O, Unhappy Dagger: Mailer and the Knife
In the various recountings of the night in 1960 when Norman Mailer stabbed his second wife Adele, one character in the drama unfailingly gets the least amount of attention.
And it’s not Adele (although she’s close). It’s the knife — or what’s referred to, in Mailer biographies, as a “penknife.”
That term, while not incorrect, can be misleading. As poetically fitting as it may be for someone who pens novels to use a penknife, a “penknife” doesn’t refer exclusively to a knife the size of a ballpoint pen or to something attached to a keychain for use in a pinch as a slotted screwdriver. (That’s a “golf knife.”)
Penknives are so-called because scribes once used something like them to sharpen quills. A more accurate term, in Mailer’s case, is “foldable knife.”
This distinction is important because tweaks in language can have the effect, unintended or otherwise, of smoothing over Mailer’s crime. And it was a crime. To call it anything else — an accident, a bad act, “the Trouble” (a term Mailer claimed his family and friends used) — is to backpedal from the event’s reality.
On Nov. 19, 1960, Mailer and his second wife Adele threw a party in their Manhattan apartment at which Mailer planned to declare his candidacy for the office of mayor of New York City, an office for which he was wholly unqualified. The party degenerated into an evening of confrontation, and in the early hours of the following morning, Mailer assaulted his wife, stabbing her twice: once in the back, once in the torso.
Mailer’s knife reportedly had a two-and-a-half inch blade — not the most formidable of weapons (a steak knife blade is about four and a half inches long) but by no means innocuous. One of the wounds to Adele’s body penetrated her pericardium, a protective layer around the heart.
Mailer almost certainly hit this mark unintentionally.
For starters, he was under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, both of which he’d been abusing for nearly a decade. But even sober, Mailer was not so schooled in human anatomy and combat techniques to know exactly where a strike to his wife’s body would threaten but not end her life. (The more lethal place to stab someone is the neck, to injure either one of the carotid arteries or the trachea, thus compromising the person’s ability to breathe.)
Where and why Mailer obtained this foldable knife is unknown: in Mailer biographies, the weapon simply appears on cue, in Mailer’s possession.
Biographer Carl Rollyson describes the knife as one Mailer “usually carried with him” — without saying for how long, or why.
Biographer J. Michael Lennon claims Mailer used a foldable knife “to clean his nails” — which, admittedly, is not implausible, despite the fact that post-war America experienced no shortage of nail files.
Lennon also writes that in 1951, Mailer walked around New York City carrying a roll of quarters as a poor man’s brass knuckles. A knife may have been added insurance, but had Mailer been mugged, the smart thing — then, as now — would have been to hand over his wallet, not whip out a knife to reenact the Observatory scene from Rebel Without a Cause.
A more likely explanation is that Mailer took to concealing a foldable knife on his person out of a marijuana-induced paranoia or an insecure need to feel tough.
Mailer may have been thinking of stories he admired in his youth: the James T. Farrell novels featuring Studs Lonigan, an Irish-American kid in early 20th-century Chicago. For Lonigan and his crew of toughs, weapons of choice to harass Jewish and black kids included brass knuckles and knives.
Regardless of its source, a two-and-a-half-inch foldable knife, for Mailer, was a relatively safe and arguably bourgeois choice. Had Mailer truly wanted to feel like a badass, he would have gotten his hands on a switchblade — but if the police had ever caught him with one, he would have been in Dutch: New York state banned the sale and distribution of switchblades in 1954.
And with a switchblade, Mailer would hardly have been able to use the fingernail excuse.
The day after Mailer stabbed his wife, he had yet to be arrested: Mailer went on TV to be interviewed by Mike Wallace and float quixotic solutions to juvenile delinquency. Mailer asserted that to deprive city hoodlums of their switchblades was to neuter them of their manhood, which sheds some light on what Mailer thought of what was in his own pocket.
According to biographer Lennon, Mailer later claimed ruefully in his journals that he had intended only to give Adele “a nick or two,” which sounds painfully like someone who swears he brought a loaded gun to a confrontation only to frighten the other person.
Such a strategy rarely, if ever, ends well.
Ultimately, we cannot know what was in Mailer’s mind or heart when he stabbed Adele, or to what degree he was in possession of his faculties, to appreciate or even realize what he was doing. For all his expressions of regret and self-accounting about stabbing his wife, Mailer never attributed his actions to being stoned out of his mind because he had used liquor and marijuana irresponsibly.
Adele did not press charges: she divorced Mailer instead. Mailer appeared in criminal court, where his attorney assured the judge that his client, an artist, would continue to produce work “on the genius level,” and so Mailer got a few years of probation and went free.
One doubts the same sentence would have been applied had Adele stabbed Mailer, coming so perilously close to puncturing the genius’s heart.
Tim Lemire is a published author and was a guest speaker at the 2016 Norman Mailer Society Conference. He is working on a book about the night Norman Mailer stabbed his wife.
