Dear Mr. Kimball: This is remarkable. Mailer has been dead for less than 12 hours, and you’ve produced a 5300 word bombardment, complete with no fewer than 7 extended quotations and many more shorter one, covering his entire career. Fess up: how much of this had been written before Mailer died, awiting the day when it could be fired, in the face of numerous hosannas?

I agree with you that Mailer was a dreadful fraud, the more so because unlike Hemingway, none of his prose works has the impact that Hemingway’s 1925-1940 work did. It was not in Henry James’s phrase “The Real Thing,” though maybe it was in the Coca-Cola sense. Why did it make such a splash then? Personality, nothing more. Mailer’s life is best seen as one long bit of performance art, amusing in that so many were fooled for so long, depressing in that the virtues of persistence (“Never give in!” as the poster of Winston Churchill tells us) were hijacked to serve perversion. Not for Mailer the dribs and drabs of Joseph Heller, but always a flood of hymns to glorious Me. It would have been instructive had Mailer ever really been knocked down. Why oh why didn’t Adele press charges? If Norm had done five years in Sing Sing, complete with that buggery he was always roaring for, we might have seen a genuine metemorphosis in the manner of Albert Speer’s writing, looking back, flinching perhaps, but looking back at the monster he once was, and asking, How could I have done that?

Sincerely yours,
Gregory Koster