Playboy Interview: Norman Mailer

In a time that encourages and handsomely rewards the specialist and the technician, Norman Mailer has refused to mine the secure, predictable lode of fame as a best-selling novelist--a lode that seemed his for the asking after his gritty, outspoken "The Naked and the Dead" was hailed by one critic on its publication in 1948 as "the greatest war novel produced in this century," earned first place on the best-seller list and its author found himself internationally famous at 25. Instead, Mailer has chosen to lead--both as a writer and as a man--a full-blooded, often dangerous life of trial and error and, above all, of growth. His literary output is varied, Gargantuan and unpredictable. The author of nine books, he has been a poet, autobiographer, short-story writer, theologian, polemicist, essayist, political analyst, science-fiction writer, cultural prophet, columnist, book reviewer, dramatist, moralist and architectural critic--while remaining one of the handful of important living novelists; his next-to-last novel, "An American Dream," despite mixed critical reception, was a 1965 best seller. Recognition of his contributions to American literature earned him election last spring to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the honor society in the arts. His latest novel, "Why Are We in Vietnam?," was greeted this past fall with the customary mixed chorus of praise and vituperation--hardly any of it moderate in tone.

In addition to his multifarious literary activities, Mailer is as colorful and publicized as any writer since Ernest Hemingway. His current marriage to actress Beverly Bentley is his fourth. (In all, he's fathered six children--four girls and two boys.) His earlier marriages were often stormy, involving public brawls with such former wives as a Spanish-Peruvian painter (number two) and the aristocratic daughter of the Duke of Argyll (number three). In 1960, Mailer made grim headlines when, in the small hours after a turbulent party, he stabbed his second wife in the breast with a penknife and spent the next 17 days under psychiatric observation at Bellevue. Mailer's fist fights at parties and in taverns are legendary; and he enjoys getting into the ring to spar with his friend former light-heavyweight champion José Torres, and thumb wrestling with Muhammad Ali.

Politically, Mailer has long been prolific and controversial in print as well as in public. Not content to remain a sideline observer, in 1960 he announced his candidacy for the office of mayor of New York City (he dropped from the race after the stabbing incident); and he once confessed, half-seriously, that for years he's been "running for President--in the privacy of my mind." A few years ago, he engaged right-wing spokesman William F. Buckley, Jr., in a series of blistering barnstorming debates before large audiences across the country; the transcript of their most explosive confrontation was published in Playboy's February 1963 issue. In May 1965, he delivered--before thousands participating in the Vietnam Day held in Berkeley, California--what many informed political observers regard as the most hard-hitting public criticism (up to that time) of President Johnson and his policy in the Vietnam hostilities. And on October 21, 1967, he was arrested while participating in the massive antiwar demonstration in Washington.

Perhaps because of the diversity of his unpredictable words and deeds, Mailer has remained in the vanguard of the nation's cultural, political and intellectual ferment. According to his friendly debating rival William Buckley, he is "a terribly good measure of the current disturbances in the air. A sort of lightning rod." Many also agree with English novelist John Wain's tribute to Mailer's persistent courage, intellectual integrity and uncanny gift for "trying to position himself so as to stand face to face with the true identity of our time, our time in America." Mailer is regarded by many of his contemporaries as being, in the words of Sinclair Lewis, "the greatest writer to come out of his generation"; and by leaders of the current hip-love-psychedelic generation as an elder statesman of the New Left for such trail-blazing explorations of the hippie underground as his seminal 1957 essay "The White Negro."

Not all observers, however, view with delight Mailer's restless and relentless search for new roles to play. Many accuse him of dissipating what they regard as a potentially major talent in American fiction. Novelist John Updike, for one, while admiring Mailer because he has "energy and candor, and cares about what he thinks of as important things," laments that he has "quite abandoned fiction as a form of truthseeking. He's become a pamphleteer.... Mailer wants to be a crank surrounded by applauding people." Mailer the pundit and professional celebrity comes in for frequent drubbings--such as critic Raymond Rosenthal's charge that he is a "self-seeking melodramatist." As journalist Eric Thompson wrote: "Any adult who wants to make his friends smile need only say 'Norman Mailer.' People who have never seen Mailer, in person or in photographs, will regale you with a description of his Harpo Marx hair. Well-read cabdrivers will tell you that Mailer has a raw talent, but, man, does he need discipline!" Still other critics, while rendering unfavorable judgment on Mailer, admit the authority of the continuous interest his works and person command. Reviewing Mailer's latest collection of essays, "Cannibals and Christians," John Thompson, writing in the influential New York Review of Books, conceded that "The man is there, pugnacious, abusive, battered, out on a razor edge talking a blue incoherent streak, and endearing."

In the teeth of all this approbation and abuse, Mailer continues to improvise one of the least boring lives imaginable--both in his everyday activities and in the regions of the mind and imagination. Time and again, he has shown that he will dare and probe to its limits any idea, any literary form, any personal experience in his energetic search to discover and confront "the true identity of our time ... in America.'

Mailer's search has taken him from Long Branch, New Jersey, where he was born 44 years ago; to Brooklyn, where he spent his childhood; to Harvard College, from which he was graduated in 1943; into the U.S. Army, where, during World War Two, he saw action as a rifleman in the jungles and mountains of the Philippines; to Hollywood, where he spent a brief, frustrating period working on the filmscript for the movie of "The Naked and the Dead"; to suburban Vermont, where, for a few years in the early Fifties, he cultivated the life of a successful novelist; to Greenwich Village, where he became a leader and a spokesman for hipsters, addicts, Beats and fellow artists, and where he experimented widely with drugs, alcohol and what he's called "the psychology of the orgy"; to a country house in Connecticut in 1957, to clear his head of what he described as "an overbrilliance" from marijuana; to Paris; and back to America, where he now divides his time between an apartment in Brooklyn Heights and a summer home in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

The first of two long sessions with Playboy interviewer Paul Carroll took place in Mailer's Brooklyn Heights duplex apartment, which has become something of a celebrity itself: Nautical items abound, from the brass ship's clock over the kitchen and the dismantled engine-room telegraph beside the big bookcases to the glass-and-wood gable forecastle, which Mailer built above the kitchen and bedrooms and which can be reached only by climbing ropes, trapezes or deck ladders. Dressed in his work clothes--dungarees and Army-surplus shirt--Mailer sat at the dining-room table, occasionally glancing out of the large bay window at the panorama of tugboats, ocean liners and merchant ships dotting the East River, and beyond to the skyline of lower Manhattan. As Mailer spoke, he frequently leaned forward to emphasize a point by jabbing his fist in the air; at other times, he'd pause for a long while, his thoughts sinking deep into the topic at hand, before he' give an answer. What was most apparent about him during the interviewing sessions was not only the energy, intelligence, wit and gravity with which Mailer probed the subjects but also the bristling, tough honesty of the man. We began by asking about his alleged aversion to the interview form itself.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about being interviewed?

[A] Mailer: I start with a general sense of woe.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Mailer: The interviewer serves up one percent of himself in the questions and the man who answers has to give back 99 percent. I feel exploited the moment I step into an interview. Of course, once in a while there is such a thing as a good interview; but even then, the rape recorder eats up half the mood. It isn't the interview I really dislike so much as the tape recorder.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think is the best way to conduct an interview?

[A] Mailer: There's no good way. It's just a matter of hard, professional technique. In professional football, a quarterback has to contemplate the problem that every third or fourth play he's probably got to gain some yards through the center of the line; and when he's got four very tough linemen opposing him, there's not much he can do that's surprising, so it's just a matter of grinding through--that's all.

[Q] Playboy: If you feel so negative about being interviewed, why did you consent to this one?

