Mailer: I know I'm not supposed to do this but. .

'Norman Mailer is dead and we were wondering if. . .'

I was driving into Berkshire last night when the ancient mobile phone I borrowed from my son six weeks ago, the one that still isn't Bluetoothed to the car, began to splutter with where-the-hell-are-the-talking-heads requests to drive to TV stations to talk about 'one of the great English stylists of the century'.

Or that's what I'd have said if I'd accepted any of the offers.

I was en route to dinner, running late, with my screenwriter friend Paul Webb, who I knew was an even bigger admirer of Mailer than I, and who had spent a memorable evening with him several months ago.

I told the enquirers that I was driving - which, these days, is the way to get anyone off the phone.

So Paul and Carolyn, his wise wife, and I spent the evening in a bit of Mailer-land, with Paul recalling the glories of Ancient Evenings, the 1983 novel of the Egyptian Pharaohs, and me remembering only where I'd read it not anything much of what it said.

The TLS was a rare admirer of that book at the time. I wondered how many people in England other than Paul could properly talk of it today.

Apart from Mailer's throat-grabbing style, and the few familiar points that everyone else makes this morning, I'm not sure what else I'd have said about him. It takes a while to put a dead artist into some kind of perspective. And at the TLS, as we do, we will take a little while.

I couldn't even remember the long conversation he and I had had in 1991 about his CIA novel Harlot's Ghost - or why he'd written in my black-and-white oriental-patterned proof copy, smudged beside the computer now, some words about the 'right height' of a tennis net.

I know I'm not supposed to do this. Blogging abhorrs the repetition of print journalism from the past. But rather than snip and cut some bits, this is the talk with Norman Mailer, published, with all its now obvious flaws, in the Times Magazine of October 12, 16 years ago.

   

"Norman Mailer, one-time wife stabber, anti-war leader, apologist for murder and angry drunk man of American letters, is a little quieter these days. Husband of six, father of nine and acclaimed chronicler of his country, he is almost happy.

But he does not like to admit it. After surviving five decades of drink, drugs, ridicule and glory, he could be forgiven for feeling pleased at a gentle, prosperous old age. ``But if you say you're happy, you're asking for it,'' he says. ``Wham! A brick falls from the ninth storey and clobbers you. Not even on the head. On the toe. You limp for the rest of your life.''

Mailer, aged 68, does not yet limp. He just rolls a little. As he moves towards the carefully chosen hard chair on which he will talk about his new book, his centre of gravity is unusually low. His solid boxer's limbs are softened now by white curly hair. He does not look much like the dark-eyed fighter famously photographed in 1960 after he had stabbed his second wife with a penknife. Nor does he even seem like the man who, in 1982, attacked reporters for fascism and ``scumbag journalism'' when they criticised his support for the murderer Jack Abbott.

In light brown safari suit and blue cotton vest, he most resembles one of the expensive teddy bears in F.A.O. Schwartz, the smart Manhattan toy shop just a few blocks away from where we are meeting. Today's top-of-the-line New York bears contain tape-recorded messages so that favourite nostrums can be repeated for ever. Mailer, an unreformed individualist of the left, has a large repertoire of such long-stored thoughts.

Among them is a special contempt for George Bush still a ``wimp'', even after the Gulf war. He believes that the president won back Kuwait to dig into the ``macho meat of B-movie sentiment'' bequeathed to him by Ronald Reagan. He excoriates Reagan himself still more, arguing that years of American military build-up delayed the reform of the Soviet Union that would otherwise have occurred much earlier.

He is no friend of capitalism. Asked why eastern Europeans seem to be embracing it so keenly, he says: ``Of course they're embracing it. When their system has failed so totally for them they are not about to say that the other system stinks also.'' Our conversation rapidly becomes a crazy paving of attacks on injustice, inequity, the greedy Eighties, the havoc wreaked by America on Castro's Cuba.

Harlot's Ghost, his new novel, is rather different, however. This 1,400-page ``novel of the CIA'' is ironic, almost kindly. It will disappoint admirers who want a fictional version of his 30-year-old radicalism. It will delight those who always thought Mailer to be a fine American writer poisoned by politics.

