Free The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America by Martin Amis Page A

a lot. Hurts my back,' he said with an apologetic wince.
    The battered but comfortable apartment feels like a ship. A pulley system leads to the upper floors. Mailer used to have a crow's-nest office at the top; the once-vigorous author would clamber up a rope to begin the day's work. Now he goes to a rented office down the street, trudging back for lunch. Children of alarmingly various ages had gathered for their supper in the dining area. Mailer's sixth wife, the dark-eyed model and actress Norris Church ('she's half my age and twice my height'), sat imposingly near by, reading a buxom magazine.
    His face is more delicate and less pugnacious than you would expect, the body more rounded, dapper and diminutive. The tangled hair is white but plentiful, the frequent smile knowing but unreserved. Despite his long history of exhibitionism, he no longer enjoys giving interviews. You can sense him wondering how much of his charm he will need to disclose.
    Mailer watched wistfully as I feasted on my drink. 'It's the terrible price you have .to pay,' he said, referring to his own eight-month abstinence. 'The day just wasn't long enough, and I have to work so hard now, to make the money. My nerves have been pretty well encrusted by booze, thank God. It's okay. It just means there's nothing to look forward to at the end of the day.’
    'Thanks a lot,' said Norris. 'What about me?’
    'No, the sex is great. The fucking's great. I just miss it, that's all.’
    This reminded me of another sacrifice Mailer has been forced to make. He has always argued that any act of sex is invalid, corrupt, soul-endangering, etc., if the chance of conception has been ruled out. 'I've got eight kids,' said Mailer. 'I can't afford to believe that any more — My hopes and expectations have changed. I no longer feel prepared to go to the wall for any big ideas.’
    'Have you mellowed', I asked cautiously,'- or what?’
    'Not really. Let's say I've adjusted to circumstances. At last.’
    Well, it has been a long haul. This is the man - and here headlines and half-impressions flash past - who stabbed his wife, who ran for mayor, who butted Gore Vidal, who 'won the election for Kennedy', who went on TV in his boxing trunks, who told novelist Alan Lelchuck that when he got through with him 'there'd be nothing left but a hank of hair and some fillings'.
    This is the Existential Hero, the Philosopher of Hip, the Chauvinist Pig, the Psychic Investigator, the Prisoner of Sex. For thirty years Mailer has been the cosseted superbrat of American letters. It has taken him quite a while to grow up. But the process has made for a fascinating spettacle.
    'Early success — that was the worst damn thing that could have happened to me.' A bright Jewish boy from Brooklyn, a Harvard graduate, Norman went off to fight as a rifleman in the Philippines. Showing that mixture of recklessness and calculation which marks his entire career, Mailer had the express intention of gathering material for the Great American Novel of the Second World War. A brave but clumsy soldier, he survived his few skirmishes, came back to Brooklyn, and wrote The Naked and the Dead. He was twenty-four.
    Before publication Mailer left for France with his first wife Beatrice. Calling in at the American Express office in Nice, Mailer was handed what amounted to a swag bag of money and fame. American express! Number-one bestseller, sobbing reviews, forty translation rights sold, Norman, get back here! That 'meant farewell', Mailer would write in Advertisements for Myself (1959), 'to an average man's experience'.
    Early acclaim won't harm a writer if he has the strength, or the cynicism, not to believe in that acclaim. But Norman lapped it up, and is perhaps only now recovering from the deception. True, he was very young, the success was very great — and the book was very good. Reading The Naked and the Dead today, one is astounded by Mailer's precocious sense of human variety, by the way he goes a step