[A] Mailer: About every two or three years, I feel I have to have a psychic house cleaning, go through my ideas in general, even brutal form--the brutal from of the interview--just to see about where I stand. Because most of the time, I spend my time thinking privately. Without this kind of psychic house cleaning. I might get too infatuated with some ideas. It's a way. I suppose, of exposing ideas that are weak. After that, you can either discard them or think about them a little harder.

[Q] Playboy: As you talk about house cleaning your ideas--disregarding, changing or improving them--we're reminded of your sentence in The Deer Park about growth: "There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more of remaining the same." Yet you've been charged by many critics with dissipating the potential growth of a major talent in American fiction by wearing so many hats. They point out that there's Mailer the politician, who once seriously considered running for mayor of New York City; there's Mailer the journalist, who writes about the maladies in American life and about the political brutalities; there's Mailer the celebrity, who grabs headlines by booze brawls and other acts of public violence. How do you answer that criticism?

[A] Mailer: Moving from one activity to another makes sense if you do it with a hint of wit or a touch of grace--which I don't say I've always done; far from it--but I think moving from one activity to another can give momentum. If you do it well, you can increase the energy you bring to the next piece of work. Growth, in some curious way. I expect, depends on begin always in motion just a little bit, one way or another. Growth is not simply going forward; it's going forward until you have to make a delicate decision either to continue in a difficult situation or to retreat and look for another way to go forward. The pattern that this creates--no, pattern is a poor word--the line of the movement reveals the nature of form. A breast is beautiful because it decides to go down until that point where it decides to go up, and after it decides to go up, it decides to go down again and then decides to go up again, and you have the beginning of the nipple. The nipple goes through its own particular curve, which consists of going out to the heavens as far as it can, then dropping down toward hell and then returning to the body--all within the space of a quarter of an inch. But there's an extraordinary difference between a beautiful nipple and a dull one.

More to the point, I've been accused of having frittered many talents away, of having taken on too many activities, of having worked too self-consciously at being a celebrity, of having performed at the edges and, indeed, at the center of my own public legend. And, of course, like any criminal in the dock, I can sing a pretty tune; I can defend myself; I'm my own best lawyer; the day when I'm not will be a sad day. The defense I'll enter today depends on my favorite notion: that an expert, by definition, is opposed to growth. Why? Because an expert is a man who works forward in one direction until he reaches that point where he has to use all his energy to maintain his advance; he cannot allow himself to look in other directions. In other words, he's become nearsighted. Now, I, as a man who's been nearsighted almost all of his life, know that anyone who's born nearsighted or becomes nearsighted early is a man become an expert prematurely. That's why kids with glasses are usually disliked by kids who don't wear glasses. The kids with good eyesight sense that the boy with glasses is an expert who's going to run the world. The first chronic personal shame I suppose I ever felt was having to wear glasses. And I don't wear them today, even though I'm so nearsighted I don't recognize old friends from ten feet away. Having been a premature expert myself, I think I may have reacted against it with a sense that expertise was the trap for me, that to get particularly good at any one thing would leave me a top-heavy expert.

[Q] Playboy: Is all this related to The Naked and the Dead and the celebrity that followed in its wake?

[A] Mailer: Yes. Being well known at 25 created a chain of legend for everything I did. If I left a party early, it wasn't because I might have been sleepy; it was because I had put down the party. This immediately created champions for me: "That Mailer's too much--Put down the hostess when he left the party." Others would say, "Dreadful--no manners; a barbarian." People expected me to grab the hostess of a party, sound her, yank her, pump her, and if I didn't like her, throw her out the window, then turn to my host, say, "Up your buns, guns," and walk over to sock the nearest guy in the eye. So when I went into a place and didn't behave like that, the other guests would say: "Why, he has such nice manners." Every little thing I did was exaggerated. Lo! There was a feedback that had little to do with me. It was as if--if you will--every one of my actions was tuned to an amplifier.

[Q] Playboy: Is this what you meant when you once remarked that your success at 25 was "like a lobotomy"?

[A] Mailer: It cut me off from my past. I felt like someone who had been dropped onto Mars.

[Q] Playboy: Did you dig your sudden fame?

[A] Mailer: Of course I dug it. I had to dig it. I mean, to be brutally frank for all our swell Playboy readers out there: It enabled me to get girls I would not otherwise have gotten.

[Q] Playboy: You make a distinction between the legendary Mailer in the spotlight whose acts were scrutinized and gossiped about and the Mailer who wanted to grow in his own sweet time. Could you contrast the two Mailers a bit more?

[A] Mailer: Well, contrasting two Mailers might have value in a novel, but to talk about it would end up being tiresome. This is the point I want to make: I had some instinctive sense--right or wrong--that the best way to grow was not to write one novel after another but to move from activity to activity, a notion that began with Renaissance man; it's not my idea, after all. My personal celebrity was an obstacle to any natural ability to move quickly and easily. For years, it was a tremendous obstacle; and I ended, up having a very dull, dogged personality that sought to wrestle with the legend, and that tried to say, "Look, fellows, I'm really simple, honest, hard-working; I'm as close to Abe Lincoln as Arthur Miller is."

The hoarseness of this confession is not to enlist sympathy but to prepare the ground for my boast: I learned how to accept and live with my legend. The legend becomes your friend, the beard, a front man, a pimp, a procurer of new situations. You live with a ghost who is more real to people than yourself; every single action you take with another person is part of a triangle. Every girl you talk to is not only in love with you or disappointed in you but also is in love with or hating your legend--who, incidentally, is more real to her than you. There are times, therefore, when you beef up your legend, perform some action to support it; times when you draw credit back from your legend, like cashing in the desire of somebody else to do something nice for you. Either way, you don't pretend--as I did for years--that the legend ain't there; it is. By the same token, when you're dealing with a man, there are now two of you against him; you're two linemen having to take out one other guy.

[Q] Playboy: In other words, if you got drunk and got into a scrap at a party, there'd be three men fighting instead of two?

[A] Mailer: Yeah. Of course, that doesn't always work to your advantage, because sometimes a guy who is fighting two guys is braver than when he's fighting one. I've gotten licked by guys who I think might not have licked me if I hadn't had my twin, the legend, on my side, too.

[Q] Playboy: One of your celebrated experiments with growth was your experience with drugs. You were on marijuana, Benzedrine and sleeping pills for a few years and were addicted to Seconal. Later, you said that a man on drugs will pay for it by "a gutted and burned-out nervous system." How do you feel about that topic today?

[A] Mailer: Drugs are a spiritual form of gambling. This is a poetic equation that can be carried right down to the end of its metaphor, because on drugs you're even bucking the house percentage--which for a drug like marijuana is probably something like 30 or 40 percent.

[Q] Playboy: Would you expand this?

[A] Mailer: Marijuana does something with the sense of time: It accelerates you; it opens you to your unconscious. But it's as if you're calling on the reserves of the next three days. All the sweets, all the crystals, all the little decisions, all the unconscious work of the next three days--or, if the experience is deep, part of the next 30 days, or the next 30 years--is called forward. For a half hour or two hours--whatever is the high of the pot--you're better than you are normally and you get into situations you wouldn't get into normally, and generally more happens to you. You make love better, you talk better, you think better, you dig people better. The point is, you've got to get in pretty far, because you're using up three days in an hour--or whatever the particular ratio is for any particular person. So unless you come back with--let us say--72 hours in one hour, you lose. Because you have to spend the next three or four days recovering. You might ask: What happens to the guy who smokes pot all the time? I don't know. But I do know something is being mortgaged; something is being drawn out of the future. If his own future has already been used up in one or another mysterious or sinister sense, then maybe the pot is drawing it out of the very substance of what I may as well confess I call God. I suspect God feeds drug addicts the way a healthy body feeds parasites.

[Q] Playboy: How do you mean?

