It's definitely an analogy he can't leave alone. 'Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer has to be ready to take chances with his readers' lives' - which I take to mean that his perceptions will be so spot on, people are injured in the psyche by his prose. Mailer worked in a mental hospital in the summer of 1942; and what with those bravely sustained hammer blows and getting so deeply smitten through the helm, is he a bit certifiable himself? There's something insane about the manner of his bigness, his sheer scale, his determination to show off and carry on (in his books) as the God of All Creation. I'm reminded of Richard Burton's boozing - as if he was ashamed to be an actor. It wasn't manly, so he kept having to prove his machismo in other ways. Or maybe it's simply that Mailer is only five feet tall, like Picasso, his avowed idol.
As a manual for would-be novelists, 'people who wish to write, in college or in graduate school', The Spooky Art is a magnificent failure. Mailer has no tricks or short cuts to impart - and good for him. 'I never knew where the next day's work was coming from,' he confesses. 'I had absolutely no conscious control of it.' Reflecting, meditating, musing, and declaring his thoughts, he concedes that 'I am not sure it is possible to describe how it feels to write a novel'. Quite so.
Where The Spooky Art brilliantly succeeds is in its implicit message that to be a writer you have to be a reader and observer. Mailer's disquisitions on the mighty bones of ancient men, Hemingway, Miller, Lawrence and Twain; his appreciation of Brando; his anachronistic idea of a journalist's existence - the 'addiction, adrenaline, anecdote-shopping, deadlines, dread, cigar smoke, lung cancer' - all this is exhilarating.
Mailer is bracing, packed with courage and brutality, unremitting guilts and cranky gusto. He's kept it going. He's full of admiration, enthusiasm, salutary loathings. He's full of himself in an interesting way, and enters his Age of Venerability very far from faint and pale.
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