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For those who condemn Mailer for being an ass: Yes, he could be an ass, and yet he was as honest as he could be about his own asinine side. His outrageous argument about feminism, people often forget, was born of his explicitly announced fear of the irrelevance of men, which of course doesn't excuse his rage and hate, but was, whatever else, a stand that he knew wouldn't stand in the long run. And he put himself on the line his entire life, which few of our current writers do. I don't think anyone else could have produced a work like The Executioner's Song, and that was precisely because Mailer had gone to the excessive before, and was wise enough by then to rein it in. If that alone was all he had done, his place in American letters would be secure. But he also captured the lost soul of this country in Armies of the Night, and -- barely mentioned by most obits -- Miami and the Siege of Chicago. What more do the small people want of him?
Thomas L. Dumm
