Albert Goldman's Elvis, which one is obliged to call an investigative biography, begins and ends with an eerie evocation of the mature Presley. First, the house - Graceland. It looks like a brothel or a gangster's triplex: red velour, gilded ta.s.sels, simulated waterfalls, polyurethane finish. Elvis always insisted that everything around him had to be new. 'When I wuz growin' up in Tupelo,' he is quoted as saying, 'I lived with enough f.u.c.kin' antiques to do me for a lifetime.'

On to the master bedroom - black suede walls, crimson carpets and curtains, 81 square feet of bed with mortuary headboard and speckled armrests. To one side is an easel supporting a large photograph of Elvis's mother Gladys; to the other is a sepia-toned portrait of Jesus Christ in his pink nightie. On the bed lies Elvis himself - 'propped up', in Goldman's gallant formulation, 'like a big fat woman recovering from some operation on her reproductive organs.'

Before going to work, Elvis rings his valet and junk-food guru, Hamburger James. After a midnight snack - $ioo worth of Fudgesicles - Elvis consumes a pound of Dixie Cotton bacon, four orders of mash with gravy, plus lots of sauerkraut and crowder peas.

He sleeps in diapers these days, thick towels pinned round his middle. He weighs over 18 stone.

This is a modern biography, so we now follow Elvis from the bedroom to the bathroom. Not that Elvis can get there under his own steam: a bodyguard has to carry him. The bulb-studded sanctum is full of devotional literature, high-powered laxatives, and the King's special 'medication' - i.e., his drugs. Elvis hates drug-addicts; he would like to see them herded into concentration camps. He once had an audience with Nixon, offering himself as a figurehead in the battle against dope. He was stoned at the time. In fact, he is a drug-addict. His doctor must delve between his toes for an unpopped vein.

In his six-door Batmobile Elvis leads the motorcade to Memphis Airport. His private plane, like his house, is a kitsch nightmare of velvet and plastic. At dawn the Lisa Marie (named after Elvis's daughter) lands at Las Vegas. Waiting limos ferry the party to the Imperial Suite of the Hilton International. Elvis is cranked down into sleep. 'Mommy, I have to go to the bathroom!' he tells his girlfriend. 'Mommy will take you.' He sleeps. He is cranked awake. He eats, with a handgun beside his plate.

Bandaged and 'braced' - i.e., corseted - Elvis dons an outfit embroidered with the crowned head of King Tutankhamun and buckles his $10,000 gladiator's belt. He stumbles and mumbles through his act, climaxing with his 'American Trilogy': 'Dixie', 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic', 'All My Trials'. He comes off stage pouring with sweat and screaming for his medication. Soon he is back in his tomb, vowing that never again will he play 'this f.u.c.k'n' Vegas'.

Elvis: What Happened?, published just before Presley's death, was the first expose, cobbled together by a couple of sacked goons. Since then, everyone has blabbed. Well, what did happen? How did Elvis's life, like his voice, turn from energy and innocence into canting, parodic ruin? Goldman's answer is that the whole phenomenon was corrupt and farcical from the beginning. 'There is', he warns, 'absolutely no poignance in this history.'

Elvis's family were hillbillies, 'a deracinated and restless race'. Elvis's father Vernon, 'greedy and stupid', 'a dullard and a donkey', was clearly a fine representative of the breed. Elvis was 'a silly little country boy' who just happened to be able 'to sing like a n.i.g.g.e.r', the 'acne-spotted self-pity' of his early songs making a strong appeal to 'the hysterically self-pitying mood of millions of teenagers'.

Nursing dreams of becoming a new Valentino, Elvis's real ambition was to become a movie star. Soon 'the biggest putz in the history of film-making' was well established as 'one of the ugliest and most repulsive presences on the American screen'. When this bubble burst, he settled for the Vegas routine. The audience was ideal, consisting of 'a couple thousand middle-aged people sated with food and drink'.

Personally Elvis was always 'a momma's boy', a bully, a coward and a fool. His career as 'pervert', 'voyeur1, 'masturbator', and so forth, was predictable as early as 1956, when Goldman pictures him 'thrusting his fat tongue into the mouth of a backstage groupie'. Finally, the 'freak', the 'pig junkie', completes his 'deterioration into homicidal madness'.

