Books: The Impish Iconoclast at 60

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This controversy is only beginning, and Mailer does not seem eager to join it. He says that he finished his long investigation with the hope that his readers might be "stimulated and refreshed about America, to the point where they can see the country on their own." But the author finds his new labors no easier than they have ever been: "I've always had a hard time writing novels." A secretary types up each day's output for revision the next morning. From this spartan setting and routine, he ventures out one or two evenings a week with Norris to elegant dinner parties. Their companions on these occasions include a cross section of the rich, famous and accomplished: Gloria Vanderbilt, Oscar de la Renta, William S. Paley. The younger Mailer's well-documented interest in John F. Kennedy (they shared a year at Harvard and a passion for the presidency) has been returned by members of the clan, including Teddy, who now see and regularly socialize with the author. One of the ongoing tensions in Mailer's writings has been his inability to decide whether he should repudiate or infiltrate the Establishment. These days, he dines with it.

That could change, of course. Every inference about his future is philosophically up for grabs. "I'm an existentialist," he says, in an apartment filled with high-bourgeois comforts (books, records, paintings, comfortable furniture), surrounded by the evidence of loved ones, links to the past and hostages to fortune. He thrives on expectation. Retrospection calls up the ghosts of doubts. He wonders, when pressed to reminisce, whether he mismanaged his career, whether the success of The Naked and the Dead (1948), his first published book, turned his head toward a course at variance with his own "bent." He would not or could not pursue the slow apprenticeships of Hemingway and Faulkner. He no longer ranks himself above or takes roundhouse swings at his contemporaries. He is much more likely to praise other work than belabor it. He speaks wistfully about John Updike's orderly and largely private career: "He has great wisdom as a writer. He sets his marks properly. He just improves from book to book. On the one hand, there is nothing wild about him, and on the other there is nothing overcalculating. He has a natural sense of progression."

Despite his enormous investment of time in Ancient Evenings, its importance to him as proof that he can still deliver a punch in the late rounds of a long bout, Mailer sometimes sounds almost diffident about the novel. It too is in the past now and cannot be changed. He compares writing to loving: "If this book isn't as good as I think it is, then I've been married to the wrong woman for eleven years." He adds: "Some people will say it is a wonderful book, and other people will say, 'I can't get through it,' and that is the reception any good book gets. That happens with every book, and the returns are never final. I feel at peace about this in one funny way, which is, well, I did my best on it." And again: "What's the worst that people who are not high on me can say? 'He has talent, but he hasn't fully expressed it.' That's not such a bad place to be."