They could argue without murdering the English language. Not a pat phrase between them.

Mailer’s 35 books and more than 300 interviews litter the past 60 years like milestones in the formulation of America’s literary life. Incendiary, ground breaking, exhilarating and, sometimes, quite awful, his work is nothing if not controversial. His latest – an obsessive portrait of the young Hitler – is set to unleash a fairly typical fire-storm of protest. Norman Mailer can hardly wait …

Mailer has become a contemporary figure of myth, a great American icon who is venerated and reviled but impossible to ignore. Indeed, so complex has Mailer’s legend become that even now there are at least three obstacles to elucidating this protean survivor from the lost world of Forties America.

First, there’s the man himself. How many Norman Mailers can you interview? Let’s see. There’s the wild narrator; the ‘psychic outlaw’; the ‘generous but very spoiled boy’; and the ‘criminal egomaniac’. Turn to a ziggurat of Mailer volumes, approximately 35 titles, and you find the author of several classics of mid- to late-20th-century American prose: The Naked and the Dead, Advertisements for Myself, The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song. And some of the worst, too: Of Women and their Elegance, Tough Guys Don’t Dance and The Gospel According to the Son. Coming on to the ever-present question of sex (leaving aside the mistresses and girlfriends), there’s also Mailer, the husband of Bea, Adele, Jeanne, Beverly, Carol and Norris (four wives before he was 40; number two notoriously stabbed with a penknife), the alimony slave and the father of eight, or possibly nine, children. Finally, there’s the doting grandfather of 10 grandchildren, to whom he has dedicated The Castle in the Forest.

More here…