Mr. Mailer Interviews Himself
The New York Times Book Review, 17 September 1967, 4-5, 40; transcribed from the editor's source (67.16).
Mr. Mailer Interviews Himself
Norman Mailer / 1967
From The New York Times Book Review, 17 September 1967, 5, 40. Reprinted by permission of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.
Interviewer: Well, here I am again.
Mailer: Nobody has seen you since Cannibals and Christians.
Interviewer: If you want to know the truth, I’m a little annoyed about that. You feel you can call me when you want me, and then need never invite me back for a cup of coffee in between.
Mailer: I want you to learn about social life. It is built entirely on the instrumentalities we offer each other.
Interviewer: Then today it seems I’m of use to you.
Mailer: On occasion, you are of use to me.
Interviewer: Yes, really, you bet. Today! Why didn’t you get another interviewer? Someone with a name?
Mailer: Well, you always manage to get my remarks right.
Interviewer: You can also filter and select your questions.
Mailer: Leave me my pride. I am not afraid of questions. A man who can’t answer questions shouldn’t run for President.
Interviewer: Are you really still running?
Mailer: Only for President of the literary world.
Interviewer: Well, even there you’ve got a way to go. There’s opposition, Mr. Mailer, considerable opposition.
Mailer: Still, I think I’m the best candidate around. It’s a modest remark, believe me, because the best isn’t necessarily that good. At any rate, I’m prepared to wait for office.
Interviewer: You think you’re better than Burroughs or Nabokov or Malamud?
Mailer: They have very large talents, but their nose is not on the Presidency. I concentrate more than they do on that.
Interviewer: What about Bellow and Algren?
Mailer: They are capital fellows. But no one from Chicago can ever become chief executive of the literary world. The East would be in insurrection.
Interviewer: What about William Styron?
Mailer: He’s the only Southern writer I know who’s the living embodiment of the New York Yankees. I suspect the Establishment would be hopelessly lonely without him, for then they would not have much else but me. And I derive from the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Interviewer: You don’t think Styron is a marvelous writer?
Mailer: He has a very fragrant if slightly redolent breath; but so far as I know a dangerous idea has never infiltrated his brain. His mind is happy as a virgin oyster. Oysters taste wonderful if you like them, but they stir no foundations.
Interviewer: Whereas you, sir, are a foundation shaker?
Mailer: I do my humble best.
Interviewer: There are some—I am one of them—who would say that the foundation manages to shake you up considerably more than you shake it. That photograph of you, for example, on the back of your new book, with a black eye as big as a fist on your face—well, you may think it’s funny, but there’s low appeal concealed in it. What you are really saying is, “Don’t get too mad at me! I’m just America’s No. 1 literary clown.”
Mailer: I didn’t see it that way, or I wouldn’t have used such a picture. No, I was trying to perform a public service. You see, people go around all the time saying, “That Norman Mailer—I’d like to see him get punched in the nose.” Well, it’s no good for Americans to walk around with so much anger bottled up. Most charitably, I was trying to relieve them.
Interviewer: Or were you trying to relieve the anger a lot more Americans are going to feel for paying $4.95 for your novel, Why Are We in Viet Nam? when it’s hardly 200 pages long and has nothing to do with Viet Nam?
Mailer: Do we have to rush into a discussion of my book so quickly?
Interviewer: I would expect you to prefer not to talk about it too much.
Mailer: You dislike it?
Interviewer: I think it’s dreadful. It’s the most cooked-up phony piece of I don’t know what. I hated it.
Mailer: Maybe I shouldn’t have called you for an interview. We’re a considerable distance apart, and I was hoping I might find you in the middle. You see, there are times when I read Why Are We in Viet Nam? and it displeases me too, but there are other times when I decide it’s one of the 10 funniest books written since Huckleberry Finn.
Interviewer: You are suffering from pre-publication schizophrenia with accompanying megalomania on the manic side of the moon.
Mailer: Not the first author to be so afflicted. Look, I don’t know what to say of this book. Sometimes I think it’s the best 200 pages I’ve yet done, the most American, certainly the 200 pages least alienated from genius.
Interviewer: You are daring to say you are a genius?
Mailer: Be careful. This is one of the ways I get my terrible reputation. I didn’t say I was a genius, I rather said in effect that the positive half of my pre-publication schizophrenia looked now and again upon this new novel with the sentiment that my prose was here less alienated from genius than in my other works.
Interviewer: What does the negative side of this schizophrenia have to say?
Mailer: That the book was written to fulfill a contract.
Interviewer: You sit there and say you wrote this book to fulfill a contract? Your cynicism would make hardened politicians walk the plank.
Mailer: I wrote the book to fulfill a contract. What’s so exceptional about that? My expenses are, to me, huge. I write to make a living. That does not obligatorily inhibit the work from rising above itself. I did An American Dream in installments because I was in debt and had to make a small fortune in a hurry. That didn’t make it a bad book. I think it’s my best book. I confess I still believe sentence for sentence An American Dream is one of the better written books in the language.
Interviewer: And Viet Nam, which was written in…?
Mailer: Four months.
Interviewer: … is thereby twice as good?
Mailer: I started with a cynical motive which was first burned through and then burned out by the rush of the impulse. The pages came to me faster than any book since The Naked and the Dead.
Interviewer: But you still have a divided mind on its merit?
Mailer: Some books come to you. As The Naked and the Dead came to me. They are bonuses, gifts. You do not have to kill some little part of your flesh to dredge them up. This is a fatal shade mystical, but it is almost as if you are serving as agent for a book which wants to get itself written. So the author never knows what to think of such books when he is done. His real fondness—since writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing—is more for those books he delivered out of his own flesh, torn and deadened by the process, but able at least to use all art and craft, all accumulated lore. Whereas Why Are We in Viet Nam? came through like a storm, writing itself—I enjoyed the work, I was full of energy when I was done, but the work was by the same token impersonal. So I do not know if I love the new novel or am indifferent to it.
Interviewer: Let us go back to the idea that you were serving as an agent for a book which wanted to get written. What then is this book saying?
Mailer: I’m afraid it is saying that America enters the nightmare of its destiny like a demented giant in a half-cracked canoe, bleeding from wounds top and bottom, bellowing in bewilderment, drowning with radio transmitters on the hip and radar in his ear. He has a fearful disease, this giant.
Interviewer: What is it?
Mailer: Greed. Vanity.
Interviewer: What else?
Mailer: The Faustian necessity to amass all knowledge, to enslave nature.
Interviewer: And what is the first vice of this giant who, in your words, symbolizes America, and has now become the metaphor pro tem of your new novel, Why Are We in Viet Nam?, a work at last—I can get this in—about some Texans who go off on a hunting trip in Alaska. What is the first vice of this giant who symbolizes America?
Mailer: Arrogance. Half the people in this country think they are possessed of genius. It is no accident, you see, that I run for President of the literary world. (Sighs.) I wish you liked my book more. Then I could open up and tell you all sorts of interesting little things about it. But as it is… oh, well, (the faintest strain of self-pity appears) they say Beethoven talked to himself.