Norman Mailer
A PREFACE TO THE JOKER
I did not like this book twenty years ago, and thought it dis–
appointing. Since I had learned as much about writing from the author
as from anyone alive, large demands were put upon the manuscript.
Jean Malaquais was not only my good friend, perhaps even my best
friend, but my mentor, more- he had had more influence upon my
mind than anyone I ever knew from the time we had gotten well
acquainted while he was translating
The Naked and the Dead
into
French . Part of the friendship rested on his candor. He is hardly rich
now, and he was poor then, as only a French intellectual who teaches an
evening course at the New School can be bread-crust poor in New
York, and he made no pretense-he was not in love with
The Naked
andthe Dead.
No, he was doing the translation because he needed the
work.
It
proved a munificent sum. The publisher was giving him
$2,000, and in the course of the year, I added another $1,000 out of
shame . I had never seen a man work so hard at
a:
job for which he did
not have respect. In the year it took him to make that translation, he
must have worked eight hours a day, five or six days a week, he was a
perfectionist and a French stylist, and hated my prose in that book with
much detailed justice: he would draw vectors across the pages to show
how sloppily I had repeated words, or worse,
ideas-how
he detested
anything slovenly in literature! He had, after all, fashioned the style of
his own French prose out of the hungriest inner disciplines. Like
©
1974 Norman Mailer
