Norman Mailer’s Greatest Hits, Phillipics, Stabbings, Etc.

New York magazine outdoes itself this week with a potted history of Norman Mailer's Literary Brawls. Some color commentary by your obediant servant:

Adele Morales Mailer Crime: Calling her husband a “faggot” when he was drunk and stoned at 4 a.m. at the tail end of a party to launch his mayoral campaign. Action taken: Stabbed her twice with a penknife, nearly killing her. Blowback: Though she refused to testify against him, he did spend seventeen days in Bellevue’s psych ward. They finally divorced two years later. She wrote a book about it in 1997.

For some reason, Mailer has always been preoccupied with male-on-male sexual attraction posing as brute aggression. (A queer theorist could kickstart a career exploring the Baldwinian undertones of "The White Negro.") He once appeared on British television and was asked collectively by Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and Ian Hamilton why his fiction so often honed in on, as it were, the masculine derriere. Mailer later rattled off a hot and petulant letter to some newspaper saying that his on-air inquisitors represented the unholy triumvirate of scribbling English queers. Hitchens and Amis drafted, but did not send, a reply to the editor arguing that this was being very unfair to Ian Hamilton.

Gore Vidal Crime: Comparing “The Prisoner of Sex” to “three days of menstrual flow” and Mailer to Charles Manson. Action taken: Head-butting him in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, then telling him, on-air, that he ruined Kerouac by sleeping with him. Six years later, he threw a drink at Vidal—and punched him—at a Lally Weymouth soirée. Blowback: Still on the floor, Vidal said, “Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.” Days later, Vidal went on Cavett’s show to assert that Mailer had—literally—stabbed his second wife in the back. They, too, reconciled in 1985.

Their spats are legendary. Not long ago, Mailer confronted Vidal at a cocktail party in Manhattan and told him, "Gore, you look like an old Jew." "So do you, Norman. So do you."

For more on the punchy Lord of the Flyleaf, see Dwight Macdonald's essay about Mailer's disorderly conduct arrest and trial in Provincetown, MA in the sixties.