Tough guys do dance

So many cliches, so many crazy stories stand between the man Norman Mailer is and the man the public expects him to be, the one it wants him to be, that it has become his fate to endure relentless reviews of his life rather than critiques of his work. Six marriages, lots of brawls, alcohol, drugs and apocalyptic hangovers; all that anger, all that ego, all that mouth, all that material to mythologise.

No other American writer, possibly no other contemporary writer with the exception of his countryman Gore Vidal, has come closer to personifying the role of writer as public man and chat show stalwart. Yet while Vidal has sustained a patrician disdain, Mailer's persona has been that of a swaggering pugilist, a sort of raucous anti-hero caught in a surreal American Dream. Excess begets excess.

In Dublin yesterday and the evening before to promote his gentle new novel The Gospel According To The Son, (reviewed last week), Mailer is cheerful, friendly and greets the observation that his book has been harshly reviewed with bright-eyed matter-of-factness. "Yes, some of them have been pretty horrible," he says, and he describes a recent meeting with the editor of The New Republic. Not only had it run a vicious review, but the cover depicted a Christ-like Mailer shrouded in barb wire. As if the review wasn't enough, the cover headline said: "He's finished!" The magazine editor smiled at Mailer, he recounts, "so I punched him in the stomach".

A short and stocky figure with, at 73, a less ravaged face than expected, he starts off the interview by saying: "Wait a minute, I have to put in my hearing aid . . ." adding ". . .Going deaf is one of the awful things about getting old. It's funny - the centre," he says, pointing to his head, "remains the same. But the bits keep falling off around the edges." Far more gracious in person than the myths suggest - as well as far less "New York" and far less Jewish in demeanour - he is shrewd, humorous, almost disappointingly unaggressive, and able to say of his larger-than-life life: "Let's say, there have been some serious misdeeds." How does this make him feel? "Rueful."

One of the strongest impressions the milder Mailer gives is that of the Brooklyn kid who went to Harvard at 16, and although a very definite class-shift was involved, "didn't really know it until later". Then, as now, Harvard was a place of privilege and, of course, Mailer knew he was an outsider. The polite snobbery of Harvard is probably the most eloquent form of true aristocracy, and he seems to have a regard for good manners and natural dignity. Sentimentality is not part of Mailer's character, but he is something of a romantic and has a gentle regret for the America of his childhood. "It was a far more beautiful place - and I'm not just talking about the landscape, which has been despoiled by the crimes of modern architecture. As you know, I grew up during the Depression so life was hard. But people cared more about each other. There was a softness, a kindness. That's all gone now."

His mother was born in Russia, "but she was sensitive about that, she liked people to think she was born in America." His father was born in South Africa. Mailer's maternal grandfather was a rabbi, but when the family arrived in America, the neighbourhood already had its rabbi, "so he opened a shop instead."

Born in New Jersey in January 1923, Mailer, the first of two children, did not have a strict Jewish upbringing. His boyhood was very normal, very ordinary, he says. It helps explain why his work is not strongly autobiographical. "My mother's attitude was more like that of a Catholic mother. You know, `if the child isn't feeling too well, he doesn't have to go to Mass'." As for his father, a small, quiet man whom Mailer recalls as having an English accent, "he wasn't interested in religion. He was bored by it."

Engineering seems an odd career choice for him to have made. But Mailer the schoolboy excelled at science. "As a boy I had been very good at making model planes. Soon after I got to Harvard I think I knew I would never be a great engineer." Soon after qualifying he joined the US army. "Brooklyn to Harvard to a Texan unit - I guess that explains why I'm not really anything."

It's true, Norman Mailer is a neutral, classless individual. There is no caricature. An intelligent, fluent speaker, his responses are balanced, detailed. America in its many guises remains his interest, just as power, and in particular American power, remains the central theme of his work, whether non-fiction or fiction. The Mailer ego may be as towering as legend maintains, yet he may be less self-obsessed than is widely claimed.

He never worked as an engineer and became famous for his first book, The Naked And The Dead, a classic anti-war book. Based on his own experiences, it is written in the third person - interesting, considering that Mailer is happiest in the first person. "Well, that was a long time ago, my first book. I didn't know how to do it. I had to read it again recently. And yes I like it. If anyone's read anything by me, that's the one. But there's a lot wrong with it. I knew how to write action, I think the characters are well drawn, but . . . "

It is very long. It has shades of Thomas Wolfe. Mailer's reaction is instant. "He was a lot better." Of his first book, he says bluntly, "there are too many adjectives, they are not poetic, just conventional. There's nothing special in the writing. Yes, that's what I don't like about that book. I don't like the style."

But that novel made him famous. Of fame he says: "It changes one's identity. It happened at a time when I wasn't sure of my place in things and then had to become something else. It took me 10 or 20 years to feel comfortable." One of the tensions in his work must be the conflict between the artist and the commentator, the reporter. He moved from the personal to the public whether it was war, the CIA, Hollywood, Kennedy's assassination, America, Gary Gilmore's life and eventual death, or now Christ's story.

"I have always been interested in big themes and . . ." pause ". . .big books. It's the Russian in me. Anna Karenina is one of my favourite books. I like big stories." Big stories in Mailer's hands become massive projects, requiring extensive research. Ambition as well as energy has shaped his career. Harlot's Ghost (1991) is just short of 1,200 pages. Epic in scale as well as the demands it makes on readers, Mailer set out to explore the ambiguous and fascinating moral presence of the CIA and its shadow over American life.

Sandwiched in between this and the equally ambitious saga, An- cient Evenings (1983), a chaotic historical novel about Egypt, is a small gem, Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984). Mailer smiles at the mention of this off-beat thriller.

"That's a book I like. I feel about it the way a mother who has had 10 or 12 children will say of her eighth, `Now that was a special baby, it came easily.' I wrote that book at a time when I had come close to corruption. I was exhausted and was late with a book and the publishers were suing me for the money." The story of a man who wakes up after a night's drinking to discover he might have committed murder, it is snappy yet lyrical and very funny. It took him only two months to write. "I'm fond of it. I like the father."

Frequently described as a natural journalist, most at home when writing reportage, Mailer says of his work: "With the non-fiction, I find myself writing about something which interests me. But with a novel, you don't know what's going to happen, it just takes over." Looking back on The Executioner's Song (1979) another vast work, he says, "I started out liking him more at the beginning than I did at the end." Gilmore wanted either escape or execution, "he didn't want life if it meant prison."

Oswald's Tale (1995) lead him to the realisation that Oswald had killed Kennedy. "I wanted to believe the conspiracy theory but I discovered that yes, this man had the ambition to kill Kennedy. But let's face it, lots of people wanted to kill him."

The Gospel According to the Son is his 30th book; he has been famous for half a century, yet it is fame based on his notoriety rather than his work. "Maybe after I'm gone they'll start looking at the books," he laughs. Next May marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Naked And The Dead. Mailer's US publishers are planning what he calls a retrospective volume composed of extracts from his work. "If they review the life then instead of the work, why then, there's no hope. I'll have to resign myself to reading accounts of my life for as long as I live." Writers, he says, "are a bit like boxers. You are alone and vulnerable and waiting to be exposed."

The Gospel According To The Son by Norman Mailer is published by Abacus (£16.95)