It quickly becomes clear - does it not? - that Goldman isn't to be trusted. In his palpable eagerness to explode the Presley Myth, he has erected an anti-myth to replace it - which, in turn, is already being whittled away at by transatlantic commentators. It may indeed be the case that Elvis was no more than a horrible, and horribly uncomplicated, embodiment of American Success; but Elvis leaves us none the wiser.

In biography, displays of such inordinate aggression leave one wondering about the personal problems of the author rather than the subject. I read Elf is under the impression that Goldman was a surly young iconoclast of the Rolling Stone school of New Journalism. On the back flap I am confronted by a middle-aged chipmunk who used to be Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. As should by now be evident, the book is a prodigy of bad writing, excitable, sarcastic and barely literate. It is also as exploitative as the exploiters whom Goldman reviles, and no more tasteful than a Presley pants-suit.

Observer 1981

Diana Trilling at Claremont Avenue

In New York, Diana Trilling is regarded with die suspicious awe customarily reserved for the city's senior literary ladies. Whenever I announced my intention of going along to interview her, people looked at me with trepidation, a new respect, a certain holy dread. I felt I was about to enter the lion's den - or the den of the literary lioness, which is often just as dangerous.

I had tangled with Mrs Trilling before, more than ten years ago, and had my own reasons for fearing her well-known asperity. Mr and Mrs Lionel Trilling were on a visit to London at the time, and, knowing of my admiration for Mr Trilling's work, a common friend had arranged a meeting: tea at the Connaught, the London hotel where all distinguished Americans seem to put up. I remember Lionel as milky-haired, laconic and serene; I remember Diana as dark, foxy and fierce. At one point I made an incautious remark, illiberal in tendency - an undergraduate remark. Mrs Trilling cracked her teacup into its saucer and said: 'Do you really mean that? Then what are we doing here? Why are we sitting here having tea with this person?'

Diana Trilling lives in Claremont Avenue, near Columbia University, where her husband taught: he was the first Jew to gain tenure there, incredible as that now seems. American cities appear to have a habit of surrounding their seats of learning with slums. In the foreword to her first collection of articles, Claremont Essays (1964), Mrs Trilling wrote about the exact sense of urban positioning that Columbia affords. The community is perched on its gra.s.sy hill, a fortress of intellection, with boiling Harlem just down the slope.

On the telephone Mrs Trilling had given me carefully, indeed grimly detailed instructions for the subway. One false move, I gathered, and I would find myself clambering out of a manhole on Duke Ellington Boulevard. In the end I took a cab - through the Upper West Side, along bending Broadway for the lawless Nineties, and up into the beleaguered castle of the University, and Claremont Avenue, a wide clean street with the solid, civic feel of old New York. Punctual to the second, I warily pressed the bell. Now, perhaps, the real perils would begin.

Mrs Trilling received me in her ground-floor apartment. I liked her immediately - actually, I had liked her the first time - and knew , that I was going to enjoy the afternoon. However, I quickly re-identified the kind of unease that a woman like Diana Trilling is always liable to provoke. You have to watch what you say when she's around. I mean this in the best sense. Mrs Trilling is not touchy or sn.o.bbish or over-sensitive; she is just intellectually vigilant, snake-eyed. In her company you are obliged to move up a gear - you must weed out your lazier, sloppier thoughts (like the one that had briefly incensed her in the Connaught). No, she isn't the most soothing of companions; but you end up chastened and braced, and there is much laughter and enlightenment to be had on the way.

The life of the American intellectual is qualitatively different from its British equivalent. In America, intellectuals are public figures (whereas over here they are taken rather less seriously than ordinary citizens - at most, they are licensed loudmouths). The intellectual life therefore has a dimension of political responsibility; the crises of modern liberalism - the race question, McCarthyism, feminism, Vietnam, Israel - are magnified but also taken personally, vitally. Spats between writers are transformed, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, into unshirkable crusades. The Trillings lived this life together and experienced all its triumphs and wounds. Lillian h.e.l.lman, Martha's Vineyard, 1952, 1968, Little Brown, UnAmerican Activities, the New York Review ... it is a ceaseless, swirling litany. These hatchets may look pretty rusty to the outsider, but they will never be buried. And maybe the positions are more fiercely held now that they are held alone.