The lengthy cast list of Harlot's Ghost is made from living, dead and wholly fictional figures who took part in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and other CIA attempts to destabilise communism in the Sixties. Mailer thinks that these real-life ``crimes'' were wrong at the time and outrageous in the light of subsequent history. ``The reason the Castro regime is so bad today'', he says, ``is precisely because of what we did. The people who were the most paranoid in Cuba rose to the top because they were the ones who were right all the goddamn time. All the party ideologues who had tunnel vision were the ones who prospered by American policy. We wrecked Cuba.'' But in the novel the shenanigans of Operation Mongoose the drugs to depilate Castro's face, the exploding cigars and seven other assassination attempts are a dimly lit backdrop to human frailty and sexual intrigue. Mailer, the committed fighter, has written Mailer's comedy of manners, a work in which Washington's Anglophile post-war spies deceive their enemies and themselves.

The action is mostly described through letters, ``the form in which people of their class and upbringing were most comfortable and revealing'', he says with a tiny sneer. Mailer does not write letters.

Harlot, code name for the old-style spycatcher whose spirit pervades the book, is drawn from the poetry-loving, orchid-growing James Jesus Angleton. The most dramatic letters are those between Harlot's wife and his young aide, who loves and later marries her.

Angleton, for 20 years the guru of mole-hunters within the CIA, was eventually accused of being a communist mole himself. Harlot may or

may not be a ghost after the book's beginning; he may be a traitor in Moscow, or he may be dead.

The settings for the novel are suitably worldly. There is John F. Kennedy's bedroom, where the president unsuccessfully tries some troilism upon an unwilling mistress; there are the Washington restaurants where hidden microphones are drowned out by the sounds of drinking, Miami safe houses where gangster's molls are entertained by junior agents in buttoned down shirts. It is all very jolly, as the author admits. ``I have got to feel like an old CIA hand. I have adopted this attitude of, `Oh yes, we were a little silly here, a little stupid there, but we are actually such a nice bunch of fellows'.''

Is not this something of a cop-out from a man who once equated the CIA with the worst excesses of American vice, and said that the quest to undermine communism was one evil statist system vying against another? ``No,'' he says, stroking the whitening black hairs on his arms as though they were in a Dunhill shaving brush. ``This is a historical novel. There is nothing I can do about these events any more. I have the detachment of the past. You get angry and strident when you can change something. Here I just thought I should try to understand them. What the hell was going on? Why was the CIA going in for idiotic attempts to murder Castro?''

Those last words belong to the once so very angry Mailer. The political philosophy is based on an unchanging distrust of any state system. ``The world of oppression is faltering, but the world of greed is still there in all of its power,'' the teddy bear growls. In his writing, however, the most aggressive edge is gone. ``Transformed to irony,'' he says. ``After 40 years, it finally gets so deep into your cells that it doesn't take the form of throwing the New York Times across the room when I read about some skulduggery.''

Maybe the rage has really died. The high points of Mailer's art have come when he has involved himself in the action of his work. The Armies of the Night, in which he describes his own part in the 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon, is a masterpiece. An American Dream, his fourth novel, has a hero, remarkably similar to Mailer, whose sexual encounter with a maid after throwing his wife from a window aroused ``the best and worst reviews of any book I've ever written'' (and a useful degree of popular disgust) when it was published in 1965. He has a favourite journalistic technique of referring to himself in the third person as he prowls political convention halls and space centres.

There is no Mailer in Harlot's Ghost. Today he is the writer alone in his room. ``When you get older'', he says, ``work is a blessing, the only thing you can count on.'' Mailer can currently count on it for $4 million, from a contract for four successive books.

Occasionally over the past seven years he has emerged to try a film or write a piece of high-priced reporting. But for most of the time he has been immured, working both to prove that he is a great writer and to provide for the numerous consuming mouths that a life like his has left variously dependent upon him.

The man whose notorious drinking persona attracted bar-room brawlers as strongly as it exasperated several wives drinks very little now. ``Alcohol is repellent to writing,'' he says. ``It also inflames my joints. If I got roaring drunk tonight I wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning. I didn't leave drinking. Drinking deserted me.''

He has also given up marijuana. ``It is just too disrupting to the mind. I'd use it for two or three days and then I'd shatter. It brings the future into my head very quickly. I would see the next six weeks of a book in one minute. And that is terrible, because you've still got to do it day by day and you've lost the fire. The spark will go off in your head before the work is there.''

He has almost given up reading. ``I'm famous for that, because when I'm working, I can't read. I'm like a boxer in training who doesn't want to see his opponents' fight films when he is smoothing out some clumsy manoeuvre of his own. It depresses me. The others look too good.''