[A] Mailer: Well, if God has great compassion, He may not be willing to cut the drug addict off from Him. During the time the addict has some of his most intense and divine experiences, it is because he is literally imbibing the very marrow and nutrient of existence. But since I do not believe that God is necessarily inexhaustible, the drug addict may end up by bleeding Him.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think this happens on LSD?

[A] Mailer: I don't think you have a mystical experience on chemicals without taking the risk of exploiting something in the creation. If you haven't paid the real wages of lover or courage or abstention or discipline or sacrifice or wit in the eye of danger, then taking a psychedelic drug is living the life of a parasite; it's drawing on sweets you have not earned. Please do not say, by the way, that L. B. J. is the biggest cornball in America; with the above, I have just presented my credentials.

[Q] Playboy: What is the danger of this parasitical self-exploitation on LSD?

[A] Mailer: I'm not going to say that LSD is bad in every way for everyone, but I'm convinced it's bad if you keep taking it. Any drug is bad finally in the same way that being a confirmed gambler is bad. A confirmed gambler ends up losing all his friends because he blows their money and blows their trust. A gambler will tell any lie to get back into the action. By the same token, if you stay on any drug for too long, then you have a habit; you're a victim; to anticipate something, you're a totalitarian.

Let me put it this way: LSD is marvelous for experts to take when they get too frozen in their expertise. Let's suppose they've driven deep into something impenetrable, some obstacle that was bound to trap them because of the shortsighted nature of their expertise. Although they work and work manfully as experts, at this point they're similar to soldiers who have pushed far into enemy territory but are now up against a resistance they cannot get through. Their only action is to retreat, but they don't know how to, because they have no habits of retreat. They're experts; they know only how to move forward to amass more knowledge and put more concentration upon a point. When this concentration does not succeed in poking through the resistance of the problem the expert is psychically in great trouble. He begins to live in increasing depression; he has to retreat and doesn't know how: He wasn't built to retreat.

My guess is: On LSD, you begin to die a little. That's why you get this extraordinary, even divine sense of revelation. Perhaps you taste the odor and essence of your own death in the trip; in excess, it's a deadly poison, after all. Therefore, what's given to the expert is a broader vision: Dying a little, he begins to retreat from his expertise and begins to rejoin his backward brothers. Hallelujah! So that LSD taken a few times could be very good, I would imagine. But before very long, if the expert keeps taking LSD, he can become nothing but an expert on LSD.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think of Timothy Leary?

[A] Mailer: Well, I wonder who we were just talking about.

[Q] Playboy: More of an answer, please.

[A] Mailer: I never met him. Perhaps I'd like him if I did. Many of my friends like him. But I have heard him speak, and he is then nought but simple shit.

[Q] Playboy: Alcohol seems to be another way by which you've tried to grow or "move forward." One of the characters in your stage version of The Deer Park declares: "A man must drink until he locates the truth." How does alcohol help a man do that?

[A]Mailer: I'm going to offer the hardworking magazine readers of America one fundamental equation: A man who drinks is attempting to dissolve an obsession.

[Q] Playboy: What's the obsession?

[A] Mailer: Talk first about what an obsession is. I've thought about obsession a great deal, but I'm not sure I know the answer. Everybody talks about obsessions; nobody's ever really explained them. We can define them, but we don't really know what we're talking about. An obsession, I'd suggest, is not unlike a pole of magnetism, a psychic field of force. An obsession is created, I think, in the wake of some event that has altered our life profoundly, or perhaps we have passed through some relation with someone else that has altered our life drastically, yet we don't know whether we were changed for good or for bad; it's the most fundamental sort of event or relation. It has marked us, yet it's morally ambiguous.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of event?

[A] Mailer: Suppose a marriage breaks up. You don't know if it was finally your fault or your wife's fault or God's fault or the Devil's fault--four uncertainties. Let's reduce them to two: a man or his wife. Put it this way: People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled. Use the metaphor of the Army here: If you move forward to attack a town and the center of this attack depends upon a road that will feed your attack, and this road passes through a town, yet you don't know if your people hold that town or someone else holds it, then, obviously, if you were a general, you'd be pretty obsessive about that town. You'd keep asking, "Will you please find out who owns that town?" You'd send out reconnaissance parties to locate the town, enter it, patrol it. If all sorts of mysterious things occurred--if, for example, your reconnaissance platoon didn't return--you'd feel so uncertain you might not move forward to attack. The obsession is a search for a useful reality. What finally did occur? What is real?

[Q] Playboy: You haven't told us yet how drink helps dissolve an obsession.

[A] Mailer: Well, if a man's drink takes him back to an earlier, younger state of sensitivity, it is then taking him to a place back of the place where he originally got into the impasse that created the obsession. If you can return to a state just preceding the one you were in when these various ambiguous events occurred, you can say to yourself, "Now, I'm approaching the event again. What really did happen? Who was right? Who was wrong? Let me not miss it this time." A man must drink until he locates the truth. I think that's why it's so hard for people to give up booze. There's an artwork going on with most serious drinkers. Usually, it's a failed artwork. Once again, one's playing against the house percentage: One drinks, one wrecks one's liver, dims one's vision, burns out one's memory. Drinking is a serious activity--a serious moral and spiritual activity. We consume ourselves in order to search for a truth. It's no accident that a part of small-town common sense insists: "I don't trust a man who never takes a drink," because that man either has no obsessions and so has never lived through a bad and tricky time or has obsessions so prevalent that he has buried them and live bodies are screaming under the ground. Whereas, in contrast, the small town will put up with a lot from a drinker, because anyone who takes a frequent nip has had revelations on drink. Drink is the active man's drug addiction. Madison Avenue, please copy.

Note: You take a drug lying on your back, whereas the way to drink is standing up.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that you've experienced moments of truth through drink?

[A] Mailer: Extraordinary moments of truth. The thing that had me ready to bawl was that I was close to the truth but too drunk to do anything about it.

[Q] Playboy: What sort of thing did you discover?

[A] Mailer: Whatever the truth was. The kind of truths you find in moments like that. Discovering that somebody you thought loved you hated you, or vice versa. All I'm underlining is that sense of certainty we all know when past moments of ambiguity are resolved. The ambiguity sinks into the earth; a crystal remains; you say, "Yes, there's the truth. Yes, this is what did happen." A relationship alters in one's memory from a morass to a crystal of recollection.

[Q] Playboy: In terms of your concept of growth, you've made in An American Dream and other writings a brilliant, dazzling and rather puzzling remark concerning the possibility that God Himself may be involved in a process of growth. You've said that you have an "obsession with how God exists," and you've argued for the possibility that He may be a God whose final nature is not yet comprehended, even by Himself. Could you comment on this?

[A] Mailer: I think I decided some time ago that if there is a God and He's all-powerful, then His relation to us is absurd. All we can see in our human condition are thundering, monumental disproportions, injustices of such dimension that even the conservative notion of existence--which might postulate that man is here on earth not to complain but to receive his just deserts and that the man who acts piggishly on earth will be repaid in hell, regardless of whether he was rich or poor--yes, even this conservative vision depends on a God who is able to run a world of reasonable proportions. If the only world we have is one of abysmal, idiotic disproportions, then it becomes too difficult to conceive of an all-powerful God who is all good. It is far easier to conceive of a God who died or who is dying or who is an imperfect God. But once I think of an imperfect God, I can begin to imagine a Being greater than ourselves, who nonetheless shares His instinctive logic with us: We as men seek to grow, so He seeks to grow; even as we each have a conception of being--my conception of being, my idea of how we should live, may triumph over yours, or yours over mine--so, in parallel, this God may be engaged in a similar war in the universe with other gods. We may even be the embodiment, the partial expression of His vision. If we fail, He fails, too. He is imperfect in the way we are imperfect. He is not always as brave or extraordinary or as graceful as He might care to be. This is my notion of God and growth. The thing about it that gives me sustenance is that it enables me to love God, if you will bear these words, rather than hate Him, because I can see Him as someone who is like other men and myself except more noble, more tortured, more desirous of a good that He wishes to receive and give to others--a torturous ous ethical activity at which He may fail. Man's condition is, then, by this logic, epic or tragic--for the outcome is unknown. It is not written.