It is all the more unexpected, then, that Diana Trilling suddenly finds herself the author of a bestseiling book about a tabloid homicide. The murder of Herman Tarnower and the trial of his mistress Jean Harris electrified America in a way that (I suspect) will never be fully comprehensible to the British public. It is hard work trying to dream up a home-grown equivalent of the crime - as if, say, the headmistress of Roedean had done away with Jimmy Saville. Diana Trilling's original t.i.tle, vetoed for legal reasons, was 'A Respectable Murder', which is doubly appropriate. To the public, the murder was all about cla.s.s, and in America cla.s.s tends to shade into race: Mrs Harris was a high-cla.s.s Wasp, 'Hi' Tarnower a vulgar diet doc, a Jewish counter-jumper. And, as a rejected mistress, one spurned for a younger replacement, Mrs Harris's case seemed to dramatise the universal female fear. It wasn't just a respectable murder; it seemed, at first, almost to be a justifiable one.

But the most extraordinary thing about Mrs Harris is its energy. Not until later did I discover Mrs Trilling's true age: I had thought she was ten years younger, and even then I was astonished by the stamina that had gone into the book. Every day Mrs Trilling would drive out to the court-house (before the trial, also, she did a little investigative work in the Westchester suburbs, hampered by bad weather, lack of co-operation, and by her own reluctance to pry into other people's lives). After a day of scandal and/or back-breaking boredom in court, she would drive back to Claremont Avenue, and start to write. 'I was working fifteen hours a day for three-and-a-half months,' says Diana Trilling, who, it transpires, is now in her mid-seventies.

The energy of the book, however, is not only a matter of endurance. After its slowish start, Mrs Harris builds into an intricate compendium of wit, social grasp, clarity of thought and novelistic brio. Diana Trilling's essays and articles were never dull, but here she is revealed as a writer with an infallible eye for the interesting. And now it seems that we can look forward to an extended period of productivity - facilitated, perhaps, by the condition of widowhood. 'When Lionel was alive, we tended to do what he wanted to do. Now there's nothing else to do but work.' Literary widowhood often means a long spell of literary executorship, and Mrs Trilling has duly completed her editing of the twelve-volume Uniform Edition of the Works of Lionel Trilling. She is now engaged on a book about her early life. It is possible, too, that she has in some sense emerged from her husband s shadow, and feels a new freedom and confidence.

'Growing old is hard. Growing old alone is harder,' she said. 'You become more sensitive with your friends. You wonder whether you are being asked out because of pity. There is an increased dependence on routine. I won't leave the bed unmade in the morning. I won't stand by the refrigerator and eat a boiled egg. I want to, but I don't.' She talks of her husband without self-drama but with palpable regret. 'I feel the usual things ... I wish now that I had worshipped him a bit more.'

The apartment in Claremont Avenue is as elegant and well-preserved as its owner. Everywhere there are books, framed photographs, mementoes. 'The individual is best defined by his social geography,' wrote Diana Trilling in We Must March My Darlings (1977). Lionel Trilling wrote about society but normally only in relation to literature, or culture: he was also a critic with certain bold mytholo-gising tendencies, with a love for the exciting idea, the daring construct. 'Yes,' said Diana Trilling, with some self-deprecation, 'I was always the one more interested in the social side, in the here and now.' 'But there aren't many people like you,' I said cautiously. 'You're a clear thinker.' 'That's right. Too clear, perhaps,' said Mrs Trilling.

Observer 1982

Mailer: The Avenger and the b.i.t.c.h

The year was 1955. At thirty-two, Norman Mailer was the celebrated and reviled author of three novels, and a notorious brawler, sage and drunk. By his own admission, he was at this point arrogant, terrified, greedy, spoilt - and galvanised on marijuana.

q. Do you feel that age will mould you into a high-priced please-the-public author?

A. I doubt it, but I also know that exhaustion of the will can come to anyone.

It would be tempting, here in 1981, to pounce on the young Mailer's stoned foreboding. His latest money-spinner, Of Women and Their Elegance, has taken a pummelling from the American press and is due for a torrid time of it over here. With its terrible t.i.tle (that 'OP somehow guaranteeing the vulgarity of the enterprise), its irrelevant photographs and coffee-table packaging, the volume seems to boast its own vulnerability to attack. As you flap through its slippery pages, you find that it is Mailer's second book about Marilyn Monroe, and his third book running about the recently dead and their s.e.x lives (its immediate predecessor was The Executioner's Song, the story of the murderer Gary Gilmore, who demanded death by firing squad in 1977). What happened to the man who has said - loud and often - that he hoped 'to dare a new art of the brave'? Clearly it is time for some revision of Mailer's American dream.

