A Former Nieman Looks Back, Part II Mailer and Styron at Harvard

(Editor's Note: Larry L. King, 41, is a Harper's magazine contributing editor, widely published freelance writer, novelist, and grandfather. In 1969-70, Mr. King was one of a group of journalists who did time at Harvard under the auspices of the Nieman Foundation. His 8,000-word account of the year, "Blowing My Mind at Harvard," appears in the current Harper's. For the CRIMSON, Mr. King has added to his memoirs by filling in the details of the visits he arranged here for writers Norman Mailer and William Styron. The following is the concluding part of this account, which began in yesterday's CRIMSON.)

A FEW DAYS before the Harvard appearance, Styron telephoned to relate a disturbing experience at Yale: 80-odd blacks had greeted his talk there with invectives and wild hooting, a thing he had grown to expect since publication of his controversial The Confessions of Nat Turner. Black attacks on that book were painful in the extreme to Styron, who had given it seven years in the writing (and twenty years of thought) only to be accused of classic black emasculation. I assured him that such would not be the Harvard case: the audience would be racially mixed, and while he might anticipate familiar challenges I felt that a stimulating balance would prevail. "Are the blacks gonna picket me?" Styron asked on arrival. My God, I hoped not. "They picket me everywhere I go," he said a bit wearily. We passed a pleasant afternoon doing equal damage to a fifth of Scotch and our respective livers.

We had no more than finished our Faculty Club ice cream than blacks joined the attack. Whites originally sat in silence. Styron, more articulate on paper than from the podium, may have hurt his cause in attempting reconciliations where he might have more profitably fought. Drinks flowed on like the Danube. Voices raised. Temperatures climbed. Whites galloped to Styron's defense. Blacks escalated the tempo. Instant polarizations. Insanity. The black man most critical of Styron's permitting Nat Turner to secretly desire a white woman was himself escorting a stunning blonde. As moderator, I equivocated where I meant to be "objective" or "fair"- and soon lost control of the crowd.

The grandfatherly Nieman sat there in the Faculty Club among hisses and boos, seeing in one room those tragic emotional and cultural divisions polarizing the races all across America. He had long been familiar with poisons boiling in white working-class hearts and among so-called Middle Americans; he knew of acid chemicals fizzing in a high percentage of blacks. At Harvard, he had learned, precious little rapport existed between black and white students. Black students to stand alone, to do their own thing: there was something absolutely tribal about it. White radicals thought blacks narrow in their political or sociological interests- though, out of an uptight if enlightened white guilt, they said little on the record. Now, supposedly sophisticated and erudite adults, hoo-hawing and blathering in the Faculty Club, made it appear that no racial reason existed anywhere in the land. In his helpless despondency, the moderator drank himself into a calamitous state.

At a private party, around three o'clock in the morning, Styron experienced a sudden physical collapse. Perhaps this was due to his history of high blood pressure, agitated by all day tensions and whiskey; it may be that our guest had also stood in close proximity to minor clouds of Mexican boo-smoke. Whatever the causes, Styron sincerely believed himself to be dying. He declared himself able to see "the other shore," thought himself a visitor to some strange nether world, and, in general, carried on like a Baptist fanatic. Rescue squads and cops came clanging and banging stretchers and doors and asking embarrassing questions; some of the larger Cambridge-Harvard names were attracted to the scene. It was one hell of a time to be dizzy and euphoric and crocked. The grandfatherly Nieman sat all night at a Cambridge hospital where Styron was under cautionary observations, himself all hung over and pale and sleepless, thinking that he had Mailer, bless us, to go.

A party-crashing shaggy beard from the graduate school greeted King Mailer with demands that he account for some vague if unforgivable "sell out"- publishing in Life, or something equally dreadful. Mailer awarded him a nickel's worth of evil-eye and walked away. An aggressive Nieman wife monopolized our guest at the cocktail hour, standing pelvis-to-pelvis, while everyone else stood apart to gape and shit-kick like Jimmy Stewart. A voice with liquor and maybe some jealousy in it said too loudly that Mailer was over-rated. The beginnings of bad vibrations tingled my spine, and I wondered whether Styron's doctor might be on call if needed.

