LEEDS:

One of the things about your work and you is that I can't get away from it, which is to say that I've obviously read and taught and written on other authors, but I'm always finding your name every place I turn, and I don't just mean in Newsweek. I was just reading Philip Roth's latest novel, The Counterlife . . .

MAILER:

I heard about that.

LEEDS:

Would you like to see this quotation?

MAILER:

I never saw the passage.

LEEDS:

You can keep this copy if you like. It's really interesting. Zuckerman, Roth's character, the novelist, is in Israel, and the wife of this Meyer Kahane type of political rabbi says, "Let me ask you a question. You are a friend of Norman Mailer?" "Both of us write books." "Let me ask you a question about your colleague Mailer. Why is he so interested in murder and criminals and killing? When I was at Barnard, our English professor assigned those books to read -- books by a Jew who cannot stop thinking about murder and criminals and killing. Sometimes when I think back to the innocence of that class and the idiotic nonsense that they said there, I think, why didn't I ask 'If this Jew is so exhilarated by violence, why doesn't he go to Israel?'" [laughter]

MAILER:

That's funny.

LEEDS:

Of course, on the next page, he defends the nature of the creative experience and such, but I thought you'd get a kick out of that. In line with something else you were saying, in Fools Die you probably know that Mario Puzo's got a character called Osano who bears some resemblance to you...

MAILER:

Well, very little in a funny way because he smokes cigars which I hate and anyone who knows anything at all about me will know . . . I can think of three things I don't like. Cigars are probably the first, and the other is he has me killing a poodle. I had a poodle for eighteen years, so I resented that directly. You know, if I were to kill a dog, a poodle would be the last one.

LEEDS:

Well, there may be aspects of Puzo himself there, because I think he's a cigar smoker, and maybe he hates poodles. But anyway, Osano is always taking penicillin. That's one of the reasons I brought it up. Every time he has a sexual encounter, which is frequently, he prophylactically takes penicillin which is why, ultimately, he dies of syphilis. But here's the thing that really fascinated me . . .

MAILER:

It's interesting to do that kind of job on a guy. It's something Jackie Susann used to do which is to put you into a book so people say "Oh yes, that's Norman Mailer" and then give you all the things you never do and that's double punishment. Not only are you written about badly, but inaccurately, and people believe it. I'm sorry. You were saying . . .

LEEDS:

Well, the amazing thing is, I was rereading Fools Die, and Puzo's got a passage written by Osano, in which he's talking about women. He says, "I have plans for [the woman I love.] I have dark graves in caves to hide her head." I said, Jesus Christ, this was years before Tough Guys Don't Dance was written. What an amazing coincidence. Maybe I'm making too much of it.

MAILER:

No. That's interesting. I think Puzo's a gambler, and gamblers are incredibly instinctive. They're always either right or wrong. People who tend to be either right or wrong become gamblers. It's a way of searching out that potentiality in oneself. So he obviously hit on a theme. I never read Fools Die. Directly of course, you know, the decapitations in Tough Guys come out of that case with Tony Costa up in Provincetown where he dismembered four women's bodies. Well, that thing haunted me for years, and you know one reason why, of course, is you're probably familiar with that introduction to Why Are We in Vietnam?

LEEDS:

Yes, right.

MAILER:

I was going to write about a group of people hiding out in the sand dunes of Provincetown who were making raids and killing and then along came Manson. That freaked me. And then Tony Costa a few years later.

LEEDS:

Was there a reason -- this is fascinating to me personally -- that in Tough Guys Don't Dance you returned to writing about a middle-aged character? I know that in Armies you said that there were parts of yourself that were nineteen and seventy-three and forty-four, and of course in Ancient Evenings Menenhetet is all ages, but it fascinates me, being middle-aged now myself...

MAILER:

Listen, you look in great shape.

LEEDS:

Thank you. It intrigues me when I go back and look at An American Dream, which is really my favorite among the works; I know there are greater books, but it's the one that speaks to me most personally. And I was looking at the preface to Deaths for the Ladies, a book which I think I understood too quickly, and then here you went back again to writing about a middle-aged protagonist. Was there a reason that you revisited not only those haunts but that period?

MAILER:

Yeah. One thing that literary critics don't pay enough attention to is the practicality of writers' themes. That is, you take a theme that you can handle. I had a set of objective circumstances. I had to write a book in two months and I had been unable to write this novel for a long time. For about a year I'd been trying to start it. I couldn't find my protagonist and I knew I was down to two months. So, I took one who would be comfortable. The only way to do a book quickly, I think, is to write in the first person, but you've got to have someone who's near enough to yourself so that he's comfortable. I chose a man who was not at all me in any real way, but was near enough so that his style wouldn't seem false to me. In other words, I wouldn't have to stretch for a style. I tried someone who could conceivably have read my work and argued with it, liked one book, not liked another. I would have been one of fifty-eight authors who made up his -- what can I say -- the dome of his aesthetic purview; and that was crucial. A lot comes out of that. In other words, I took someone who was middle-aged because to write about someone who was young would have been too great a stretch and my own age would have interfered in other ways. I didn't want to write about someone too near to me. Then I'd get involved with myself while writing the book. All these things were determined by the fact that the book had to be written quickly. You know, in movie-making, parenthetically, they have a wonderful phrase: "Do what is necessary." In other words, if you have to get a scene in before dark, the director will say, "Do what is necessary," and what that means is, we'll get the shot in whether it's good or it's bad. We'll have it by dark because otherwise we're lost. Tough Guys is an example of what happens when you have to do what is necessary. The book took two months to write. If I'd had more time, it might have taken a year because I would have had time to go off on excursions that I couldn't afford any longer. Once you can only afford the task before you, you work quickly provided you've gotten yourself into a simple frame of mind. Most writing consists of getting into that simple frame of mind; it's very, very hard to do. You know there's so much to write about and you've chosen a little and that's always irksome, and one's always rebelling against how little there is to write about in the particular book you've chosen.

LEEDS:

Speaking of the movie version, after doing those three movies in the late '60s that were so relatively unstructured, was it an interesting challenge, and were there any particular problems working from a structured script?

MAILER:

It was altogether different. It was as different as boxing and wrestling. The movies I made all those years ago were great fun, wonderful fun. Making Maidstone was probably the most interesting week of my life. But now I had a budget, an expensive budget for me -- small for a mainstream film -- but still it was five million dollars. I had a schedule to keep to. I had movie stars; I had a script, a most detailed script. So it was different. I had to function with that. I wouldn't have dreamed of improvising much.