Collected ProseNorman Mailer is 80 this year, which is splendid for him and at the same time somewhat reassuring to his reviewers.
Though he maintains he has never actually struck a critic, he does admit to having derived considerable pleasure, 40 years ago, from sitting on a couch at a literary party much too close to a nervous Philip Rahv.
On that occasion it was Mailer's own feathers that were ruffled, for Rahv had just panned An American Dream. But he is equally moved by what he calls trade union feelings of solidarity with his fellow literary toilers and contempt for the "petty killers", "creeps" and "old ladies" of professional reviewing who often have them at their mercy.
Though he might, in a more lucid moment, admit that critics cannot praise all the books they are given and that some of the brickbats could even be merited, Mailer's sympathy with the writer and his sense of the importance of the novel and the sheer gut-wrenching difficulty of the novelist's art are on so grand a scale as not to admit of much balance in this matter. And of course balance is not really a Mailer virtue.
It is this sympathy, this remembrance of having been there on many a bad day, sweating and fidgeting in front of the blank page, that is the great virtue of this somewhat uneven collection of essays and interviews. After Mailer's huge initial success with his war novel, The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park was written in the grip of ambition, fear and queasy calculation - not to mention marijuana, Seconal, benzedrine and coffee.
Nor was anxiety to maintain or enhance his literary reputation the only concern; there was also the fear of trespassing into obscenity, or what in the 1950s might pass for it. Of the lines "She was lovely. Her back was adorable in its contours" a publisher's lawyer warned him: "The principals are not married, and so your description puts a favourable interpretation upon a meretricious relationship."
When the book did eventually come out, after a change of publisher, "I was no longer feeling 80 years old but something like a vigorous, hysterical 63 . . ." Hysterical indeed: just to show he didn't give "a sick dog's drop" for public taste, Mailer published the worst reviews of The Deer Park in an ad in the Village Voice ("sordid and crummy", "golden garbage heap", "the year's worst snake pit").
Mailer's claims for the centrality of the writer derive at least partly from his sense of the importance of the novel to society, its civic role or duty if you like. This is in turn linked to his great distaste for the American Way and its "vast institutional systems of greed, injustice and manipulation".
Important as the writer's duty may be, Mailer is by no means sure it has been adequately carried out by the novelists of his or later generations: perhaps, he suggests, because writers tend to live (imaginatively) with other writers, we have become "over-familiar with the sensitivity of the sensitive and relatively ignorant of the cunning of the strong and the stupid . . ."
This collection of occasional pieces, written over 40 years, is at its best when it sticks most closely to its title. Mailer's thoughts on writing are honest, provocative and often wryly or rudely amusing; his views on cinema, which also take up some space, I could have done without. Whether in the end the book will more inspire or frighten the young writer he says it is directed at must depend on him or her.
Which brings us to a final point. Throughout the book Mailer refers to the writer as "he", and in his preface explicitly declines to edit his old remarks to fit with "the rhetorically hygienic politically correct". Well, fair enough, but it is somewhat disingenuous of him to try to pass the whole business off as a matter of style or fashion. For the truth is that for Mailer writing is essentially a guy thing. His favourite metaphors for the activity are drawn from the art of the boxer (prizefighter is actually his preferred term) and the aggression of the sexual athlete, and though he can find faint praise for one or two women writers his heroes are overwhelmingly male.
Indeed one suspects that for all his references to love, the old goat doesn't actually like women very much or attribute to them any real importance save as bed-partners. A generation ago, when he clashed with Kate Millett, these views made him something of an ogre for feminists.
The feminists, I think, won that round. In 2003 that old Mailer, the punchy little satyr chasing his "beautiful sexy dame", is more an historical curiosity.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist