The effect of these musings on his fiction became apparent in An American Dream (1964), a novel which Mailer composed in eight monthly instalments for Esquire. The unprepossessing hero, Rojack, is prefigured in the early fragment ‘The Time of Her Time’, in which the stud hero, who refers to his organ as ‘the avenger’, finally brings his girl to her first orgasm by whispering in her ear (after sodomy) the words, ‘You dirty little Jew.’ ‘That whipped her over’ all right.
An American Dream takes this kind of thing a stage further. In brutal summary, Rojack murders his wife, sodomises the German maid, outwits the police, and impregnates the Wasp princess, having beaten up her super-hip black boyfriend. This is the novel’s critical redemptive moment, as Rojack feasts on his blonde:
— and I said sure to the voice in me, and felt love fly in like some great winged bird, some beating of wings at my back, and felt her will dissolve into tears, and some great sorrow like roses drowned in the salt of the sea came flooding from her womb and …
In the Evelyn Waugh Letters Mailer is briefly described as ‘an American pornographer’. For this book, the description holds. It is the prose of a man in a transport, not of sexual excitement so much as the tizzy of false artistry.
Nothing that Mailer writes is without interest, or without a good deal of negligent brilliance, but Why Are We In Vietnam? (1967) walks pretty close to the line. Heavily influenced by William Burroughs, the book consists of zoo pages of disc-jockey jive-talk, loosely recounting a hunting expedition and a macho initiation test. A failure at the time, the novel now seems no more than a marooned topicality. Mailer reached the end of something here. And he has written no fiction for fifteen years.
Like President Carter’s favourite poet, James Dickie, who is reputed to go around the place muttering ‘Oh I’m so big. I’m so damned big’, Mailer has always seen the novel as a challenge to his masculinity. He refers constantly to the author’s ‘size’, ‘vastness’, ‘stature’. When he writes of writing, his metaphors are always competitive, sexual or military. In Cannibals and Christians (1966) Mailer salutes the novel as ‘the Great Bitch in one’s life’. Assessing the work of some contemporaries ‘who have slept with the Bitch’, Mailer accuses them all of toadyism, timidity and insufficient ‘breadth’ or ‘weight’ — or ‘size’. ‘You don’t catch the Bitch that way, buster,’ he tells William Styron, ‘you got to bring more than a trombone to her boudoir.’ The piece ends: ‘Can those infantrymen of the arts, the novelists, take us … into the palace of the Bitch where the real secrets are stored?’ In other words: can Norman?
For the last fifteen years Mailer has been the most sought-after journalist in America. Following his masterpieces of superheated reportage, The Armies of the Night (1968) and Of a Fire on the Moon (1969), he has played fast and loose with his reputation, and the quality of his work has declined. In 1973 he wrote the notorious Marilyn, surviving a plagiarism suit (settled out of court) and the stink emanating from his claim that Monroe was bumped off by Jack and Bobbie Kennedy. In 1975 he wrote The Fight, an extended waffle on the Ali-Frazier match. Then came The Executioner’s Song.
A matter of weeks before the book appeared, Mailer persuaded his publishers to package the Gilmore story as a novel, or rather a ‘true-life novel’, along the lines of Truman Capote’s ‘non-fiction novel’, In Cold Blood. After the ‘factoid’ squabble over Marilyn, the fictoid squabble over The Executioner’s Song seemed like opportunism disguised as impatience with genre. In fact, the first 300 pages of the book show irreproachable artistry in their re-creation of the locales and loners of middle America; but then Mailer lets the story run away with him, and his reliance on transcripts, tapes and reports finally dishes its artistic claims. Once again, the fatal yearning for monumentality: Norman keeps overplaying his hand with the Great Bitch.
‘I don’t know, maybe it was too long,’ he now admits. ‘Since I started needing all this money,’ he says, and in such a way that you know he has said it before, ‘I’ve written twice as many books as I should have done, and maybe they’ve only been half as good as they should have been.’