Now, at fifty-seven, Mailer has acc.u.mulated six wives and eight (or maybe nine) children. He is obliged to earn over $400,000 a year to stay abreast of alimony and tuition fees. Last year his summer house was confiscated by the taxmen. He has received, and spent, a $635,000 advance on an unwritten novel. And he is still half a million dollars in debt.

In his three-storey brownstone apartment in Brooklyn Heights, overlooking New York Harbor and the Dunhill lighters of Manhattan, Mailer perched on a stiff-backed chair, and told me to sit on the old velvet sofa. 'I can "t sit on a soft chair. I writhe around 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 G.o.d. 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 s.e.x is great. The f.u.c.king'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 s.e.x 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 b.u.t.ted 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 s.e.x. 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 d.a.m.n 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 Advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 further into the extremities of exhaustion, yearning and terror, and, above all, by his ability to listen intensely to the ordinary voices of America. The novel was impossibly adult: the immaturity was all to come.

It is hard to imagine the kind of freedom that was suddenly Mailer's. After an equivalent success, an English writer might warily give up his job as a schoolmaster, or buy a couple of filing cabinets.

But Mailer had the whole of America to play with. Flattered and lionised, he b.u.mmed around Hollywood failing to write a screenplay, lived it up a good deal, and discovered a further perk of literary fame: 'getting girls I would never otherwise have gotten'. 'I was a node in a new electronic landscape of celebrity, personality and status.' The only trouble was that he had nothing left to write about.

The reception of Mailer's second novel, Barbary Sh.o.r.e (1951), was hysterical too, but the nature of the hysteria had changed. 'It is relatively rare to discover a novel', wrote one of the more temperate reviewers, 'whose obvious intention is to debauch as many readers as possible, mentally, morally, physically and politically.' A murky, paceless tale of spies and subversives, predators and impotents, the new novel had little of the style and control of The Naked and the Dead. The prose gurgles with cliches, tautologies and uneasy mandarinisms. What offended the critics, of course, was the book's supposedly socialist message. What offends the present-day reader is the book's message, period.

The truth is that in the vacuum of success Mailer had fallen prey to the novelist's fatal disease: ideas. His naivete about 'answers', 'the big illumination', 'the secret of everything' persists to this day. An admirer of Malraux and the equally humourless Jean Malaquais, Mailer dubbed Barbary Sh.o.r.e the 'first of the existentialist novels in America' and himself 'a Marxian anarchist' - 'a contradiction in terms, but a not unprofitable contradiction for trying to do some original thinking'. It is all too easy, though not very profitable, to imagine Mailer at this time, sitting around doing lots of original thinking. His thraldom to catchpenny shamanism had begun. Oh well, existentialism (so far as I can gather from Mailer's writing on the topic) means never having to say you're sorry.

Over the next few years Mailer underwent a kind of aesthetic nervous breakdown. The reverse he suffered over Barbary Sh.o.r.e released a primal scream of rage and hurt; it also wrecked his artistic confidence. The resulting combination of Big Ideas and naked desperation proved crucial to Mailer's psychology. In a deep haze of illness, depression and drink, Mailer gouged out The Deer Park (1955). It was turned down by seven publishers.

Against the grain as always, Mailer had this time fallen foul of the obscenity laws. Or so the publishers feared - or so they claimed they feared. Mailer raged against the 'sn.o.bs, snots and fools' of the literary establishment but refused - at first - to tone down his mannered portrait of Hollywood amorality. When the novel was finally accepted Mailer took another look at the page proofs, intending no lawyer's deletions but 'just a few touches for style'.

By this stage Mailer was 'bombed and sapped and charged and stoned with lush, with benny, saggy, Milltown, coffee, and two packs a day'. His artistic nerve began to jangle with his commercial sense. 'I needed a success and I needed it badly ... The Deer Park had d.a.m.n well better make it,' wrote Mailer in a startlingly candid pa.s.sage in Advertis.e.m.e.nts for Myself. Shamefacedly, he started cleaning up some doubtful scenes. He wanted 'a powerful bestseller' but also wanted 'to save the book from being minor'.