[Q] Playboy: Could you talk a bit more about the relationship between a man and this God who is still involved in discovering His own nature?

[A] Mailer: In capsule: There are times when He has to exploit us; there are times when we have to exploit Him; there are times when He has to drive us beyond our own natural depth because He needs us--those of us, at least, who are working for Him: We have yet to talk of the Devil. But a man who talks about his religion is not to be trusted. Who knows--I may be working for the Devil. In fact, I sometimes suspect every novelist is a Devil's helper. The ability to put an eye on your own heart is icy.

[Q] Playboy: You said recently that maybe the Devil is God in exile. What did you mean?

[A] Mailer: I don't know. What I mean is, I don't know if the Devil is finally an evil principle of God--a fallen angel, a Prince of Darkness, Lucifer--a creature of the first dimension engaged in a tragic, monumental war with God, or whether the Devil is a species of nonexistence, like plastic. By which I mean every single pervasive substance in the technological world that comes from artificial synthesis rather than from nature. Plastic surfaces have no resonance--no echo of nature. I don't know if plastic is a second principle of evil just as much opposed to the Devil as it is opposed to God--a visitor from a small planet, if you will. So when I talk about the Devil these days, I don't really know whether I'm talking about a corrupter of the soul or a deadening influence. I don't know who or where the enemy is. In fact, I don't have the remotest notion of who or what I'm working for. Sometimes I think I'm unemployed. That's despair, son.

[Q] Playboy: Let's get into something that may have a tangential relation to this despair. You've written extensively about John F. Kennedy and his impact on our times. In your essay "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," published during the 1960 Presidential campaign, you suggested that Kennedy was an "existential politician." Existential is a term that crops up frequently in your writing: existential God, existential politician. Exactly what do you mean by it?

[A] Mailer: Existential--no precedents, no traditions, no disciplines, no books, no guides sufficiently familiar with the situation to take you through.

[Q] Playboy: In what way was Kennedy an existential politician?

[A] Mailer: Kennedy was a man who could define himself--or, in other words, comprehend himself--only by his actions. He had such extraordinary ambition that if he had not succeeded in being President, he might have ended up a bad piece of work. There is such a thing as a man starting as a bad piece of work because he has a nature that is extraordinarily disharmonious; he lives with unendurable disproportions and ambitions. If he succeeds in what the psychoanalysts call "acting it out"--with some scorn they say "acting out"--the fact remains that he also has to have huge courage, high wit and vast imagination. Kennedy succeeded in getting to play the one role that could allow him to realize himself: the President of the United States. When I call him an existential politician, I mean that Kennedy had no nature other than the particular nature he discovered in himself by the act of living. If he had tried to live a more conventional life, he would have sealed his psyche in a vault and probably would have died young and schizophrenic.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any theory about who killed Kennedy?

[A] Mailer: I have no special insight into that. Where I'm more ready to speculate is on the events after the assassination. There must have been one incredible moment for every secret-police agency in the world when they first heard that Oswald had been in the Soviet Union and had come back here to America. Every intelligence operation everywhere must have known the odds were great that Oswald was an agent for several quite separate espionage services, because you don't let men and boys like Oswald in and out of Cold War countries without making them pay a little price: They've got to become a little agent--not a big agent, just a little agent, a pawn. As for most of these guys in secret services--I won't say they're clowns; some are able, but they don't have a great deal of personnel to work with, when you get down to it. Their best material is found in one another's agents. So they play games with one another's agents. They develop the same attraction toward one another's agents that buddies work up for the same girl. Two guys in love with the same girl get great play back and forth. So, yes, once in a while, a poor guy like Oswald gets caught in a situation--becomes an agent for two countries, and two or three other secret services or espionage services will get in on it. It's possible Oswald may have been an agent or on the working list of a dozen different secret services throughout the world.

When the assassination occurred, I think a tremendous panic erupted. An enormous effort was made to begin destroying all evidence in sight--in every possible way. To top that, you had the Dallas Police Department--Which I don't know anything about--but, give or take a few points, it has to be as corrupt as the next big-city police force. Moreover, a cop under a searchlight is not the most resourceful of creatures; he tends to stampede--he's not called a bull for nothing.

[Q] Playboy: How did you feel when you heard Kennedy had been shot?

[A] Mailer: Horrible. Horrible. At first, in some cockeyed way, I thought it was a gag--like, he wasn't really hurt that bad. For some reason or other, I was bitter about him in those days and I made a sardonic remark I've been ashamed of since: I said, "That son of a bitch, he's got hard Irish smarts; he's probably lying there with that flesh wound in his arm, saying, 'Let America sweat for an hour thinking I'm about to die. They'll realize how much they need me.' " Of course, when I realized he was indeed dead, I came to the conclusion that my on-the-spot divination of events was not particularly incisive, tasty or superb.

[Q] Playboy: If Kennedy had been only wounded and then had recovered and resumed his responsibilities as President, what do you think America would be like today?

[A] Mailer: It might still be in serious trouble. Kennedy was a fine man, maybe even a magical man, and he changed the style of America; he opened it up. Something racy came back into American life. The country was saltier; it swung more. Still, you would have had technological society eroding most of his efforts; in addition, terrible problems with Congress and civil rights. I have a hunch, however, that Kennedy wouldn't have been such a fool as to get us into Vietnam the way Lyndon Johnson got us in; I think Kennedy would have kept the war going about the way it was going, and he might have looked for a way to write it off. Kennedy might even have come to pay attention to an idea that doesn't have enough attention paid to it--that the way to fight communism is not by warring against it but by letting Communists fight one another. There's something in the nature of communism that makes it attack itself. Communism is profoundly cannibalistic.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't that why you said we should get out of Vietnam--in the controversial talk you delivered on Vietnam Day at the University of California at Berkeley two and a half years ago?

[A] Mailer: Yes. Except it's next to impossible for us to get out of Vietnam. Psychologically impossible. Militarily, of course, the war is next to meaningless. But America, more than any other country on earth, has an image of herself as a fighting nation. Americans really want to fight; they really want a war. It's good for them, healthy for them. Fine. Have war games every year. I offered this suggestion in a satirical piece, but I've since become a little more serious about it. Buy some place--some desert or jungle--and invite any countries we have eyes for to come to fight. If they don't accept, they're conceivably too yellow to show up. Or, at least, so we can tell the world. But if they do, they have 50,000 men, we have 50,000 men; we get 200 or 400 airplanes--name it--they get the same; all ordnance similar in category, the same count of weapons. Then you have the biggest professional war game in the history of the world. Let it go on for two or three months, or to a conclusion, covered by color television, radio, interviews with some of the stars who come out of this engagement. Some will call it musical comedy, barbaric; but, in point of fact, the one difference between this war game and Vietnam is that we won't be burning kids in any number or smashing property that belongs to others. Americans will just be doing what they want to be doing: some shooting, some war.

Many men love to be in battle. They are better men at the end of it if they are engaged in a war that has some modicum of purpose. If you're engaged in a purposeless war, you can end up healthy, but you're still a pig with a distorted mentality, because you have to justify the act of killing as being a patriotic act when, in fact, all you want to do is kill. If I wish to blast somebody and I say, "Yeah, that's what I want to do," then I'm existentially tuned; I know what I am. I am obeying the first dictate of ethics: Know thyself. But if I want to kill somebody and I say, "I'm doing it for my country and for freedom," then I'm a bad piece of work. I'm psychically disoriented.

