, bitchy, and believably desirable. Lovemaking becomes an abstraction, with huge phalluses beyond the dreams of ambitious pornographers and torrential orgasms a lesser mortal can hardly recognize.

You will also have to face—as I now must—a thematic obsession that will cause difficulty for the most willing reader. During Menenhetet I’s initial discourse on the life of the gods, the attempted buggering of Horus by Set leads to the first of many disquisitions on excrement. Menenhetet I warns his greatgrandson on the dangers of their journey toward the Land of the Dead: “You have no gift for your trip to Khert-Neter if you do not comprehend that shame and waste may be buried in shit, but so is many a rich and tender sentiment as well.”

On hearing this from his great-grandfather, Menenhetet II reflects:

His language had too powerful an effect on me. I was now aroused by the sweetest turnings of sex; my belly was as sentimental as a flower, and my buttocks in honey—I had never felt so agreeable before. Was this the power and pleasure of a woman? Whatever had become of my pride in a phallus as dependable as my arm? To go soft before these hymns to the sinuosities of shit! It used to be legitimate, if a filthy habit, to jam the force of one’s own cock into the ass of any friend (or enemy) weak enough to take it, a way of measuring ourselves, but nonetheless! every mark of a noble Egyptian was his detestation of such dirt. The smell of the mud was too close to our lives—our white linen spoke of the distance we maintained from such subjects, the whiter the better. So were our walls white, and the complexion of our Gods when we painted Them. So were our noses most distinguished when they turned up nicely. Yet here was Menenhetet seducing my attention with the glories of this repulsive topic.

Mailer’s discussion of “this repulsive topic” sometimes becomes not only hard to take but hard to follow. “Excrement is full of all...that we cannot afford to take into ourselves—all that is too rich, too courageous, or too proud for our bearing.” I don’t know how the word “courageous” got in there, though I understand Mailer when he says, “We laugh at shit—but then, we always laugh when a truth is suddenly disclosed and as quickly concealed. The Gods have tickled us with the truth.” But then I’m puzzled again by the news that “each time a difficult choice is avoided, the best part of a noble man chooses to depart by way of his buttocks.” All of us males want to be noble men, don’t we? If I’m in a state of indecision, should I think twice before going to the toilet? I simply don’t know how to behave.

I have further difficulties with Mailer’s ornate, detailed descriptions of ceremonies and processions. D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent gave me my first intimation that this kind of stuff can’t work convincingly in a novel. Mailer does it as well as anybody can: he has clearly studied Egyptian wall paintings and tried to render them as narrative. In “The Book of Queens,” the novel’s fifth section, in which Menenhetet I recounts his adventures in the Pharaoh’s harem, I was mightily pleased by the voluptuousness of the gossip, intrigue, and sensual pleasure in the Gardens of the Secluded:

A green moss covered the banks, as brilliant in the soft light as any emerald. It was the most beautiful place through which I ever wandered, and a perfume came from the flowers and the fruit trees until even the blue lotus had a sweetness of odor. Since it usually had none, I did not know why I could sniff it until I saw black eunuchs on their knees painting the blue lotus with scented oils, perfuming the carob trees, and the sycamores, even the roots of the date-palms whose fronds, above, deepened the shade of the garden. One could not even see the sky for the branches and leaves of the low fruit trees and the lattice of the grape arbors, and this shade gave back the lavender light of evening as one sits within a cave.

Fine. But I got restless when HoneyBall, the plump Little Queen of the harem, worked detailed spells against her Pharaoh. I got restless again when Mailer embarked on a formal depiction of the Festival of Festivals, in which Ramses II parades, with thousands of extras, to the steps of the temple in Thebes. But just as I scrawled “no more parades” in the margins of my galleys, I ran into a sardonic Mailer joke. The Pharaoh turns, opens his robes, and wows the populace with a mighty erection. “There was no such description in the papyrus I studied,” the narrator admits. But Menenhetet I, who was there, confirms it: “I never saw Him with a greater sword.” Mailer is hard to resist when he tips us this kind of wink.

I like the playfulness that underlies the solemnities of Ancient Evenings. Mailer’s handling of time-shifts, for instance: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, the academy piece in this line of work, is not more complicated. Keep in mind, while I set up a quote, that Menenhetet II has waked up a thousand years after his death with only patchy memories of his earthly life. The novel’s central event will be that all-night family dinner with Ramses IX, on the festive Night of the Pig, when unwelcome truths can be spoken. But the boy also attends a business meeting in the Pharaoh’s throne room earlier on the momentous day: “Memories came to me of the banquet my family would enjoy with Ptah-nem-hotep that evening, a curious way to express it, but I did not feel as if I looked forward to the Night of the Pig so much as that it had already taken place and I need only remember what I must have already forgotten. Going forth in one life was much like recollecting another.” A virtuoso with his novel’s vast time scheme in his grasp here performs a little capework for his own amusement. Our fun comes later, when we rediscover this gnomic remark on a second trip through the book.