Having rendered the book major (whew!), and even more powerful, Mailer waited anxiously for publication. On a mescaline trip, he rewrote the last six lines. Confident for a while, he lost his nerve again and sent out copies of the book to various bigwigs with fawning inscriptions ('if you do not answer,' he wrote to Hemingway, '... then f.u.c.k you, and I will never attempt to communicate with you again.' Hemingway didn't answer). The Deer Park was a 'half success', as indeed was its due, and not the 'breakthrough' for which Norman had pined. As a last gesture, he put together a full-page advertis.e.m.e.nt with choice quotes from the reviews: 'Disgusting. Nasty. Sordid and crummy. Junk.'

'Norman,' a friend said to him at the time. 'You're a writer. You shouldn't be doing all this.' 'You're wrong,' said Mailer. 'This is exactly what I should be doing.'

American success has been doubly unkind to him. Never timid, Mailer accepted his fate - and proceeded to do his growing up in public. 'I was on the edge of many things', he wrote later, 'and I had more than a bit of violence in me.'

Earlier that winter I had gone to see Mailer on the $i-million-doilar set of Ragtime, Miles Forman's rambling film version of the Doctorow novel. Turn-of-the-century New York had been re-created on an acre of Shepperton mud. Nattily dressed, his wig prinked, Mailer was playing the role of the architect Stanford White, and Norris, appropriately, was playing his wife. In the scene they were shooting that morning, White was to make his entrance into Madison Square Garden (whose facade had been reconstructed for the occasion), there to be shot in the head by an enraged cuckold.

The interior murder scene had already been filmed. In the car on the way back to the studios that day, and later over lunch, Mailer elaborated on his existential anxieties about his 'symbolic death' on the screen. 'They put wires, charges and blood packs in my hair. Unpleasant, but that didn't bother me so much as the idea of enacting my death. Then John Lennon was shot, two days before we did the scene. After that I knew which death was for real.'

'Okay, Norman!' the megaphone had bawled on the set that morning. 'Let's do it again!' For the seventh time the jalopy pulled up at the steps of Madison Square Garden. Mr and Mrs White pushed through the waiting newsmen while antique cameras flared and fizzed. Norman got to say his lines. It was the Mailers' last scene on the film, and the mood was genial. When the final take was finished, Forman shouted out: 'Okay! Let's hear it for Norman!' Norman smiled and nodded at the applause of the crew, pleased, braced, unembarra.s.sable to the last.

During the sixties Mailer directed and starred in three films of his own, Wild 90, Outside the Law, and Maidstone, in which he pretends to be, respectively, a mafioso, a cop and a film director. All three were disasters, and much of the money lost was Mailer's own. But still, he hardly needed the big screen by this point: he was doing most of his acting in real life.

So began the years of the Performing Self. Why write it when you can live it? The author was no longer a craven figure hunched over his desk: the Author was a Hero, an Event, a Spectacle.

In the autumn of 1960 Mailer threw a party with his second wife Adele Morales, a Peruvian painter. 'She's an Indian, primitive and elemental,' he liked to boast. Things got a little too elemental that night on the Upper West Side. After several fistfights, and in a frenzy of alcoholic paranoia, Mailer forcibly divided his guests into two opposing groups, those for and against him. Towards dawn he stabbed Adele, nearly fatally. In a subsequent poem which I have been unable to trace, Mailer wrote that 'So long as you use a knife/There's some love left,' or words to that effect. Cheering for Adele, who anyway didn't press charges.

'f.u.c.k you! f.u.c.k you all!' was how Mailer opened his speeches when he campaigned for Mayor of New York in 1969. 'No more traffic.' No more bulls.h.i.t!' It was Mailer's dream to make New York City the fifty-first State in the Union; he wanted the city divided into autonomous units, 'some based on free love'. In The Presidential Papers (1963) Mailer had proposed the following 'existential legislation": states wishing to retain capital punishment should do so by means of public gladiatorial games; cancer researchers should be executed in this way 'if they failed to make progress after two years'. Today Mailer will look you in the eye and say, 'I was sure I was going to win.' John Lindsay won. Mailer came nowhere.