[Q] Playboy: In the Berkeley talk, you also argued that the reasons given by the Johnson Administration for America's involvement in Vietnam are patently phony. In particular, you rejected the claim that we're there because we're battling communism. Why do you think we entered the war?

[A] Mailer: Because we had to. America was profoundly afraid of the Negro Revolution. In the secret councils of our sleep, we were ready to do anything to stop it. War in Vietnam was the quickest way to slow it down. Another reason: The potential for violence in American life was accelerating every year, the social fabric was beginning to break down. I think in some deep instinctive way, Johnson reasoned that a war would enable him to control the country better. America was getting out of his control; nothing inspires profound anxiety in a man like Johnson more than losing control over every last little button. Vietnam was an instrument Johnson could use to manipulate public opinion, to apply leverage to the economy, to stand up against the civil rights movement. I think he saw Vietnam that way. It was the fatal error of his life. This talented, wily, seasoned politician made an error of Shakespearean proportions when he decided to embark on that war in Vietnam. The smartest President in America's history had just become the stupidest. Because Vietnam will yet prove to be the war in which America lost control of its ability to control a large part of the world, and Johnson lost his power to lead the American people on an ideological leash.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think Johnson stands a chance for re-election in 1968?

[A] Mailer: If Richard Nixon runs, Johnson has a chance.

[Q] Playboy: Of all the major political figures about whom you've written extensively, you've hardly ever paid serious attention to Nixon. Why?

[A] Mailer: One reason is that Nixon was written about very well all through the Fifties. He became a natural target for every good political writer on the left, so it felt like kicking the cat to go to work on Nixon. I'm not fond of the man, but I didn't see any reason to duplicate a job done so many times. If he gives signs of becoming powerful again, that'll be another matter. That will be serious. I don't know anyone who has ever heard Richard Nixon say anything interesting in all the years he's invaded our life. Nixon is resolute in his refusal to become more interesting. It's a remarkable power--this passionate embrace of monotony.

[Q] Playboy: Do you see any politician on the scene today who might be an existential politician in the way of J. F. K.?

[A] Mailer: I think Bobby Kennedy might be. You can't begin to know what direction the man will take. I don't mean his directions are cheap or contradictory, but he has a nature that finally is resistant to analysis--so at least he gives you a ride for your money. Bill Buckley, replete with all his vices and virtues, is certainly an existential politician.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think of the other Republican Presidential potentials, Romney, Percy, Reagan and Rockefeller?

[A] Mailer: They are the tragedy of the Republican Party. They are the embodiment, the present-day focus of the mediocrity of--nay, let us say they are the tragedy of--the Republican Party.

[Q] Playboy: In Cannibals and Christians, you said that Bobby Kennedy has made a pilgrim's progress since the murder of his brother. What did you mean?

[A] Mailer: He's become more interesting than he used to be; that's a pilgrim's progress. How many people can that be said about?

[Q] Playboy: What do you think his chances are in 1968?

[A] Mailer: I don't have any idea. My approach to politics is from outside. I don't like being filled with inside stories. There was a period in my life when I knew people who knew every inside story. It took me a while to find out they knew nothing. For instance, they knew in 1963 that Bill Scranton was going to be the Republican candidate in 1964.

[Q] Playboy: A while ago, you praised John Kennedy for changing the style of America by opening it up and making it "saltier." What would the nation be like under a Robert Kennedy Administration?

[A] Mailer: It would depend on what kind of country he might inherit in this election or in 1972 or whenever. It might be a country damaged irreparably by the horrors, pusillanimities and hypocrisies of the Johnson Administration, the Vietnam war--which may have done more damage to America than anything in our history--and the "Great Society."

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about Johnson's Great Society?

[A] Mailer: It's a comedy. The Great Society is not only not going to come into being but it shouldn't. It's artificial. The only growth with meaning is organic growth that does not become separated from the root of its origin. Any time you find a great society developed from the top, what you've got, in effect, is a test-tube baby--artificial insemination of the worst sort. Let's say the Great Society is drug addiction on a huge political scale. It's similar to shooting B12 complex into your butt. The patient may feel healthier for a while, but the fact of the matter is that a part of his ass has been violated in a way that bears no relation to his life--at least not as his own flesh can feel it. In other words, your flesh is visited abruptly by a tubular needle that punctures skin, rips delicate strands of muscle and cuts holes in a vein wall. To what end? The body doesn't understand. If you're in a fight and get hit, your body can usually understand that: It was probably mobilized for action. But what action are you mobilized for when a needle goes into your flesh? The same thing happens, I think, with economic growth. Take the first idea of the poverty program--making jobs. What pleasure can a man take in a job that has been made for him?

[Q] Playboy: Doesn't that statement place you in league with the right wing?

[A] Mailer: I don't mean we have to go all the way back to 19th Century conservatism. Instead, take Harlem as an example of what I'm talking about. Right now, part of the New York City police force works in Harlem. It's a hopeless job for any white policeman. He doesn't have a prayer of being a good cop; he's too hated because of all the bad white cops who've been there and also because of all the bad Negro cops who've worked in Harlem. He's hated because he comes from outside and is a symbol of oppression. Suppose the existential fact were recognized that Harlem is more separated from New York City than East Berlin from West Berlin; it is a separate principality, a kingdom in and of itself. Suppose, then, that Harlem had its own police force and was offered its fair share of the funds that run the New York Police Department. Suppose they even used part of that money for other purposes and had a volunteer police force, just like the Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a couple of years ago. Anything that functions on the basis of volunteer effort by people who have come to feel they have to do this particular job in order to feel respect for themselves will work better than obliging a professional to do a job in some place where he's miserable professionally. The advantage of having an all-Negro professional and volunteer police force in Harlem is that every time something ugly happened, the Negroes would have to recognize one particular complexity in life, which is that not only can their own people be bad but that police brutality might be something that comes out of being a policeman. And they'd have to face the fact that Whitey ain't the only devil in town. That might be good.

Take schooling in Harlem. All these educational programs that come from the outside are absurd. I've never met a stupid Negro in my life; I've met many Negroes I couldn't talk to, but I never had the feeling of a stupid man behind the face. I have met stupid whites. The point is: The Negro has a life experience that prevents him from being stupid. As a result, he has a culture that is thus different from our own, and his school education should begin with his culture before he is asked to move over to ours. So, again, let the city allocate board-of-education funds to let the Negro administer his own schools and evolve his own curriculum. There might be chaos for a time. Could it be any worse than the daily chaos in Harlem schools now? Why should Negroes be forced to learn to read by methods devised by Midwestern WASPs? Totally different kinds of people--as different as Japanese and Georgians.

Concerning housing projects, I see no reason to come in with these tremendous urban-renewal jobs that are unspeakably ugly and tear up neighborhoods; they are like metal plates put in your head or plastic tubes stuck in your gut. These projects disrupt a neighborhood. Instead, some of these tenements could be saved. You could have a scheme where a man could start by being given $100 worth of materials--I use the figure arbitrarily--and a little professional labor, and he could set out to improve his apartment: plaster a wall, this or that; say his wife will be in on it. He's working for his own apartment. If he goes out and drinks up the money, all right, he drank it up and presumably he won't get any more. His neighbors might lean on him. Not lean on him hard, probably, because if he's the guy who drank it up, he's possibly the meanest guy in the house. Still, what you get this way is a house interested in itself; whereas the other way, housing projects, poverty programs, Great Society--any Negro who doesn't set out to exploit the white man who is giving him money is nothing but a fool. With such handouts, honor for the Negro becomes his ability to lie, cheat and exploit the white man. Whereas a few thousand dollars given bit by bit to a man working very hard on his own apartment over a few years would obviously do much more for that apartment than $20,000 spent to renovate it by outside methods.

