suicide, incest, orgy, orgasm and Time.' He was referring to his work rather than his life, but the two activities (like bar-room brawlers) were hard to keep apart.
The book is strewn with vicious confrontations, drunken couplings, ostentatious suicide bids, cruel human manipulations, incessant violence — and incessant cant. It is like a distillation of every Sixties hysteria, every radical-chic inanity. A girl's drink is spiked with LSD. On a brief homoeopathic fad, Mailer refuses to let his baby daughter have her shots. While Mailer was directing his third cinematic 'happening' (and flop), Maidsfone, there were 'people by the dozens, running around, chasing each other, fighting, fucking, acting insane'; 'the violence ... was so thick you could feel it'. Sure enough, 'all of a sudden there's kids screeching, Beverly [wife 4] screaming, and blood.' This is a common background noise in Mailer: screaming children.
Of course, everyone was at it, in that convulsive bad-behaviour festival that beset America after the war. Often the urge to scandalise a non-existent bourgeoisie took a more benevolent form. One of the funniest passages in the book describes a cocktail party on Cape Cod given by the distinguished belles-lettrist Dwight Macdonald. 'We got out of the car,' says Mailer's second wife, Adele, and there was everyone standing around nude. All these intellectuals, the whole bunch. It was just so cute. Norman and I looked at each other and shrugged and took off our clothes. No, I think Norman left his shorts on.
Let's be thankful for small mercies. If I go to a literary party this summer, I shall certainly pause to count my blessings.
The knifing of Adele — known as The Trouble — stands as the pivotal incident of the book: as Mailer's sociopathic epiphany. In 1960 Mailer threw a party in New York as 'an unofficial kick-off" for his mayoralty campaign (the campaign was perforce abandoned thereafter; and it was a decade later that Mailer made a slightly more serious attempt to become the Ken Livingstone of New York). Intending a creative confrontation between the city's haves and have-nots, Mailer invited the local bigwigs and machine politicians together with a rabble of punks and pimps — the disenfranchised whom Mailer hoped to represent. Predictably, none of the haves showed up. The have-nots, however, had no prior engagements.
Mailer had already got a few fights under his belt by the time the party collapsed and he staggered, bloody-lipped, into the kitchen and reached for the knife. Adele had apparently been baiting him all night; she had been fooling around with a woman 'in the John'; she was 'definitely' heard to remark that Mailer 'wasn't as good a writer as Dostoevsky'. Or perhaps she simply called his poodle a queer. Later, friends were considering whether to go in 'with a baseball bat' to rescue Mailer's daughter. 'He had this marvellous rationale', muses a friend, about art and life — and he actually did it, he lived it. And it wasn't just something he did half-ass. It almost killed him — or actually Adele...
There is a fair bit to be said on the credit side. And, after all, better writers have behaved worse. There is manifest charm, strong loyalty, an absence of snobbery, the novelist's gift of finding interest everywhere (even in bores and boredom), the enviable — if not admirable — shamelessness, and above all the selective but delightfully strident honesty. In a letter:
I've decided that at bottom I'm just a sadist, and no damn good for any woman. The reason - I can beat them up. Only with men do I act decently cause I'm scared they'll whop me, isn't human nature depressing?
One of the most formidable and endearing voices running through this book is that of Fanny ('my kids are tops') Mailer, Norman's 86-year-oId-mother. 'I couldn't understand why he hadn't gotten the Nobel Prize.' 'Why he picked Adele I never could understand.' 'If Norman would stop marrying these women who make him do
The book is strewn with vicious confrontations, drunken couplings, ostentatious suicide bids, cruel human manipulations, incessant violence — and incessant cant. It is like a distillation of every Sixties hysteria, every radical-chic inanity. A girl's drink is spiked with LSD. On a brief homoeopathic fad, Mailer refuses to let his baby daughter have her shots. While Mailer was directing his third cinematic 'happening' (and flop), Maidsfone, there were 'people by the dozens, running around, chasing each other, fighting, fucking, acting insane'; 'the violence ... was so thick you could feel it'. Sure enough, 'all of a sudden there's kids screeching, Beverly [wife 4] screaming, and blood.' This is a common background noise in Mailer: screaming children.
Of course, everyone was at it, in that convulsive bad-behaviour festival that beset America after the war. Often the urge to scandalise a non-existent bourgeoisie took a more benevolent form. One of the funniest passages in the book describes a cocktail party on Cape Cod given by the distinguished belles-lettrist Dwight Macdonald. 'We got out of the car,' says Mailer's second wife, Adele, and there was everyone standing around nude. All these intellectuals, the whole bunch. It was just so cute. Norman and I looked at each other and shrugged and took off our clothes. No, I think Norman left his shorts on.
Let's be thankful for small mercies. If I go to a literary party this summer, I shall certainly pause to count my blessings.
The knifing of Adele — known as The Trouble — stands as the pivotal incident of the book: as Mailer's sociopathic epiphany. In 1960 Mailer threw a party in New York as 'an unofficial kick-off" for his mayoralty campaign (the campaign was perforce abandoned thereafter; and it was a decade later that Mailer made a slightly more serious attempt to become the Ken Livingstone of New York). Intending a creative confrontation between the city's haves and have-nots, Mailer invited the local bigwigs and machine politicians together with a rabble of punks and pimps — the disenfranchised whom Mailer hoped to represent. Predictably, none of the haves showed up. The have-nots, however, had no prior engagements.
Mailer had already got a few fights under his belt by the time the party collapsed and he staggered, bloody-lipped, into the kitchen and reached for the knife. Adele had apparently been baiting him all night; she had been fooling around with a woman 'in the John'; she was 'definitely' heard to remark that Mailer 'wasn't as good a writer as Dostoevsky'. Or perhaps she simply called his poodle a queer. Later, friends were considering whether to go in 'with a baseball bat' to rescue Mailer's daughter. 'He had this marvellous rationale', muses a friend, about art and life — and he actually did it, he lived it. And it wasn't just something he did half-ass. It almost killed him — or actually Adele...
There is a fair bit to be said on the credit side. And, after all, better writers have behaved worse. There is manifest charm, strong loyalty, an absence of snobbery, the novelist's gift of finding interest everywhere (even in bores and boredom), the enviable — if not admirable — shamelessness, and above all the selective but delightfully strident honesty. In a letter:
I've decided that at bottom I'm just a sadist, and no damn good for any woman. The reason - I can beat them up. Only with men do I act decently cause I'm scared they'll whop me, isn't human nature depressing?
One of the most formidable and endearing voices running through this book is that of Fanny ('my kids are tops') Mailer, Norman's 86-year-oId-mother. 'I couldn't understand why he hadn't gotten the Nobel Prize.' 'Why he picked Adele I never could understand.' 'If Norman would stop marrying these women who make him do
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