'It seems that people want my ideas,' Mailer had said bewilderedly in mid-campaign. Mailer's ideas: they were coming in a torrent by now. The essays 'Reflections on Hip', 'The White Negro' and 'The Existential Hero' are the keys to how Mailer was regarding himself in those days. Attracted by Hemingway's idea of 'the Good' ('what makes me feel good is the Good') and Lawrence's idea of 'blood' (ditto), Mailer cobbled together a philosophy grounded on drugs and jazz, mighty o.r.g.a.s.ms, frequent fistfights, and doing what he liked all the time. This credo resembles the usual rag-bag of Sixties sophistries, but it was imbued with Mailer's own kind of extremism.

The effect of these musings on his fiction became apparent in An American Dream (1964), a novel which Mailer composed in eight monthly instalments for Esquire. The unprepossessing hero, Rojack, is prefigured in the early fragment 'The Time of Her Time', in which the stud hero, who refers to his organ as 'the avenger', finally brings his girl to her first o.r.g.a.s.m by whispering in her ear (after sodomy) the words, 'You dirty little Jew.' 'That whipped her over' all right.

An American Dream takes this kind of thing a stage further. In brutal summary, Rojack murders his wife, sodomises the German maid, outwits the police, and impregnates the Wasp princess, having beaten up her super-hip black boyfriend. This is the novel's critical redemptive moment, as Rojack feasts on his blonde: - and I said sure to the voice in me, and felt love fly in like some great winged bird, some beating of wings at my back, and felt her will dissolve into tears, and some great sorrow like roses drowned in the salt of the sea came flooding from her womb and ...

In the Evelyn Waugh Letters Mailer is briefly described as 'an American p.o.r.nographer'. For this book, the description holds. It is the prose of a man in a transport, not of s.e.xual excitement so much as the tizzy of false artistry.

Nothing that Mailer writes is without interest, or without a good deal of negligent brilliance, but Why Are We In Vietnam? (1967) walks pretty close to the line. Heavily influenced by William Burroughs, the book consists of zoo pages of disc-jockey jive-talk, loosely recounting a hunting expedition and a macho initiation test. A failure at the time, the novel now seems no more than a marooned topicality. Mailer reached the end of something here. And he has written no fiction for fifteen years.

Like President Carter's favourite poet, James d.i.c.kie, who is reputed to go around the place muttering 'Oh I'm so big. I'm so d.a.m.ned big', Mailer has always seen the novel as a challenge to his masculinity. He refers constantly to the author's 'size', 'vastness', 'stature'. When he writes of writing, his metaphors are always compet.i.tive, s.e.xual or military. In Cannibals and Christians (1966) Mailer salutes the novel as 'the Great b.i.t.c.h in one's life'. a.s.sessing the work of some contemporaries 'who have slept with the b.i.t.c.h', Mailer accuses them all of toadyism, timidity and insufficient 'breadth' or 'weight' - or 'size'. 'You don't catch the b.i.t.c.h that way, buster,' he tells William Styron, 'you got to bring more than a trombone to her boudoir.' The piece ends: 'Can those infantrymen of the arts, the novelists, take us ... into the palace of the b.i.t.c.h where the real secrets are stored?' In other words: can Norman?

For the last fifteen years Mailer has been the most sought-after journalist in America. Following his masterpieces of superheated reportage, The Armies of the Night (1968) and Of a Fire on the Moon (1969), he has played fast and loose with his reputation, and the quality of his work has declined. In 1973 he wrote the notorious Marilyn, surviving a plagiarism suit (settled out of court) and the stink emanating from his claim that Monroe was b.u.mped off by Jack and Bobbie Kennedy. In 1975 he wrote The Fight, an extended waffle on the Ali-Frazier match. Then came The Executioner's Song.

A matter of weeks before the book appeared, Mailer persuaded his publishers to package the Gilmore story as a novel, or rather a 'true-life novel', along the lines of Truman Capote's 'non-fiction novel', In Cold Blood. After the 'factoid' squabble over Marilyn, the fictoid squabble over The Executioner's Song seemed like opportunism disguised as impatience with genre. In fact, the first 300 pages of the book show irreproachable artistry in their re-creation of the locales and loners of middle America; but then Mailer lets the story run away with him, and his reliance on transcripts, tapes and reports finally dishes its artistic claims. Once again, the fatal yearning for monumentality: Norman keeps overplaying his hand with the Great b.i.t.c.h.