[Q] Playboy: Prior to the riots in Newark and Detroit, you said that civil war would erupt soon in this country. Did you see it as happening between Negroes and whites?

[A] Mailer: I think there's a tendency toward civil war--not a war in the sense of people shooting it out over the hills and on battle lines; but certain kinds of functions might cease to exist in this society--technological functions. It may be that people will lose the habit of depending on the subway to get to work, or people might lose the real possibility of driving into certain cities at certain hours of the day or night. What might happen would be scattered outbreaks of violence: people, for example, who've gotten fed up with the Long Island Expressway and so start overturning cars in traffic jams. All sorts of things--products getting worse and worse; shoddiness at the center of production, breakdowns, fissures.

[Q] Playboy: How much of this will be the result of what you've often and passionately condemned as our technological society?

[A] Mailer: Oh, much of it. Most of it, perhaps. Another great part of the tendency toward violence might derive from our guilt of the past: We've never paid for the crimes of the past; now we're trying to bury them. That's one reason the technological society advances at such a great rate: It frees people from having to look back into the horrors of the past. Western man has never faced up to the slave trade, the concentration camps, the colonization of the world, the imperialization of the world--the list could go on as long as one's knowledge of history.

[Q] Playboy: In Cannibals and Christians, you described the Cold War as useless, brutal and enervating. You said we should stop it and get on with the destiny of Western man. What is that destiny?

[A] Mailer: A huge phrase--"the destiny of Western man." I suppose I meant that the West is built ultimately on one final assumption--that life is heroic. It's a Faustian notion. Of course, one immediately rushes to say that the West is also Christian, but there's always been a contradiction at the heart. Christianity, the gentlest of religious professions, is the most militant and warlike of religions, the most successful and Faustian of religions. Indeed, it conquered the world. In that limited sense, Christianity is the most heroic. The alternative to this heroic notion of man is that passive acceptance of the universe that characterizes Hindu or Oriental philosophy and religion.

One of the ironies of our century is that the technological society creates an atmosphere of such passivity in people that they are now prepared to entertain Oriental notions precisely because they have lost much of the real power to shape their own lives. The citizens of a technological society are as existentially powerless as an Oriental peasant. Their living standard may be vastly superior, but their essential social impotence is similar: They command less and less; they are manipulated more and more. They may think they are picking their channel, but TV channels them.

Note: The more we wage a religious war against communism, the more we create the real social equivalent of communism in America--which will be the total technological society. You can look forward into a future where communism's technological society grows nearly identical with ours; the differences will be of the mildest local color. For the natural tendency of the technological society is to try to clean up all sorts of social excesses and to root out random oppression because these activities are illogical; they interfere with the smooth working of the machine. You never want a piston to drive with more force than is necessary to direct the action of the machine; you never put a part in the machine; that is heavier than it needs to be. So the natural desire of the technological society is to create a smooth totalitarian society free from the ranker forms of injustice. Its long-term tendency in Russia is to make a totalitarian environment that is relatively civilized and pleasant. Both countries may well end by serving up a life to their citizens about as anonymous and vitiated and pill-ridden and dull as some of our new office buildings.

[Q] Playboy:Then why does America fight communism?

[A] Mailer: Because we're Faustian. We believe we have to grapple with the universe; we have the secret faith that we are inspired by a national genius that enables us to take on anything and do anything. The tragic irony is that in fighting communism, we are creating the absolute equivalent of communism in this country. And we will destroy our own Faustian dream in the act of fighting communism, for the technological society looks to destroy any idea of the heroic because such ideas seem irrational and unscientific to the technician.

On the other hand, each time communism has captured some small part of the West, it has been shaken by Western complexities that open huge rents in the Russian Communist ideology. A backward country like Yugoslavia did more to halt Stalinism than 50 military adventures dreamed up by John Foster Dulles. Yugoslavia introduced a complex notion into the center of communism: the idea that there could be two kinds of communism, each equally devout and heroic in itself, each more or less oppressive. This made the Communist bureaucrat begin to contemplate the nature of his own system and therefore to doubt his faith and so look for ways to ameliorate the oppressiveness of it.

Communism is cannibalistic, as I said earlier. Any ideology that attempts to dominate all of existence has to split into sects and segments, because the moment disagreement exists between members, it cannot be adjudicated or compromised without losing the primitive force of the ideology. Compromise impossible, splits occur. What you get then is two ideologies equally monotonous, equally total, soon equally at war with each other.

[Q] Playboy: Opposed to this, then, is what you call the heroic destiny of the West?

[A] Mailer: Let's say, an exploration into the heroic.

[Q] Playboy: Is existential politics an exploration into the heroic?

[A] Mailer: To a degree. Existential politics can be understood only by talking practically, specifically, about what you are going to do here in this particular place and time. After you talk about, say, 20 such situations, you get some notion of existential politics. The basic principle is that you do not separate the act from the receiver. Existential politics depends on a certain intimacy between the law and the people upon whom the law is enacted. For example, the most paradoxical notion of existential politics is not that there should be no capital punishment but that if someone is going to get killed by the state, then make a spectacle of the event. Let people watch while a professional executioner and the condemned man fight hand to hand in an arena. Since the executioner is professional, he wins practically every time; but he doesn't win to a certainty; that gives the prisoner some last chance to fight for his own existence. It gives him the right of any man to fight for existence under extraordinary circumstances. Such a spectacle also opens the public to the real nature of execution. Let them see that blood on the sand. They may then decide if they still want capital punishment. If they do, more power to them. They like blood. But at least one profound hypocrisy--our quarantine of the execution from the eyes of the public that decrees the act--won't be able to exist anymore.

[Q] Playboy: In terms of the possibility of your becoming an existential political figure yourself, you once planned to run for mayor of New York City, although recently you said that you've decided to devote your time to writing instead of political activities. Do you still feel that way?

[A] Mailer: I disqualified myself from being in political office; you can't stab your wife and get away with it. It's as simple as that.

[Q] Playboy: Yourself apart, do you have any prognostications about the American political and social scene in general?

[A] Mailer: I'm gloomy. I won't say I don't think we're going to make it; but I am gloomy because, quite beyond politics and any related or unrelated discussions of courage, honor, love, beauty, and so forth, rests this technological society that sits upon us like an incubus. It's impossible, for instance, to have any contact with anything in your existence that is not incapsulated by this technological society. I can't take a pat of butter at breakfast that doesn't have some chemical additive to deaden the taste of the butter just a bit, and therefore my taste buds, and therefore deaden me, as well as line my stomach cells with a new if minuscule addition of the chemical. If you could eat a fresh piece of butter for breakfast, certain sensory messages might be able to reach down deep into the secret needs of your nerves--enough to enrich you. You might live a hint better. The technological society gets between us and existence in everything we do, the air we breathe, the buildings we live in with their abstract monotonous forms, the synthetic fibers we wear; ever notice how a rash from a synthetic fiber is more disagreeable than one from cotton or wool? The list is endless. I've written about little else for years.

[Q] Playboy: What can be done about it?

[A] Mailer: I don't know. My feeling is that there is going to be some extraordinary holocaust. Who knows? We may all die off in mysterious fashion. For instance, about the time we discover some cure for cancer, a new disease even worse will probably be spawned by the cure--just as new viruses were spawned in relation to penicillin. Modern disease and modern technology are inseparably connected.

[Q] Playboy: You've often connected this, which you call "the plague," with the modern technological society. How did the plague begin?

