Corresponding with the past

Not to be outdone even when there was no competition, Norman Mailer wrote at least 45,000 letters about everything — literature, art, religion, writing, history, Hollywood — and his personal place in all of it.

J. Michael Lennon, Mailer’s biographer and friend who compiled and edited “Selected Letters of Norman Mailer,” recently released in paperback (Random House, $20), says Mailer wrote far more letters than anyone. Thomas Jefferson wrote about 23,000, he says, Willa Cather wrote 2,800 and Ernest Hemingway about 10,000.

After hours with pen to page writing for pay, the literary rock star would respond to piles of correspondence.

“There’s really nothing like it. Mark Twain has a lot, too, but he didn’t have a telephone,” Lennon says. “Mailer was so middle class about meeting his responsibilities and schedules and doing what he had to do. Someone would write him a letter, he’d have to write them back.”

He wrote to family, friends, fans, celebrities and lovers. He wrote about work, notes of thanks, angry letters, love letters — dirty love letters.

Though Mailer reread most of the 714 letters that wound up in the book, he censored nothing. Not even the graphic letters written to his last wife, Norris Church Mailer. She handed them over after his 2007 death, telling Lennon he wanted them included.

“That was Norman,” says Lennon. “He said, ‘Put it all in.’ Very different from Gore Vidal. Vidal really tried to protect his image.”

Lennon wrote to Mailer back in 1971 after he saw him spar with Vidal on the Dick Cavett Show. He said that Mailer was right — Vidal was an asshole — and shot him ideas about creative nonfiction. Lennon was surprised when, a couple weeks later, he got a fat letter back.

“I almost dropped dead,” he says.

The pair corresponded for a couple of years, and when they finally got together they got on so well they closed a bar. Lennon says he visited Provincetown every summer thereafter with his wife, Donna, and their kids, who were about the same age as Norman’s. He knew him so well and so deeply that he’s thinking of writing a memoir about his years with Mailer. And yet, Lennon says he learned more than he thought discoverable while reading through the letter trove.

“The letters in the 1950s show how depressed he was, how anxious he was,” Lennon says, adding that Mailer contemplated quitting writing after “Barbary Shore” and “The Deer Park” received bad reviews. “By the time he gets to the Village Voice and ‘The White Negro,’ he begins to bounce back.”

And bounce back he does. He becomes the ultimate outsider-insider, Lennon says, when he is embraced by the beats while remaining part of literary society. Mailer even sends a Grove Press blurb to Allen Ginsburg that he wrote for William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch,” calling him “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius. And I make these remarks in sourness and without enthusiasm, since Mr. Burroughs, after all, is one of my fellow racketeers.”

Many of his letters will make readers laugh aloud.

There’s the letter Mailer wrote to literary critic Diana Trilling that’s among Lennon’s favorites in which, Lennon says, he talks about Jewish writers, including himself. There’s another to Gordon Lish, the author of “Rebel Without a Cause,” in which Mailer talks about how he hates post-modernism. He tells Mickey Knox nearly everything in years of letters that Lennon says could be a book by themselves.

“No one had such a voracious curiosity,” says Lennon. “He really was involved in a lot of stuff.” He writes in the book’s introduction, “Mailer relished personal letters of news and gossip, argument and analysis, on a wide range of topics.”

All that is evident in “Selected Letters of Norman Mailer.” From World War II (his letters to his then-wife Beatrice were heavily used to write “The Naked and the Dead”) to Time magazine (“I’ve never been a cop-hater. Too small a role. But one is not a cop-lover, for that is cancer gulch.”) to thanking Jackie Kennedy for her letter and answering a question: “Once in awhile, when I think of going into another century, I pick the eighteenth, France, the last three decades, and the first of the nineteenth, I suppose.”