KEY POINTS:
American writer Norman Mailer, who died this week, would have approved of our guerrillas in the mist.
Given that he devoted much of his career to mythologising violence, their posturing would've appealed to him. He was also a sucker for menacing outsiders and had a rare talent for glossing troubling behaviour with dissident paranoia.
In 1960, aged 37 and already the most talked-about author in America, Mailer stabbed his second wife after she'd opined that he wasn't as good a writer as Dostoevsky. (There, but for the grace of God, went a fair swathe of the literary establishment.)
"So long as you use a knife," he wrote later, "there's some love left." His wife presumably swallowed this preposterous assertion since she didn't press charges.
The Moronic Inferno, Martin Amis' collection of journalism about America, contains a portrait of Mailer that is by turns appalling, hilarious, and endearing. A typical anecdote involves Mailer getting beaten up by sailors after he'd objected to them insulting his poodle - "Nobody's going to call my dog a queer."
Mailer's fascination with violence reached a nadir with Jack Abbott. A convict who'd spent more than half his life in prison for various crimes including the murder of a fellow inmate, Abbott initiated a correspondence with Mailer who instantly "felt all the awe one knows before a phenomenon".
He went into bat for Abbott, getting his work published in the New York Times Review of Books and championing his cause before the parole board. Abbott duly gained parole and a book - In the Belly of the Beast - followed.
Twelve hours before the reviews hit the newsstands, Abbott resolved a trivial dispute with a waiter by stabbing him to death. Mailer urged leniency. In a breathtaking display of egotism and offhand callousness, he declared: "I'm willing to gamble with certain elements in society to save this man's talent."
The 22-year-old married victim whose existence counted for so little was an aspiring playwright who'd just had a play accepted for production. So just how cosmic was Abbott's talent that Mailer was prepared to cut him such slack? In Amis' view, in addition to not being any good, Belly was "the work of a thoroughly, obviously and understandably psychotic mind". In 2002, Abbott hanged himself in his cell.
Mailer's other pet subject was sex and here again his views were extreme, bordering on deranged. He believed abortion should only be resorted to when pregnancy was a result of lousy sex, and railed against contraception and masturbation on the grounds that any sex act which didn't offer the possibility of conception was soul-endangering. (He abandoned this posture for financial reasons when his eighth child arrived.)
Mailer was many things - intellectual controversialist, feminist baiter, boxing aficionado, celebrity, would-be politician, actor, movie director - but his most successful incarnation was as a journalist. His accounts of protest and politics in Vietnam-era America - The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago and St George and the Godfather - are classics of reportage, combining the verve and immediacy of the New Journalism with novelistic depth and bravura style.
One thing he wasn't, despite the endless self-promotion and laughable musings, was a great novelist.
Perhaps early, spectacular success did him in. He was 25 when The Naked and the Dead, a novel based on his experiences as a rifleman in the Philippines, surfed to bestsellerdom in 40 languages on a wave of ecstatic reviews. He spent much of the next 30 years making the most of being famous, in the process making himself even more famous, generally for reasons other than his writing.
Sometime around 1980 the bill arrived, in the form of severe financial pressure generated by his five divorces and eight children. (With typical perversity he adopted a ninth.) They say a mortgage is the best cure for writer's block and daunting debt sent this already prolific writer into a frenzy of productivity. In a rare moment of self-awareness, he conceded that there was an inverse relationship between quantity and quality. He could have added that most of the books would have benefited from being half as long.
But Mailer was nothing if not stubborn and he remained in denial right to the end, moaning that "authors such as I have become anachronisms. When I was young the big novel was the driving force. No more".
Wrong on both counts. Serious novelists are still out there and, far from being an anachronism, the celebrity-author is a defining feature of contemporary publishing. That, along with some great journalism, is Norman Mailer's legacy.
