Mr Kimball’s largely right and if he has read Mailer more than me it’s that I could stomach so much less than him.

But rewarding Mailer with wealth and fame are the people whose exposure to ‘life’ was through the window of that one cab they took from Washington Sq. to E. 76th St. some 30 years ago. Those who ‘recognize’ and admire the ‘authenticity’ of Mailer’s ‘rebellion’, the ones quite blind to his narcissistic, neurotic, disjointed, bombastic nonsense as that of the self-indulgent, self-obsessed Vidal, Roth and others. The same people who would send Sean Penn on a 10 day trip to the Congo after the Cannes film festival and breathlessly await his take on African society, or think a 800 page tome is always 4 times more brilliant than a 200 pager. The part of American society that simultaneously celebrates the disgusting violence of its cinema, its TV screens and so much of its music, because the two, you see, go together.

Miles Davis took to speaking like a hoodlum to cover up being a well-off dentist’s son, which was supposed to reflect his ‘pain’ and far from quiet ‘suffering’, but at least he could play a lyrical trumpet and whereas Wynton Marsalis cuts out the bullshit and limits himself to simply being generous and brilliant.

Mr Mailer was the Hugo Chavez of American letters, while not dumb deliberately cleverly stupid. Having suffered very little he also frequently snapped under the weight of his own inherent dishonesty and utter inability to express true compassion and wisdom.