Norman Mailer: His Last Rolling Stone Interview

Do you use the Internet yourself?

I don't even know how to turn on a computer.

So you-

I use it indirectly. My wife uses one, and my assistant, so I get the benefits without having to pay the price.

Do you feel like becoming a literary celebrity was a distraction for you?

Oh, yeah, a distraction, a bonus, a trap. It caricatured your life.

What bothered you the most, as far as the wrong notions people had about you?

Nothing has bothered me more than the idea that I hate women. I grew up in a world that was full of women, and they were lovely women, and I loved women. I was foolish enough, as I grew older, to make a few sneering remarks about women. I made a couple of totally ridiculous remarks over the years, and of course what you had was a bunch of - not all of the women in the women's revolution were ugly. Gloria Steinem, for example, was damn good-looking. But there were an awful lot of uglies in that revolution, and they hated men, and they were looking for despised objects, and I became a despised object.

Saying there were a lot of ugly people in the women's revolution isn't going to endear you to feminists.

In the early stages, in the early stages! No longer. They have now become part of the general population.

You were on assignment with Hunter S. Thompson in Zaire in 1974 to cover the Muhammad Ali - George Foreman fight. What was that like?

Zaire was fascinating. There were a great many of us writers there who loved prizefights and were absolutely, completely attached to the idea of the fight. Then Hunter came in, and it was so typical of Hunter: Here was the convocation of experts, and his experience throughout most of his life was that convocations of experts were concentrations of bullshit. He figured he was going to ace the whole goddamn thing. He had a basic knowledge that he wasn't going to learn more about prizefights in a week or two than the rest of us had already known for years, and so he had to make an end run around us. And what he decided to do was to see the fight with Mobutu, who was the dictator of Zaire. He made a real effort to get together with Mobutu - and failed.

I saw him on the plane home, and there he was, full of good spirit and knocking down a great many beers in a row. I remember that in terms of his immense adaptability - he'd take huge risks, and if they blew up on him, so what? There was always another risk to take, and he move on. But that was probably one of the least successful ventures he went on.

Did you follow his writing?

[Fear and Loathing in] Las Vegas is - I wouldn't say it's my favorite, but it's a hell of a book. Everything he did, in a way, is a hell of a book. He broke so many rules that I would get dizzy trying to evaluate him. I didn't always approve of the rules he was breaking, since I was much more of an established writer than he was, but his daring always appealed to me. And he's one of those people who you could read a page of his work and be turned on by it, and you can't say that about too many writers. It's a rare page of Hunter's that won't turn you on.

What did you make of the baby boomers' belated embrace of the "greatest generation"?

[Laughs] I don't think we ever saw ourselves that way at all. It's cute. It has nothing to do with reality. The reality is we groused, we pissed, we moaned, we were furious. We just pissed and moaned right through the war. The idea of the greatest generation, it was a low appeal to our vanity. I don't know what it was to younger people. But I think the smarter ones just said, "Oh, more bullshit."