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WRITING HIS OWN TICKET? Mailer campaigning during his 1969 bid to become mayor of NYC
Norman Mailer: Bob Peterson//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Did you enjoy writing in the first-person voice of the devil? It seems like you did.
You want to have fun with your narrator. You know, writers are like actors. Warren Beatty has a remark I love. I saw him in Bugsy, and afterward I was kidding him a little. I said, ''Aren't you concerned your friends might be afraid of you now?'' because he had a violence in Bugsy that was really startling. And he said, ''No, because most of my friends are actors, and what we know is that you only need 5 percent of someone in yourself to be able to play it.'' And Beatty grinned and said, ''Of course, if you have 75 percent it's a lot easier. But 5's all you need.'' And I thought, that's all you need in novel writing. Five percent is enough to create a character. So all right, if you will: 5 percent of me is the devil.

Not 75?
No. I won't accept any more than 5.

Have you ever felt the impression of an otherworldly force in your own life, God or the devil?
Yes, but it's not something I'd talk about.

Didn't you have a strange experience like that when you were writing your 1967 novel, Why Are We in Vietnam?
Oh, I have had this feeling, which I've talked about a little bit, that there are, in a Grecian sense, gods out there — lesser gods, demigods — and that they may assign us books. In other words, I sometimes think that certain novels come out of our experience, and are books that we write as a combination of a cleansing process and a creative process; they really come out of ourselves. And there are other books that are just handed to us. And I've had fun with that notion, that the gods say, ''Who do we give this story to?''

And that's what happened on Why Are We in Vietnam?
It was an odd book, because I wrote it in about three months. I'd go in there every day and this mad voice would just come out of me, and I loved it. I loved the mad voice, it was just someone speaking through me, and I felt as if I was more of a radio station than a writer. So that was fun. It was fun because it was not a hard book to write. But I mean, that just happened to be the way it felt. Whether there's any truth to that, that's another matter.

And you've felt that push in your private life — someone speaking through you to do things?
Y-y-yes. [Pause] But they were minor episodes. And they're not worth getting into. I spoke about it once in an interview. I was in a diner, late at night, about midnight, out in Brooklyn, having a doughnut and coffee, and I heard God's voice, and God said, ''Leave without paying.'' And I did. And my whole thing was, I can't, I can't. Because I'd been brought up to be absolutely trustworthy about dollars and cents, and this voice said, ''Just get out of here, stop carrying on, don't pay.'' And so I did it. And what I could hear was the mockery of God: ''You wanna change the world, and you can't even cheat on a nickel and a dime?''

That's interesting.
It's minor, but there was something so august about the voice, and so contemptuous of my little middle-class-clinging to honesty and reliability.

And you never heard that voice again?
No.

And you never heard the darker voice, the voice of the devil?
Not when I've been sober. You do things when you're drunk that you find it hard to explain.

It doesn't mean the devil's talking to you.
Well. [Pause] I don't want to get into it. I've done a few things that might've been inspired by dark forces.

Do you drink much anymore?
No.

Do you drink at all?
Yeah, I love drink. I always used to wonder why Hemingway didn't drink after dinner, and now I discovered why I don't. I have a drink before dinner, or two drinks, and that's it. If I have three glasses of wine in an evening, that's a lot.

Does that wreck you now?
That doesn't hurt me at all. I go to bed. I rarely feel booze in me when I go to bed.

You don't have the old desire for it?
I have no hunger for booze. I enjoy that first drink very much, more than I ever did. At the end of a day's work, to have that drink, it's terrific.

Back to the book. You've said this is a book you needed to write for 50 years. Why did you wait so long?
Well, it isn't that I had this book in my head for 50 years. What I had was a preoccupation with Hitler for 75 years, ever since I was 9 years old. I started this book four years ago or whatever, so say for 70 years I was obsessed with Adolf Hitler. Now, not obsessed in the sense that I woke up every morning thinking of Hitler, but he's always been on my mind, as someone I could not comprehend.

Are you planning only one more book on Hitler? I talked to your archivist, J. Michael Lennon, and he suggested you might write Hitler's story as a trilogy.
Well, Mike's an optimist. [Laughs] No, I've probably made remarks to the effect that the next novel, if I can do it, would carry me to about 1935, and then maybe there'd be a third novel. But I'm not sure that's the way to do it. I don't know that I'm going to be around long enough, because to do it that way I'd need another 15 years, and I'm not going to have 15 years to write. So I gotta figure out what I can do in three or four years that makes sense.

You really think you only have three or four more years?
I'm not saying I have three or four more years to live. I'm thinking that I have three or four more years to write at the level I'm writing at. I don't want to start writing if I'm losing it, and just writing in the same mediocre fashion. Then I don't think I should write.

What's your verdict on your own writing ability in your 80s? You still got it?
I have it, but I'm not gonna brag about it. I'm aware that this next book's going to be an uphill slog. Certainly my memory for events is not what it used to be. My command of vocabulary is pretty good, but it's one of the reasons I do crossword puzzles all the time, as calisthenics for my brain.

I've read that you're wary of being a novelist in his 80s.
How many novelists are in their 80s? There are not too many of us. And how good are the last works they've done? And I don't know any novelists in their 90s. Not one. Poets, maybe! Stanley Kunitz lived to be 100.

It's easier to write a poem than a novel, though.
Well, you just gotta be good for an hour or two! [Laughs] The poets will kill me for that one!

NEXT PAGE: Mailer on getting tough with Philip Roth and John Updike, and aging into ''cool''


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