THE NOVEL I'M WRITING AT THE moment was inspired, very loosely, by the death of Saul Bellow. Entitled, provisionally, The Death of Eli Gold, it first came about because I noticed that, when Bellow died, at the age of 89, all the eulogies about him signed off with the notice that present at his deathbed were his wife and daughter; what went unremarked were the ages of his wife — mid-40s — and his daughter — 6.

In my novel, Eli Gold, an imaginary greatest living writer, is dying in hospital, and his death (and recollected life) is seen from the point of view of his young child by his present (fifth) marriage, his middle-aged son by his third marriage, and his first wife, watching the news reports on television in her care home in London. If it is about anything, it is the licence our culture grants to men who have been rubber-stamped in public as Great to behave badly in private — specifically to their women and, to a lesser extent, their children.

It is in no way based on Bellow's actual life, about which I know very little; and, anyway, if I was going to explore that theme through fictionalising the life of any writer, it has become clear to me, this week, that it should be Norman Mailer.

It's not just women, of course, that were the locus of Mailer's torrential behaviour — in what appears to have been a lifelong quest to prove his manhood, Mailer punched Gore Vidal (not necessarily a bad thing — anyone who comes out with a lot of ultra-smart witticisms should occasionally be punched in the face), assaulted a man who intimated that his dog was gay (it was a poodle: I suggest Norman should have known the risks when he left the pet shop), endorsed the release from prison of a violent criminal who immediately murdered a waiter, and ran for Mayor of New York in 1969 on the ticket that the best way to ease urban tension in the city was to stage medieval jousting tournaments in Central Park. But women undoubtedly bore the brunt of it.

Norman Mailer

Pugnacious novelist whose turbulent private life sometimes overshadowed his substantial literary achievements

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Married six times (it never fails to amaze me how many women are happy to shack up with women-hating men) to the “low, sloppy beasts” — his description of the gender to Orson Welles — he stabbed the second, Adeles Morales, at a party, nearly fatally. “A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul,” he announced in a 1972 speech to the University of California. Like many significant male creative figures of the past century — Picasso, D.H. Lawrence, Jean-Luc Godard, Eugene O'Neill, Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, etc, etc — his work, and his life, were fuelled by an anger towards (and its usual corollary, fascinated mythologising of) women. For Mailer, as for a lot of these men, authenticity was about masculinity — to be an artist meant to be a rebel, to be difficult and raging and driven, and that energy, although often directed at class, or convention, or artistic orthodoxy, always, via the association of marriage and monogamy with imprisonment, ended up also directed at women.

This has no relevance, for me, as to whether or not Mailer was a great writer; the endemic sexism in his work is as much a product of his time as the anti-Semitism in A Merchant of Venice is of Shakespeare's, and besides, the main mistake that people make about art is the notion that it has somehow to be good or nice or socially responsible. But I am interested in how Mailer's placement in the canon plays into the posthumous judgment on his life. In other words: it seems to me, reading the obits, that Mailer — partly because of his cross-generic half-journalist, half-novelist ouevre — has been doomed to not-quite-first-rank status, writer-wise. This seems to give more room for the moralists and the puritans to have a go at his life — as if, the greater the artist, the more slack can be cut when the time comes to assess just how much of a bastard he was.

If you compare Mailer with, say, Picasso — whose astonishing array of sexual and ego-driven selfishnesses has just been charted in the second volume of John Richardson's exhaustive biography — a sense remains that, at the Spaniard's stellar level, all the bad behaviour was in some way necessary for his art. Mailer hasn't quite got into that camp, and for that, his life may always overshadow his work.

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