LEEDS:

There are some touching scenes there.

MAILER:

In the movie it gets lost to a degree because there's no room for it. You know who played Dougy Madden? Larry Tierney. Remember, who did Dillinger? I think people are going to like him a lot.

LEEDS:

I'm really looking forward to that movie. By the way, are the three earlier movies available on cassettes?

MAILER:

No, it's too expensive. It would cost seven hundred bucks to make one of them into a cassette, but I can't afford it.

LEEDS:

You know, there'd be a market. This pal of mine teaches a movie course, and he got Wild 90 and I came in and gave a guest lecture. And then he got Beyond the Law, and then we couldn't get Maidstone and they said at the rental place that you had the only copy. Apparently you had taken it out of circulation.

MAILER:

I might have taken it back at a certain point because what had happened was there are very few left and there was no income from them and I just thought they'd get chewed up, there would be nothing left at all, so I took them out of circulation.

LEEDS:

You were talking about dogs earlier and I'm struck by "Stunts" in Tough Guys. When you mentioned owning a poodle for eighteen years, was that by any chance the dog you got in a fight about with a sailor in a bar because he called your dog a fag?

MAILER:

Yeah. It was on the street actually. I had two dogs at the time. At that point Tibo had a wife who we later gave away because we came back from the country with Tibo and the wife and a pup and walking three dogs on a New York street got to be hilarious. I couldn't handle it. With three leashes. So we gave away two of them.

LEEDS:

That's a scene worthy of Charlie Chaplin. And I also like the story about Karl the German Shepherd and Dorothy Parker's dog . . . I was thinking about other writers. I'm certainly not going to get into the Farrell, Dos Passos, Steinbeck things that people ask you about all the time, but I just have to tell you that in terms of Hemingway, I keep finding you saying new things about him that always warm me because he's been so central to my life. I thought that in Advertisements, first of all, that capsule criticism of The Old Man and the Sea said more about that book than many long essays did. But I really was pleased that you said in a recent interview, "After Executioner's Song I realized how very talented he was." I found that very heartwarming. I thought it was a very gracious thing to say.

MAILER:

Well, he is, he was. Did you read that attack on Scribner's in The New Republic by Barbara Probst Solomon? Look for it in the library. Barbara Probst Solomon is a good writer who went and read the original Hemingway manuscript which is over at the Kennedy Library. And she says it's a great miscarriage of literary justice. The Garden of Eden as published is a total misrepresentation of the work that Hemingway was doing. The people in the book pass through many years; they're not just young. The thing's totally distorted.

LEEDS:

Well, I gather from what Baker said in his biography, purportedly it was in horrendous shape. But I wouldn't presume to know.

MAILER:

What she said was that it wasn't in bad shape, that the work would have been more interesting printed the way it was, sprawling all over the place with all the false starts but that finally what we would have seen is half the body of a giant book and that this thing is not Hemingway, that it's been so altered...

LEEDS:

It would be more interesting to guys like me. That's sad to hear. Another guy with large ambitions and big books is James Jones, who I know was a friend of yours. And I've always admired that trilogy (or tetralogy if you count The Pistol). People used to ask me, "Is The Naked and the Dead the great novel of WWII?" and I said, "Sure," and then eventually I had to say, "Maybe not, if you take Jones's books as one massive work."

MAILER:

I always thought Eternity was a bigger book.

LEEDS:

Not just Eternity itself, but Eternity and The Pistol and The Thin Red Line and Whistle put together, because in a sense he made World War II his Yoknapatawpha County; and I wonder if you feel, because you don't want to keep writing essentially the same book about the same things, that this return to the same central setting and preoccupations is artistically stultifying? Do you think that it shows too much limitation on the part of a writer like Jones?

MAILER:

To begin with, a novelist writes the books that he or she can write and this is more true of serious novelists than commercial novelists. But a novelist does the kind of book that they can do until it gets distorted by their ambitions and by their idea of the kind of book to make them immortal. If you're reasonably young when you arrive and start taking yourself seriously long before you've developed your metier then you tend to be very self-conscious. Jones was self-conscious. Styron and I are, to a degree, even to this day still a bit self-conscious because very early in life we were handed a role. We were young major novelists and it's a terribly funny role. You have to live up to it. You tend to think that way. I think Jones probably wrestled with the idea: Is this good or bad for my career to do a tetralogy on the war? He may have lost energy in thinking about it too much. I've tried to avoid those traps. I may have set myself a trap with the three big books, you see, and spent an awful lot of time thinking: Will I do it, should I do it, is it worth doing, can I do it? All those questions. And finally, writing novels at this point in my life is a little bit like falling in love: it isn't automatic. You know, one may never fall in love again with someone new and one may never get another novel, or one may; one may get five novels. You just don't know. You don't know if you're going to have a thrill-filled old age with five novels yet to be written or whether you'll dry up slowly and fall off the tree.