'I don't know, maybe it was too long,' he now admits. 'Since I started needing all this money,' he says, and in such a way that you know he has said it before, 'I've written twice as many books as I should have done, and maybe they've only been half as good as they should have been.'

Mailer is a well-liked figure among the New York literati: there is much protective affection for the loud-mouth and tantrum-specialist whom they have indulged for so long. 'Oh, I like Norman,' was the typical response of one Madison Avenue publisher. 'I mean, I wouldn't want to room with him next year ... but he's good to have around.' It seems that every MA in Manhattan has his Mailer story: 'Then he smashed this window ... Then he loafed this guy ... Then he grabbed this bottle ... ' But he is spoken of with the reverence customarily accorded to people who live harder than most of us do.

It is always possible that Mailer's best work is yet to come. Age is currently doing a good job on his infinite variety. Although his writing in the Fifties seemed prescient, Mailer's ideas solidified in the Sixties, despite his attempts to get interested in ecology, graffiti, the Yippies, and what not. He seems well-poised to make some sort of reconciliation with his own limits. Money worries constrain him now; but eventually the wives will remarry, and the kids will all grow up. Then the Avenger might get his piece of the Great American b.i.t.c.h - or, in language more appropriate to his years, Mailer might write the novels that are in him.

In the Belly of the Beast, the book that sprang Jack Henry Abbott from jail, played a key part in putting him back inside. All last week, the State Supreme Court had the carnival atmosphere which New York reserves for its celebrity murder trials. Through a gauntlet of camera lights and superfat security guards strolled writers Jean Malaquais and Norman Mailer. Among the intent voyeurs of the public gallery sat filmstars Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken. Already there was speculation about the film of the book of the trial of the life.

'"It's like cutting hot b.u.t.ter, no resistance at all,'" quoted the prosecutor. '"They always whisper one thing at the end: 'Please'. You leave him in the blood, staring with dead eyes." Did you write that?' Abbott - a jittery figure, terribly thin, a man clearly in a state of intense and permanent confusion about what the world is making of him - gave one of his rare, murky grins. 'It's good, isn't it?' he said.

At the end of the day's hearing, a turbulent press conference was held by Mr Mailer. He said that he hoped Abbott wouldn't get too long a sentence for his latest murder. 'Culture is worth a little risk,' he said. 'Otherwise you have a Fascistic society. I am willing to gamble with certair. elements in society to save this man's talent.' Mailer is willing. But does society feel the same way?

One thing seems clear: the Jack Abbott story will run and run. 'It is a tragedy all around,' Mailer had said. But it is a farce too, an American rodeo of inverted cal!ousness and pretension. Could this happen anywhere else? The world looks on fascinated, rubbing its eyes.

Now thirty-eight, Abbott has been in prison since he was twelve. He was released at eighteen and promptly readmitted for theft. Three years later he murdered a fellow inmate - 'in combat', according to his book. At one point he escaped, robbed a few banks and was recaptured within a month. Abbott is what they call 'State raised'. Eight years ago Abbott started writing letters to Jerzy Kozinski, a correspondence that ended, for the novelist, in alarm and repulsion. 'So stay away, Abbott,' read Kozinski's last letter. 'You have killed a man already - you won't kill a man in me.'

In 1977 Abbott tried his luck with Norman Mailer, then at work on The Executioner's Song. Instantly Mailer felt 'all the awe one knows before a phenomenon'. Extracts from Abbott's letters appeared in the New York Review of Books. Mailer was joined by other literary figures in championing Abbott's cause in submissions to the Utah Board of Correction. Abbott's letters were edited down and Random House made plans to publish. Abbott was duly paroled and established in a halfway house in the Bowery, where he braced himself for literary fame.

It could be argued that literary fame, in New York, has been more than a match for the equilibrium of Norman Mailer. So G.o.d knows what it did to Jack Abbott, a man who had spent half his adult life in solitary confinement. With Mailer, Abbott preceded Dudley Moore on the TV show 'Good Morning, America'. He was photographed by Jill Krementz (Mrs Kurt Vonnegut). He was toasted and praised at literary dinner parties. Then the reviews started to appear: 'One of the most important books of our age__a stunning and original writer__Conrad-like lyrical beauty... awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous; its impact is indelible'.

