NORMAN MAILER
13
would have at such times a remarkable resemblance to Picasso-the
same noble vault of forehead and workingman's knob of a nose, same
characterological determination of chin , same cleft. (Of course,
Malaquais might detest the comparison. "What a stinker! " I heard
him say once ofPicasso.)5 Still, speaking of genius, I heard Malaquais
give a lecture once at the New School. I never heard a better one. For
fifty minutes he spoke (without a note) exploring into the recesses of a
novelist 's unique relation to his time-memory across the years
suggests the lecture may have been on Stendhal, or was it Proust?-I
only remember the sensation of feeling my intelligence conducted
through exercises I might not ordinarily have been able
to
follow. He
had the same intense application ofenergy upon a given point that one
finds only in those few great athletes who bring absolute concentration
to
every instant of a contest and so reveal to you by their body
movement some meanings of the sport . When Malaquais lectured, it
was inconceivable that his mind and tongue could separate. To
cerebrate was
to
speak. Once at a party he went on for hours, domi–
nated all conversation. When his wife later remonstrated , "Jean, you
talked nine-tenths of the time," he grunted and said, "I had ten times
as much
to
say."
It
was not arrogance. Merely his grim estimate of the
proportions, grim because this small French Pole with his rugged face
and mighty brow, his virile purchase on any question to come his way,
this prodigy of debate, this behemoth of orality-he spoke out of the
same gusto with which a good appetite devours steak-was a man
locked in chains when it came
to
writing .
With no belief in karma, one might still have
to
postulate a
phenomenon like reincarnation to explain the enormity of Malaquais'
woes when he tried to write-only a soul paying in this life for outrages
it had performed in another could pass through such suffering. So
Malaquais may once have been Gilles de Rais. In the late Forties and
early Fifties when Jean was writing
The Joker,
just those years when I
first came to know him well, he would sit at his desk for ten or twelve or
fourteen hours a day , every day.
It
was his boast that he would not get
up, not pace around, not break for a meal, no, he would sit, contem–
plate his page, and would write . . .
to
the tune of two or three
hundred words a day . Two hundred words in ten hours! It is twenty
5" Did I ..er say of Picasso, 'What a stinker!'? If
SO,
it must have b<:en in reiation to some concrete
occasion, perhaps his drawing a 'dove of peace' in Stalin's honor."