Mailer was surely the best actor to pay us court, the most practiced at thinking on his feet with a glass in his hand. Now and again he paused, sipping the fine yeasts of his bourbon, to regard us over a glass rim while his eyes squinted as if to flirt with a wink. Oratorically, however, he was off his game. A few weeks earlier he had read to an appreciative Harvard audience in Sanders Theatre from his new manuscript, Of A Fire On The Moon, scooping up questions as smoothly as a sure-handed shortstop, turning a few heckler's hot line drives into quick double-plays. This night, however, Mailer was less the athlete. He took a fighter's stance, to be sure, his left (or non-drinking) hand shooting out sharp jabs, a shoulder thrust forward and the curly graying head pulled in protectively as a close neighbor to the shoulders. He hooked the New York Times for its general timidity or unimaginative misinter-pretations; he bloodied the nose of technology for its spiritless contributions; he pillowed ideological liberals before abandoning them in a neutral corner. These were old foes he had knocked kicking on his better outings, though on this night he could not seem to care enough to expend wind in their pursuit.

Mailer has been exposed to the press since fame caught up with him in his early twenties on publication of The Naked and the Dead. A few years later he could write, in The Deer Park, "A newspaperman is obsessed with finding the facts in order to tell a lie, and a novelist is a gallery-slave to his imagination so he can look for truth." So he began by saying that as sorry as newspapers are they are in some cases improved over their pasts, then decided that the functions of most reports could easily be accomplished by machines, and ultimately improved the thought by calling us whores. This multiple insult producing no return blows (and even some agreeable chuckles), Mailer lost his fighting balance. He had grown accustomed to audiences that either wildly cheered him or shouted that he could go fuck himself. Now, he appeared nonplussed by an audience regarding him in some dull Rotarian lumpishness: we had heard, at this point, enough speeches each week to properly nominate a Presidential candidate, and so probably would not have been inspired had Moses appeared to reveal an Eleventh Commandment. When our guest threw it open to questions, we lobbed up fat, soft and non-curving batting practice offerings. Mailer, reading them as clever change-ups, lunged, missed, or popped to the infield. "What the hell," he complained, "I thought you Nieman Fellows were tough." One was reminded of a 300 hitter who, going 0-for-5 on a given night, charges the opposing pitcher with dealing in junkstuff: Mailer wanted a high, hard one he could rip over the Nieman fence. Nobody threw it.

At a private bash afterwards, Mailer could not originally relax. Thirsting for his base hit, he called surviving Niemans around his feet to attempt his speech anew. By now, however, fortyodd children of the grape clamored and whooped in their private adventures. The Nieman Class Lover had eyes only for a stunning visitor from the Mailer entourage, The Class Drunk stood in the kitchen loudly quoting Invictus, the wife of a magazine editor complained that we had chuckled rather than fought when Mailer called us whores. Our guest soon abandoned oratory for a night of innocent reveling- including vigorous bouts of thumb-wrestling which did not, I fervently thank the powers, inspire his physical collapse.

Only footnotes remain to tidy up the record. Half of official Cambridge became angry over not being invited to private bashes for my two old heroes, and you must here understand that in Cambridge parties are serious matters, indeed. False rumors made the rounds that I had poisoned Styron through dropping LSD into his Scotch; another popular lie ran that Mailer had engaged in pre-dawn fisticuffs with this one or that. Styron, following his sobering experience, has initiated no further contact; Mailer wrote a note apologizing for "my tongue sticking to my mouth," and alluded to a subpar performance when I next saw him in New York. (These were exactly the opposite reactions I might have predicted of my two guests, which proves that not even a serious and analytical Harvard scholar knows everything,) The crowning blow came when I asked a young CRIMSON editor for his impression of my two literary heroes. He stabbed them- and me, and our over-forty generation- with this brutal dirk: "Well, I never thought they'd seem so goddamn old. "