Mailer's writing memoirs

BOOKMARK

"He lived at a certain distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself..."

James Joyce: A Painful Case

Norman Mailer quotes this as an epigraph to his latest book, The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing (Random House paperback, $10.95), a grand summing up "" the book was released on his eightieth birthday last year "" of this Grand Old Man of American Letters, assessing his place in the literary pantheon with little of the braggadocio which has become Mailer's trademark.

In his Preface with Three Warnings and One Apology, Mailer tells us the book is "about writing, its perils, joys, vicissitudes, its loneliness, its celebrity if you are lucky and not so lucky in just that way... It speaks of the problems of craft and plot, characters, style, third person, first person, the special psychology of the writer."

It is a tour de force of a life devoted wholly to writing, its ups and downs, its agonies and ecstasies that every writer goes through in a precarious career before he finally reaches home.

This is a big book in the sense that it provides Mailer's elaborate theorising on writing, ageing ("as you grow old you always measure your chances against your physical stamina") technology and what the future holds in an age when technology takes all.

"The notion that what you had put into a book is going to have a powerful effect is a notion that's harder and harder to maintain. Part of the ability to keep writing over the years comes down to living with the expectation of disappointment. It's exactly the opposite of capitalism. In capitalism you want your business to succeed, and to the degree it does your energy increases, and you go out and buy an even bigger business. In writing it's exactly the opposite. You just want to keep the store going. You're not going to do as well this year as last year probably, but nonetheless let's keep the store going."

Mailer has divided the book into two parts and within this framework gives his views on just about everything on the art of writing and the world of books; past, present and future.

The two parts are Lit Biz and Genre and within them discusses questions of style, real life versus plot life, instinct and influence, mind and body, the unconscious, evil and judgement, social vision, being and nothingness, and so on. There are nuggets of advice in every section "" in fact in every paragraph "" that anyone who is breaking ground would do well to take to heart.

"Being a novelist, I want to know every world. I would never close myself off to a subject unless it's truly repulsive to me. While one can never take one's imperviousness to corruption for granted, it is still important to have some idea of how the world works. What ruins most writers of talent is that they don't get enough experience, so their novels tend to develop a certain paranoid perfection. That is never as good as the rough edge of reality. (Franz Kafka immaculately excepted!) For example, how much of the history that is made around us is conspiracy, how much is simple fuckups. You have to know the world to get some idea of that."

Or, "It is not advisable for a novelist, once he is successful, to live in an upper-class social milieu for long. Since it is a world of rigid rules, you cannot be yourself. There's a marvellous built-in reflection in such society. It goes: If you are completely one of us, then you are not very interesting." In fact, one of the commandments for all writers should be to keep out of the cocktail circuit of the Bold and the Beautiful.

One could go on and on because there are gems on every page. Perhaps the best 'quotable quotes' of the lot is in the last section, Giants, where Mailer discusses some of the great novelists of all times "" Tolstoy, Dostoevesky, Mark Twain, D.H.Lawrence, Hemingway, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett "" and many more. For anyone interested in the art of writing and literature as a whole, this is the Paris Review series rolled into one.