This past summer, I sat in Norman Mailer’s living room in Provincetown, Mass., as the sun beat on the windows looking out to the bay, listening to Mailer’s literary executor and longtime friend, J. Michael Lennon, tell stories about “Norm,” his wives and his writing habits. I was there as a writing fellow at the Norman Mailer Center, which is what the brick house on Commercial Street has become, and our group, Lennon told us, was going to have a special opportunity to tour the house, including Mailer’s attic study, which has been “preserved in amber.” Mailer was in the middle of writing a book when he died, and after his death nothing was touched. The plan is to have the room “stay that way forever, ” Lennon said.
George Ruhe for The New York Times
The Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate in the Berkshires.
Norman Mailer Center, 2007
The Mailer house in Provincetown is now the home of the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony.
Having toured dozens of dead writers’ houses over the years, I was familiar with the genre of the Mailer tour: the bedrooms, the bookshelves, the dining room table scratched up by the author. I could also anticipate the quiet awe of my fellow tourgoers once we reached the mecca, the third-floor study. My reaction? Geez, it’s hot up here, and musty, and I hope no one saw me yawn. But I did marvel at one thing: the Universal Gym, in mint condition, installed in the middle of the room. I wonder how that will play to the Provincetown pilgrims 50 years from now?
By my count, there are 73 writers’ houses open to the public in the United States. Not all provoke the awestruck response of the self-selected group at the Mailer house. According to curator and tour-guide estimates, only about half of the 2,000 people who visit the Walt Whitman House in Camden, N.J., each year come because they are interested in Whitman (as opposed to a nice historical stopover after touring the battleship down the road). Just 10 percent of the 9,000 annual visitors to the Thomas Wolfe Memorial in Asheville, N.C., come specifically for the author. Most people who visit the Mount, Edith Wharton’s lavish estate in tourist-friendly Lenox, Mass., are killing time before a concert at Tanglewood (and tend not to continue to Arrowhead, Herman Melville’s modest homestead in the nearby depressed industrial city of Pittsfield). Half of the 182,000 annual visitors to Hemingway’s house in Key West say they come for the cats.
Full piece at NYT.
Footnote:
The Bookman visited Edith Wharton's home in May this year.
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