Stormin' Norman
Christopher Hitchens's Vogue interview (October 1991), a thoughtful dialogue on Harlot's Ghost and the nature of the CIA, with photographs by Mary Ellen Mark. Mailer calls the novel a 'comedy of manners' about 'the interface between bureaucracy and unprecedented action.'
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
“Stormin’ Norman,” Christopher Hitchens‘s interview, ran in Vogue in October 1991 (311–12, 366–67), with photographs by Mary Ellen Mark. A “thoughtful dialogue” on Harlot’s Ghost and the nature of the CIA, conducted as Mailer’s first interviewer on the novel — Mailer calls it a “comedy of manners” and names the contradiction at the Agency’s heart, “the interface between bureaucracy and unprecedented action,” while ranging over Angleton, the Kennedy assassination, male bonding, Jewishness, and his self-definition as “a left conservative.”
A full transcription, held in the working archive pending rights clearance, is at full text.