That last gobbet is from the New York Times Book Review. Twelve hours before the paper hit the stands, however, Abbott had allegedly stabbed a man to death and was on the run. It has emerged at the trial that throughout his few weeks of freedom Abbott was in a highly volatile state - failing, in other words, to adjust to society. Asked to extinguish a cigarette in a museum, he reportedly flicked his b.u.t.t in the guard's face. Told in a department store that it would take ten days to complete an alteration, Abbott started upending clothes displays, looking for scissors to do the job himself. Everyday vexations: but it was a routine spat of this kind that led Abbott to stab a waiter at an all-night cafe.

As Abbott went on the run, his sponsors grew silent. Some suggested that they had wanted simply to encourage a writer rather than unleash a con - as if, wrote one commentator, 'the most they hoped for in writing to the parole board was to provide Abbott with an electric pencil sharpener'. The 'Right', in fact, had a field day. Radical chic, in hiding for over a decade, had taken a peep out of its burrow and been stomped on all over again. Abbott was recaptured, in Louisiana, and the circus resumed. Last Thursday, on his thirty-eighth birthday, Abbott was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter, not murder, a verdict which the family of the deceased regard as 'an outrage'. 'Happy birthday, Jack,' said one of the jurors.

So what is one to make of this mess? First, the book, Belly, represents only a fraction of the original 300-odd letters. Even in its reduced form the book is grotesquely uneven, as well as aggressive and deluded, full of giveaways and triple-thinks.

'I have read all but a very few of the world's cla.s.sics, from prehistoric times up to this day.' Nourished by these bronto-texts, Abbott develops a primitive canvas of the outside world, entirely notional, tendentious and self-reflecting. It is a world-view based on nothing but books and (h must be said) psychosis. Reading Abbott, with his categorical stridency, his hollering italics, is like being drunkenly b.u.t.tonholed by Colin Wilson's Outsider - all night, and with his finger jabbing at your chest. In a way the book is a precise and miserable testimony to the effects of lifelong isolation and terror. The real mystery is how it got confused with meaningful polemic, let alone with literature.

It was Mailer, initially, who did the confusing. His introduction to the book (not to mention his other cavortings) would be shameful and ridiculous even if Abbott were now a well-established poet and humanitarian. In his introduction Mailer reaffirms that society should seek to cultivate the potential of its violent citizens. We shouldn't bother, he says, about the threat they pose 'to the suburbs'. What are the 'suburbs' doing in this argument? Abbott, anyway, posed his threat on Second Avenue and Fifth, and perhaps will again if Mailer's priorities are honoured.

There are several wishful misapprehensions on offer here: that a 'creative individual' can't be evil; that writers, too, are outsiders, unheeded prophets; that life is a prison in the first place, and that the incorrigible criminal is forged only by contact with the criminal system, a system which gives distress to all well-informed Americans. Which comes first: the Beast, or the man in its Belly?

There have been rumours that it wasn't Mailer and Co. who sprang Abbott from jail: it was the Feds. After a violent strike-beating operation in Marion Penitentiary in April 1980, a broken Abbott co-operated widi the prison authorities. Informers don't live long in the Pen, so it may have been a handy coincidence when Mailer's letters testified that the snitch happened to be a genius too.

In an article commissioned and rejected by the New York Times Abbott claimed that 'the Press has helped the Government to make it finally impossible for me to survive in prison'. In the piece, Abbott presents himself as the cla.s.sic Kierkegaardian poet-martyr, transforming pain into music. To Mailer he is a victim, an existential hero. The sympathies of the public, of tabloid America, are rightly with the murdered boy - who was also, apparently (as if this case needs any more irony), a writer of promise.

Up there on the stand Abbott seemed tremulous, distracted, half-way between laughter and teats. His reactions to the prosecutor's questions fizzed with indignation, with terrible impatience. It is said that the State-raised convict fears society as intensely as the ordinary man fears prison. Jack Abbott looks as if he has never seen much difference between the two.

Postscript It is absolutely consistent that Mailer should have presided over the publication, in 1985, of the most exhaustive character a.s.sa.s.sination in the history of letters: Mailer: His Life and Times, by Peter Manso. And it is ironical that the only episode in which Mailer fails to gratify rock-bottom expectation is die episode involving Jack Henry Abbott.