Mailer's early literary life was spent regularly ``ahead of the curve'' the most desired place to be in New York. After a Jewish boyhood in Brooklyn and an aero-engineer's course at Harvard, he joined the army for the last year of the war in the Pacific. The book of that experience based on letters home to Bea, his student wife became a bible of the young anti-war movement. The Naked and the Dead is still his biggest selling work.

He then became a pioneer of the ``new left'', advancing ideas about the state's essential repressive nature and the need for individuals to react against its bonds. The political books most importantly his second, Barbary Shore were commercial failures. But they were influential. Married in 1954 to his second wife, Adele, a former lover of Jack Kerouac, he dominated a feverish salon of drugs, black power and protest.

He was a star. He courted publicity while beginning a long record of attacks on the journalists who publicised him. He was a founder of the radical Village Voice magazine and he wrote The White Negro, an essay which backed his political platform of uniting New York's whores, homeless and drug addicts with the literary and social elite. At a party in 1960, held to herald the new age and announce his New York mayoral candidacy, he used a penknife two and a half inches long to make a similar sized wound close to his wife's heart. She survived. The marriage did not. A year later, helped by Adele's plea to the judge for leniency, he received a suspended prison sentence.

To welcome the socially melting Sixties, he chose as his third wife Lady Jeanne Campbell, the daughter of the Duke of Argyll. This was a short-lived success, to be followed by Beverly Bentley, the southern actress, a brief wedlock ``to legitimise the child'' with Carol Stevens, the singer, and the attestedly happy 11 years of marriage to Norris Church (right).

Until the early Seventies, when his anti-institutional paranoia appeared to be vindicated by Watergate, he was judged a prophet. Since then, as he freely admits, his finger has come off the pulse of the political nation. ``It has been an intermittent gift'', he reflects, ``which was awfully good in the mid-Fifties, pretty much in place in the Sixties; the Seventies were a desert, and for the Eighties, the only interesting thing I have to say is that Ronald Reagan was a disaster.'' Not even an ego as big as Mailer's seemed really to believe that this judgment was ``interesting''.

But his writer's confidence remains strong. The Executioner's Song, his 1979 ``true life novel'' of the life and death by firing squad of Gary Gilmore, deserved to be his best seller since The Naked and the Dead. Although his 1983 novel Tough Guys Don't Dance was less well received, the early word on Harlot's Ghost is good.

Mailer is not a brilliant constructer of books, but he wraps himself around his subject with a peculiarly intense embrace. That subject is almost always, in one way or another, America itself. On the night that Robert Kennedy was shot, he describes himself as sleeping with his then wife Beverly, after an afternoon ``dalliance'' with another woman. He wakes and waits, watching television news to see whether Senator Kennedy would survive. Through his mind runs the notion that if he confesses his infidelity to his wife, this will encourage God to save the dying man. He does not confess. Kennedy dies. Mailer falls asleep ``with some gnawing sense of the devil there to snatch his offering after the angel had moved on in disgust''.

There are few authors who could breathe credibility into such a scene, which first appeared in his account of the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention. Harlot's Ghost shows that Mailer, although stepping away from his stories in old age, still sees his life and country as mysteriously linked.

He sees America almost as though it exists to be one of his wives. ``Every time I think I get to know her, she does something unexpected again,'' he says. ``I'm still chasing after her true nature. Are we a good country or a bad one? I mean, are we a good country with all sorts of hideous things wrong with us, or are we essentially a bad country with lots of superficially positive aspects?''

He is convinced that America has been ``disgusting'' for the past ten years. But during that time Norman Mailer has just been ``happily'' getting on with his work."

Comments

[Dion Per Sona]

In his personal life he often behaved like an immature, publicity-seeking asshole, picking fights and causes without thought. In that sense he also represented a large stain and strain of American life. His death at 84 represents a loss of a national treasure.

http://www.counterpunch.org/landau11242007.html

[Susan Balée]

Used to be fun to read his choleric letters to the editor of the NYTIMES Book Review. He often felt reviewers were doing hatchet jobs on him (and no doubt sometimes they were).

The angry young man became a slightly less angry old man. But not much. Good thing his wife didn't die of her stab wound or he'd be the subject of "Executioner's Song."

[Daniel]

Peter it is good to hear you publicly taking time to consider Mailer, for yourself and the TLS, before making any grand declarations on his career.

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Norman Mailer recently met Gunther Grass, who has been in trouble himself over his Nazi past and his recounting of it, and opined to an interviewer that the reason he did not win the Nobel is that its Commitee is wise, and did not wish to recognize a wife-stabber like him.

[Dion Per Sona]

What an adorable picture of Fidel.