[A] Mailer: I think it began somewhere back with primitive man, when the first mediocrity discovered he could get power over men stronger than himself by employing magic for control over others rather than using magic for communion with his existence. Jacques Ellul, in his book The Technological Society, suggests that the beginning of all scientific technique came from a perversion of primitive magic.

[Q] Playboy: You've written that one aspect of totalitarianism is fear of orgasm, particularly by the liberal mentality, because the orgasm, you claim, is "the existential moment. Every lie we have told, every fear we have indulged, every aggression we have tamed," you say, "arises again at that instant to constrict the turns and possibilities of our becoming." Would you tell us more about that?

[A] Mailer: Orgasm is the moment when you can't cheat life. If the orgasm was no good, something in you--or in your mate, but probably in you--was no good. In an existential moment, something bad can happen to you, because you can't control it; you don't know how it's going to turn out. Anybody who's ever been in an automobile accident experiences such a moment--three or four or five fragments of time that seem endless--and you're into something that is brand-new.

But the American liberal is programmatic about sex. Yesterday he believed in sex hygiene. Today he believes in promiscuity. He thinks it's good. I think that's innocent. Promiscuity is good at given times. Other times, dreadful. When sex becomes programmatic, in walks the totalitarian. Because a program does not permit of surprises. Sometimes, existence can reveal itself only by its surprises.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the abundance of sex manuals available today contributes to the programing of sex?

[A] Mailer: Taking them at their best, the psychological sex manuals, I'd still say I'm not a champion of Albert Ellis' opinions. Although there's one thing in Ellis' ideas that isn't so bad: the notion he has of sex as will. For instance, I remember he once told me a story about one of his patients who was terribly timid and nervous about women. After they'd worked for a while in the analytical relationship, Ellis finally said one day to his patient: "Look, you like this girl; you find her attractive. Neck with her tonight; take her to the movies and neck with her." Ellis said the patient went to the movies with the girl and suffered and sweated and died but finally made a pass; he did neck with her. Ellis said the real reason was that the patient was more afraid of Ellis than he was of the girl. There's something in that. A healthier reflex can sometimes be initiated by an act of will.

[Q] Playboy: Is that an example of existential sex?

[A] Mailer: Yes: It's leaping a gap. But, you know, I distrust this talk. The older I get and the more I learn about sex, the more I know I don't know anything at all. Sex is more mysterious today than it was the day I started.

[Q] Playboy: In what sense?

[A] Mailer: I find it harder to come up with value judgments that can be used from one day to the next. I prefer it this way--having fewer and fewer answers about sex as the years go by.

[Q] Playboy: In that case, do you still believe, as you wrote several years ago, that birth control is evil--that it's a kind of murder of what may have been a man's best son?

[A] Mailer: Yes. In fact, not too long ago, I was reading a very generous review of Cannibals and Christians in a Catholic magazine called The Critic; and at one point the critic said, Of course, Mailer's ideas are almost absurdly sentimental about birth control. I am now to the right of the Catholic Church.

[Q] Playboy: Indeed, the Catholic Church is presently struggling with its birthcontrol position, in order to square it with the problems of the world population explosion and the individual moral problems raised by families that are too large.

[A] Mailer: Regardless of what the Church finally decides, the problem of birth control is the same as all of the other problems in our technological society. They're all part of the same damn problem; something is insulating us away from our existence. My guess is that in primitive times it was much more difficult to conceive and--as a result--more natural. In a just existence, the best things are always the most difficult. Since primitive man lived in a relation to his life that was more biological--which is to say, he felt everything around him with his own body--he was therefore more intelligent physically than he is today, even though he might have been smaller. Each man was more an animal; his senses told him more. We notice that many animals don't conceive all that easily. I would judge the problems of breeding are considerable with animals because they don't conceive unless they really want it to take.

In our modern life, on the other hand, the body is so deadened at its sexual center by contraceptives and pills that we no longer can afford to be as selective as we used to be. This adds desperation. Because people are less sensitive to conceiving, they have to make damn sure they conceive. So men put a child into many a woman they would not choose in the real calling of their blood; and many a woman accepts the seed of a man she would normally despise or half despise. There's an adulteration of distinctions, a losing of the intimacies of form, in the sense that a fine key for a fine lock is intimate. I repeat: People now conceive too easily because they're afraid if they don't, they won't conceive at all.

[Q] Playboy: What would happen if there were no birth control?

[A] Mailer: It's possible that it might then become much more difficult to conceive, because there would be more real terror of conceiving for too little.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't it also possible that the social consequences would be calamitous--if your theory didn't work?

[A] Mailer: Perhaps--but one thing you can be sure of: People would start making love a lot less; they'd make it only when they really wanted to make it; they'd have to be carried away more. On a flood of passion, yeah. How many people ride on a flood today? One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Mailer: Well, it's like taking your vitals, putting them on a stone block and pounding away with a hammer. It's bad for the back--that I know.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think it's possible for a couple to have an enduring sexual relationship?

[A] Mailer: Yes, I do. Even after you've been married awhile, it can still be the thing you go through the day for.

[Q] Playboy: You don't believe, then, in the old cliché that the early days of marriage are the great times and after that the sexual scene gets less interesting?

[A] Mailer: I think a marriage should get better all the time. By the time they're 80, a couple should die fucking. But I don't think that happens, because none of us have the guts for that; none of us are clean enough; all of us are yellower than we ought to be. Cowardice kills love.

[Q] Playboy: Cowardice in what sense?

[A] Mailer: It centers around possession. A curious thing: If you gamble with your possession and gamble foolishly and you're not possessive enough, that's fatal. There's something in a woman that is profoundly outraged if you don't want to make her all your own; women will never forgive you for that. Permissiveness to a woman is permissive shit. They hate it. Everything primitive rebels in a woman if a man does not want her absolutely for himself. At the same time, once you claim a woman, you start killing everything in her. Nothing in love or sex is ever simple, because you're always walking between two paradoxes.

[Q] Playboy: What are they?

[A] Mailer: They go by many names: possession versus liberty; protection versus spontaneity; novelty versus tradition.

[Q] Playboy: You've been married four times----

[A] Mailer: Heroines, every one.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about marriage?

[A] Mailer: I love marriage, but I don't think I'd love it unless I were a novelist. I love it because it's a curious relationship. It's artificial and yet, on the other hand, it has such primitive roots and territorial rights. A novelist can become absolutely obsessed with marriage. I've never written much about it, but I think it's a gold mine: to write about marriage, to really write about marriage and what really goes on between a man and a woman--the way they kill each other and keep each other alive.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think you may write about it someday?

[A] Mailer: I don't know; I don't know. It's difficult. After all, the marriage you're usually thinking about at the moment is your present marriage, and you can't start writing about that.

[Q] Playboy: Many of your critics accuse you of harboring a good deal of hostility to women. They point to the classic scene in your story The Time of Her Time when the protagonist calls his penis the "avenger" and rapes a girl anally.

[A] Mailer: Let's get something hotsy-totsy. Let's say: takes carnal possession of her posterior territories.

[Q] Playboy: All right. Critics also point to the well-known scene in An American Dream when Rojack deprives a German maid of her orgasm by insisting at the last second on having his orgasm in her rectum instead of her vagina. Critics say that here again is an example of Mailer's deep hostility toward and distrust of women. What do you say about it?

[A] Mailer: I think I've got as much anger against women as anyone I know, but I'm perfectly willing to let the defense rest right here--I don't give a damn--and, you know, I sometimes have as much hostility against women as I've got against men. The reason I wrote about those things twice deliberately was something writers will understand but no critic ever will; it was just to say to the critic: "Fuck you. I wrote about it once; I'll write about it again. What are you going to do about it? Say I'm anally oriented? OK. Say I'm anally oriented. I'll say I'm Cassius Clay. Fuck you."