Mailer also plays serious games with the notion of telepathy that so absorbs him. As a six-year-old, Menenhetet II sometimes feigns sleep during the dinner with the Pharaoh, the better to disguise “my power to visit—I never knew when—into the thoughts of others.” Not only can Mailer’s Egyptians enter one another’s heads, they can shut one another out when they put their minds to it, so to speak. Knowing how gifted her son is, Hathfertiti sometimes pulls down the shades. He sees her planning to shuck her husband and seduce Ramses IX, and he catches her daydreaming about the legendary phallus of Ramses II. But during the morning audience with the Pharaoh, bored by a quarryman’s report, the young Menenhetet tries to enter his mother’s thoughts and gets a rebuff:

My mother’s mind, when I tried to enter it again, was closed to me, or should I say closed to all I would wish to ask. With her skill . . . she had chosen to give all her attention to that poor quarry official. So, by placing myself in her mind, I was given over to nothing better than an admirable introduction to the difficulties of mining rock.

In a later, dizzying passage, the boy enters the head of Ramses IX, to discover only himself and his family seen through the Pharaoh’s shrewd, appraising gaze.

We are far from the realms of Mika Waltari’s junky The Egyptian or Thomas Mann’s stony Joseph and His Brothers. The teeming mental life of Mailer’s characters and the muddy, excremental energy of his imagination give Ancient Evenings—amid some very tedious stretches, I’ll admit—the jolt of a book nobody has attempted before. Mailer does, I think, flunk comparison with the best historical novel yet written, Robert Graves’s I, Claudius. Without a literary flourish, the lean, acerbic prose of Graves’s emperor brought his age into sharp, unerring focus. Mailer indulges in such purple flourishes that I was surprised that the dread specter of Cecil B. De Mille rose before me only once, in a banquet scene fifty pages from the end:

The singer was followed by a group of dancers who . . . wore nothing but a thin chain about their hips, and they danced not only before the Pharaoh, but went their way among the guests, removing wreaths from the wine jars, filling the goblets, then setting back the wreaths.

You stage a bacchanal, you take the consequences. Mailer mostly avoids this kind of mishap. The book’s riskiest set pieces are busy with felt life: the battle of Kadesh; the mythology of the gods (which might have been the most awful Bulfinch); the intricate technicalities of transmigration; Menenhetet I’s visit to Tyre, where the stench of snails that provide purple dye is overpowering (“I had never seen so many well-dressed people on such a mean-odored street. That was the cost of wealth here—you were obliged to breathe the air”); even Menenhetet IPs reliving the procedures of his own embalmment. Licking his Pharaoh’s feet as instructed, the young Menenhetet notices the smell of the perfume with which the floor has been ceremonially mopped. Other odors, which you will discover for yourself, are meticulously registered. The prose can rise to epigrammatic precision: Ramses II “was beautiful in the way twenty birds are one bird in the instant they turn.”

There are original feelings. Told by Ramses II that the Hittites will fight with axes, Menenhetet I thinks, “How wonderful is a new fear! ... It gives a thrill to new parts of one’s flesh. While it was one thing to be killed by a sword . . . there were now lamentations along my back and in my arms and thighs at the thought of being mangled by an axe.” Within the space of a few pages, the narrative can swing from guff to bathos to grandeur. Coming upon a band of drunken thieves in a wood, Menenhetet I delivers a little temperance lecture on how offensive their boozing is to the trees. He next hears the trees griping among themselves—one about its roots being pinched by rocks, as by tight shoes, another about being shaded by a taller tree. But then he enters a fight to the death with one of the thieves, and this happens: “The slim thiefs face began to change. The tricks he had played on others came over his expression one by one—thievery, betrayal, and ambush were his hidden faces—but by the end, I saw a good man, not without bravery, and he died with a peaceful look.” That’s just plain marvelous.

Mailer is sure to catch hell for this demanding book. It’s partly his own fault. He has so repeatedly told us that he will one day write a great novel— sometimes to the extent of becoming a windbag on the subject, to keep his spirits up—that we can’t read Ancient Evenings without asking, Is this it? I will not be suckered into making that kind of pronouncement. Mailer has been counted down and out, and has sprung up again, as many times as Menenhetet I. The Executioner’s Song was very, very good, and so is Ancient Evenings. He’s undertaken a huge act of imagining and carried it out with the most delicate (and indelicate) craft. He earns the description he applies to Menenhetet I, who has “that look of character supported by triumph which comes to powerful men when they are sixty and still strong.”