Read an exclusive extract from Mailer's final book that begins with his thoughts on the creator’s place in history

The first problem with this “uncommon” conversation is that its main elements are so commonplace. The last time I spoke to Norman Mailer on the telephone he was bawling at me in the carrying tones of the hard-of-hearing about his 1997 novel The Gospel According to the Son. “Jesus, Christopher,” he yelled, “you have no idea what a real revolutionary this guy from Nazareth really was.”

One has been hearing this sort of thing for years, originally from the now-defunct “liberation theology” school and most recently in a dense pamphlet from Terry Eagleton. And now here comes a load more of it, elicited by the patient Mailer scholar Michael Lennon:

“Q: You said that dogs have souls.

A: Yes.

Q: Then I assume that both sides have enlisted them. What about the other animals? Are you ready to say that some are on God’s side? Are the eagles and the doves? The vultures and the snakes.

A: To enter these matters is equal to philosophical free fall.”

I’ll say it is. (One is tempted to say that it’s equivalent to barking.) But more interesting is what Mailer goes on to add: “For instance, my belief in God and the Devil comes, to a good extent, from the fact that the majority of people, through all of recorded time, have believed in both evil spirits and good ones and, finally, in a god and a devil accompanied by angels and demons. If the majority has such beliefs, one does well to keep some respect for such notions.”

Here the absorbing question — apart from that odd shift from the upper to the lower case — is: did it take religion to get Mailer, of all people, to yearn to blend in with the vast majority? (Lennon’s next question, however, occurs as if nothing had happened. “Do you relate any of your ideas to modern concepts of disease?” he blandly inquires.)

When people exclaim “My God”, it is, in fact, often a highly personal deity (personal to them, I mean) that they are evoking. Individuals create gods in their own image. Mailer, of course, would not be behindhand in the business of confecting idiosyncratic gods to suit his own requirements. He is in character in taking the chance to point this out early on, and in a highly Mailerish way, too: “I can hear the obvious rejoinder: ‘There’s Norman Mailer, an artist of dubious high rank looking to give himself honour, nobility and importance by speaking of God as an artist.’ I’m perfectly aware that that accusation is there to be brought in. All I say here may indeed be no more than a projection of my own egotistical preferences.”

Oh, come on Norman, who is going to believe a thing like that? (Actually, the word around certain parts of Brooklyn and Provincetown had been that Mailer had finally succumbed this time, and really did think he was God after all.)

He is best on, of all subjects, the matter of heaven and hell. As he usefully points out, moments of ecstasy or perfection in our lives are almost by definition brief and transitory, “whereas we can be in hell for months, even years; we can live in towering depression. Hell, therefore, is much more available to human beings as a set of stages”.

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