[Q] Playboy: Some of the same critics have taken you to task for a poem in your Deaths for the Ladies and Other Disasters:So longasyouusea knife,there'ssomeloveleft.

They say this boastfully exploits the episode when you stabbed your second wife. How do you feel about this charge?

[A] Mailer: I don't want to talk about the stabbing anymore. Not anymore. Say the word 18 times and it loses its force. I'll just say--this could be hard to believe--that I was not really thinking about the act or myself at the moment I wrote the poem; I was really thinking about a long conversation I had with a man who stabbed his brother. He had been telling me about it and he had such complexity of feeling for his brother that the poem came: "So long as you use a knife...." My feeling about writing such things is simple: If you're not ruthless about your work, you can't be an artist of interest. Once something crystallizes, you have to be ruthless about presenting it; it doesn't matter who gets hurt, starting with yourself. Your message in the ear of the reader is going to be worth the damage that's done. You've got to be impersonal; you can't look back. If, on the other hand, you go in the other direction and start thinking, "Will writing about this experience hurt me?"--well, then, you're a bad writer, the kind who spends his life humping for The New Yorker. You spend your life hurting other people--not yourself.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Mailer: A sadist can't bear pain, self-examination, anything injurious to the ego. His ego, after all, has to give him sanction to do harm to others.

[Q] Playboy: In Cannibals and Christians, you spoke of the dangers of the womanization of America. Could you expand on that point?

[A] Mailer: The gist of what I said is that women are getting more power because men want them to. Today, a man wants a wife who is a military assistant, a woman who can go out into the world with her husband and help him climb those hills of status.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that a woman's place is in the home?

[A] Mailer: That takes us right back into the technological society. When a woman is in the home today, she's miserable. Our technological society has transformed her home into a minor-league factory with all sorts of plastic and electric services and appliances that keep breaking down constantly--at a far greater rate, be it said, than the clumsiest machines of the 19th Century. That's part of the mystery of our technological society: Nothing really works well. I, of course, put the blame on plastic. The machine bears some umbilical relation to metal, just as a house does to Stone or wood and red wine to meat. Plastic in a machine makes about as much sense as a foam-rubber cunt.

[Q] Playboy: The "technological society" more directly affects--and you would say, oppresses--the middle and upper classes. Is that the reason you've written that the lower classes enjoy a more satisfactory sex life?

[A] Mailer: I think the lower classes probably have more sexual vitality than the upper classes. They have fewer outlets in life. Another reason: They tend to work more with their bodies than with their minds.

[Q] Playboy: But according to Kinsey, the lower economic groups suffer from more sexual rigidity and engage in less sexual experimentation than the upper and middle classes.

[A] Mailer: All such statistics show is that attitude to which people are ready to confess. I don't know how valid such findings are. What we're talking about here is old-fashioned sexual perversion. Members of the upper classes and the more prosperous middle classes tend to be an adornment, an enrichment; the lower class, on the other hand, they looks upon sexual perversion as weakness; they see it in its other aspect. Perversion has two aspects: It is an adornment; it is also a need, and so they see it as a weakness and they despise it. To the lower classes, need is weakness.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean by "perversion"?

[A] Mailer: Whatever it might be--fellatio, cunnilingus, you name it. Lower-class people see it as a weakness in themselves if they desire it. Envision a strong guy who wants to go down on his girl. He thinks he's weak. Of course he's weak. Giving head to your woman is weakness; it's also a good way to get rid of some of your weakness. It's also dangerous because it gives the Devil introduction into the vagina.

[Q] Playboy: The Devil? How so?

[A] Mailer: Oh, the mind's a devil. Didn't you know? And the mind, after all, is connected to the tongue.

[Q] Playboy: You've said that D. H. Lawrence was the first novelist who gave you the idea "that sex could have beauty." Do you continue to admire Lawrence?

[A] Mailer: My objection to Lawrence is that he's sentimental about sex. Sex is not only a divine and beautiful activity; it's also a murderous activity. People kill each other in bed. Some of the greatest crimes ever committed have been committed in bed. And no weapons were used.

[Q] Playboy: About the art of fiction in general, do you agree with critics such as Norman Podhoretz who claim that the novel as an imaginative art is dead because of the recent incorporation of reportage techniques into fiction?

[A] Mailer: Obviously, I don't agree with them. I believe the novel has its own particular resource, which is almost magical. If you write purely and your style's good enough, you can establish a communion between yourself and the reader that can be found in no other art. And this communion can continue for hours, weeks, years. When the novel is dead, then the technological society will probably be totally upon us. You'll need a score card to be able to tell the Communists from the Texans.

[Q] Playboy: Many critics have said that of all the writers of your generation, you seem best equipped to write the fabled Great American Novel. How do you feel about that?

[A] Mailer: Let's assume they're right.

[Q] Playboy: What would it be about?

[A] Mailer: That's something I want to keep to myself.

[Q] Playboy: Several times you've compared your generation of writers with the generation of the 1920s--Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the rest--and you've argued that the older writers were far superior. Do you still believe this?

[A] Mailer: They're doubtless greater; and they're certainly more fascinating as men.

[Q] Playboy: You said that if Hemingway had been a pimply-faced kid instead of the man he was, his books wouldn't have had the audience they commanded. Some critics claim about you that if you were a middle-class, conservative man who wrote novels rather than a brawling, pugnacious, hard-drinking hipster, your books would never have sold as well as they have. What do you feel about your relation to your public image?

[A] Mailer: Hemingway had a clear image, if you will: The work and the man bore a certain resemblance to each other. But my relation to my public personality is more surrealistic than that. People are in an incredible state of confusion about me. So my public personality probably hurts my sales, because Americans like answers, not enigmas. It's precisely the middle-class conservative authors who sell in huge quantities: Herman Wouk, Louis Auchincloss, James Michener. Make your own list.

[Q] Playboy: How do you want to be remembered?

[A] Mailer: The surest way not to be remembered is to talk about the way you want to be.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel good about the future of American fiction?

[A] Mailer: I don't want to predict. I can't even predict my own work.

[Q] Playboy: You've said about your latest book, Why Are We in Vietnam?, that it sometimes displeases you; but at other times, you decide it's one of the ten funniest books written since Huckleberry Finn. To which of your previous works do you feel closest?

[A] Mailer: Probably The Deer Park and An American Dream. And one day a month, I really like Barbary Shore. Whenever I'm depressed, I'm always pleased The Naked and the Dead is around.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you write?

[A] Mailer: Why do I write? You can't beat the hours.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think you'll continue to write political and cultural essays? Some of your critics complain that in An American Dream, for instance, you rehash ideas already expressed in your essays and book reviews and columns. What are your feelings?

[A] Mailer: Everything I write is a card out of the same deck. You can reshuffle them; but in a way, I've been working on one book most of my writing life. Probably since I started with Barbary Shore, certainly with and since The Deer Park, I've been working on one book.

[Q] Playboy: Including the books of essays--Advertisements for Myself, The Presidential Papers and Cannibals and Christians?

[A] Mailer: Yes.

[Q] Playboy: What's the book about?

[A] Mailer: Existentialism. That is to say, the feel of our human condition, which, by the logic of existentialism, is the truth of the human condition. Of course, it takes no mean artistry to get the feel.

[Q] Playboy: At the beginning of our talk, you said you like interviews because they sometimes serve as a psychic house cleaning for your current ideas. Do you feel you've accomplished that here?

[A] Mailer: I hope we haven't had a curettage.

[Q] Playboy: Is there any final statement you'd like to make?

[A] Mailer: Yes. Up the Irish / Down the Feds / Say we sad Irish / Anarchists and Reds. Not bad doggerel, when you realize I learned my Hebrew in Brooklyn. Cheers to the brogue. Let's get a drink.