LEEDS:

I know which way I'm betting.

MAILER:

Well, I was struck when I started making this movie about how much I was enjoying it, compared to the way I felt about writing for the last fifteen years. Something had gone out of the writing, maybe the belief that it makes a difference. I can't tell you what that does to effort. How vitiating to feel it just doesn't matter that much.

LEEDS:

Fitzgerald said something very similar when movies were in their infancy, and Kesey said something very similar last fall at Town Hall. He said, "If Chekhov were alive today, he'd be using a video recorder," and he said that's why the Alaskan novel [Sailor Song] or whatever the next one may eventually be isn't getting written. But Kesey showed so much promise. I don't know if you ever read Sometimes a Great Notion, but it's about fifty times greater than Cuckoo's Nest.

MAILER:

Really.

LEEDS:

Yeah. It's a wonderful novel and I wonder if you're willing to say something about the kind of novelist who only tells us one or two stories and then stops. I guess we're lucky to get what we do but we don't get any more.

MAILER:

Kesey certainly has an enormous amount to write about. Writers who write just a few books . . . I think nobody knows how much damage a book does to you except another writer. It's hell writing a novel; you really poison your body doing it. It's an unnatural physical activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself. It means that you secrete various kinds of fatigues and poisons through your system that you don't get rid of easily. As you get older, it's worse. The other reason why I've been so obsessed with prize fighters is the idea of the aging prize fighter who has to get into shape for one more fight and knows the damage that fight is going to do to his body, which is already beginning to worsen; it puts him in a gloom. One of the things that characterizes almost every older fighter I've ever seen training for a fight is the depression that hangs over him and his camp because the only thing good that can come out of it is money. The rest is all a foregone conclusion. Even if he wins the fight -- even if he wins it well -- he's not going to get a new purchase on life out of the fight the way a young fighter can by a decisive victory. And that's true in writing. Writers will often make grave decisions -- am I going to write this book or not? And at a certain point you have to believe that the book can be enormously important or you won't suffer that kind of self-destruction. Because it is self-destruction, it's quiet self-destruction, civilized self-destruction. Let's say in writing a novel over two or three years of the hardest work, that the damage it does to the body is equal to someone who has never smoked before taking on two or three packs a day for a few years. And I think if you could weigh those things you'd find it's accurate. I think one reason I've always been such an amateur about medicine and so interested in it at a great remove is because when you're a writer, in a certain sense you're a doctor to yourself. You're always feeling these various tensions and ailments creep into you. From an early age writers become hypochondriacs. It goes with the territory. Your factory is yourself. You're always examining the factory for potential breakdowns, anticipating troubles, and so you get to be awfully alert to the relation not only between yourself and the world but the relationship between yourself and your body. And writing impinges on your body.

LEEDS:

One of my favorite quotations about you is the opening of Joan Didion's review in The New York Times Book Review of The Executioner's Song, where she said so many people read you only within their own limitations. I just wanted to ask you, do you like her work?

MAILER:

I have a lot of respect for her work. I once said that if there were a particular woman writer today in America whom you could compare to Hemingway, it'd probably be Joan Didion.

LEEDS:

Absolutely.

MAILER:

She has that same sense of the power of the sentence sitting by itself and the power of the next sentence. There's no accident that she writes movies and lives with film because her work, like Hemingway's, is montage. That is, there's an assumption that the reader's going to pay enough attention to each sentence so they'll feel the next sentence come into place. It's very much like cuts in a film. Sentences don't have to exist entirely by themselves; they exist by their relation to the next sentence and the echo of the sentence that just passed. She writes marvelous prose. Another thing about Hemingway that I liked so much after I finished The Executioner's Song is . . . I was doing that a little bit in The Executioner's Song but it just didn't compare. Pick up Hemingway and read him, and boy, you feel that montage. People who write in a simple style, like Raymond Carver, depend on montage. You can't write in a simple style and get away with it unless you can do that . . . Those choices have to be exquisite -- what goes next to what.

LEEDS:

I wanted to ask you about a guy I'm interested in, Harry Crews, whom you mention in Tough Guys Don't Dance. Spider Nissen and Tim are always going through this list of writers and he's one of the guys they rip up once in a while. But here's a quotation that I like from an essay he wrote. He says, "I'm sick and tired of women in my face and on my case and I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." [laughter] I thought that's something that might interest you. I know you gave him a blurb for A Feast of Snakes.

MAILER:

Yeah. I think he's very funny and very tough and kind of incorruptible. Like he's set his course and if storms come across, then they come, it's all right, but he's staying on that course. He knows what he knows and he's going to write about it. He has a clarity of purpose in his writing that I like.

LEEDS:

Yeah, you can see it in his face.

MAILER:

I've never met him.

LEEDS:

No, I haven't met him but on every book jacket his face gets fiercer; he's got lines on lines and this forceful scowl and you can just see that he's an uncompromising guy.

[Perhaps fifteen minutes of informal chat and amenities ensues.]

LEEDS:

Thanks for inviting me, Norman, and good luck on the movie.

MAILER:

Thank you, Barry.