LEEDS:

One of my students came up to me. I always assign The Naked and the Dead the first week of classes. I get a lot of dropouts because of that, but the ones that stick with it love it. And this young girl (remember when we used to be able to call them girls?) came up to me . . .

MAILER:

What do you have to say? This person came up?

LEEDS:

Well, woman, even if they're thirteen. Of course, my students are all over eighteen. I think that the eighteen-year-old girls today are not militant about that; they don't care if you call them girls anymore. I think it's the people who came up during the movement that still take that seriously. But, anyway, this young woman came up to me (she's holding the Rinehart edition that you need a wheelbarrow to bring to class) and she said, "Is there a video on this?" [laughter] I love that.

MAILER:

Is it that they read The Naked and the Dead and they drop out, why? Too long a book?

LEEDS:

No: they don't read it and they drop out. They see how big it is, and they say, "Have I got to read this? Wow!" And I say to them, "If you don't like reading and talking about books and writing about them, then drop out." So a lot of them drop out and the ones I keep are great kids and they usually love the book. After forty years . . . Here's a quotation that's always intrigued me out of An American Dream: "No, men were afraid of murder, but not from a terror of justice so much as the knowledge that a killer attracted the attention of the gods; then your mind was not your own, your anxiety ceased to be neurotic, your dread was real. Omens were as tangible as bread. There was an architecture to eternity" . . . That's the line that rings for me. I wanted that to be the full title of my first book about you: An Architecture to Eternity: The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer. "There was an architecture to eternity which housed us as we dreamed, and when there was murder, a cry went through the market places of sleep. Eternity had been deprived of a room. Somewhere the divine rage met a fury." This sense of the cosmic order and an embattled God is something that obviously has pervaded your work, but do you feel that in recent years it's been expanded, refined, changed in any way?

MAILER:

I think it has. You know if I end up writing a few more good books then those refinements ideally will find their way into that. I still would subscribe to every single thing that's said there. That hasn't changed a bit. Henry Kissinger once said to me, "I haven't had a new idea since I've been in government. You see, I'm working with all old ideas." And he's a very bright man obviously, a man who prides himself in his ability to think and to have new thoughts. That's the joy of life to many people and certainly to him, and I feel that way. But I find that idea you've just quoted is the key of all my ideas. There are little variations on it all the time, but to attempt to talk to you about it now, how it's changed, all I can say is it hasn't really changed that much. I'm still trying to find a way to embody all that in a book where it truly works for a reader who's never encountered these notions before.

LEEDS:

Yeah -- who hasn't been a charter subscriber all along.

MAILER:

Another reason why I was so drawn to writing about Gary Gilmore is I had the feeling deep down he believed the same thing. I found him a funny man and parts of him I understand perfectly; other parts of him to this day I don't have a clue. He had a quirky dull streak that I've never gotten near, but the side of him that wanted to die I understand perfectly. It was almost like he was dramatizing one of my favorite notions, that the soul can die before the body, and was quite aware of that and was determined not to let that happen and in that sense was heroic.

LEEDS:

I understand that. Speaking of criminals and of cops, too, I'd like to talk to you about Dougy "Big Mac" Madden [in Tough Guys Don't Dance]. One thing about Dougy is that he looks like a detective but he hates cops, and I think that a lot of people have been attracted or repelled by your interest in the criminal mentality, but they forget that you deal almost as much with the psychology of cops. You played a criminal in Wild 90, but a cop, a lieutenant, in Beyond the Law, and obviously it's the other side of the same coin. Do you know a lot of cops? My dad was a cop for twenty-one years in New York City and we had cops around the house all the time.

MAILER:

I have a friend who's a detective on the police force and he gave me this.

LEEDS:

It's a miniature detective shield.

MAILER:

Yeah. I'm fascinated with cops. I love good cops. I really think that it's such an extraordinary thing to be a good cop, it's so difficult, and a good cop probably has more temptations than any man in any profession you could name. And to keep their balance in the middle of all those conflicting forces . . . so I have two fondnesses. One's for a good cop; the other's for a good crook.

LEEDS:

I knew the latter but I didn't know if I should mention cops because for the most part in the books and even in the nonfiction, you're pretty negative about them. But I have to come clean, that while my dad probably would share a lot of the same views -- he's in his seventies now -- that you have about crooked cops, there were cops around in my life as I was growing up and in fact I used to impersonate one when we went to police conventions after I got big enough to look like I might be a young cop.

MAILER:

Casting would always put you in as a cop.

LEEDS:

Thanks, I hope that's positive. Anyway, the thing is, those guys are really fun to be around. They're crazy in a weird way. All those Wambaugh novels ...

MAILER:

They have the most powerful dirty minds. A sense of motive . . . so mean and strong. I think it would be a marvelous novel to write about a good cop, but the only reason I've never been drawn toward it is because it's been so abused. I mean you can't turn on the television without finding a good cop. I'm so sick of that theme. I think it's been so abused. It's always used for ulterior motives. The worst forces of law and order are always used in the portrait of the good cop so I tend not to get into that, not much. But it would make a marvelous novel if you could find a way to do it.

LEEDS:

I started talking about Dougy. The thing about Dougy that fascinates me is that there's very little about fathers in your earlier works. Mikey Lovett is an amnesiac and Sergius' father throws him into an orphanage, and then suddenly here's this very positive, massive father figure. Could I ask . . .

MAILER:

Nothing to do with my father. My father was a small . . . a smaller man.

LEEDS:

I didn't assume that . . .

MAILER:

You mean, why? Why did I get into it? I think it's the sort of thing you get into when you get into it. I've never written about childhood. I don't want to until the day I can really write about childhood. I don't want to write about anything unless I can do something with it that hasn't quite been done before. So that's all I ever ask of a book is that I have something new to say. I don't really want to write the same book other people are writing and so I've never found that moment when I could write about childhood. I may before I'm done. I've never really written about a father and a son until Tough Guys. I think it's the best thing in the book probably.