Mailer and me

New York

Three months before the Americans committed their greatest foreign policy blunder ever, I had gone up to Cape Cod to interview Norman Mailer. Towards the end of his life, Norman called himself a left-conservative, and went as far as to agree that losing one’s culture through immigration was not a good thing. But he remained adamant about the evils of American corporations. He blamed them for making America an uglier place to live in since the second world war, a country full of ‘50-storey high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways that homogenise our landscapes, and plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant’s tactile senses’. He told me he was opposed to the notion of an American empire because of the all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness of the most powerful Americans corporations. ‘There are no cathedrals left for the poor â” only 16-storey urban-renewal housing projects that sit on the soul like jail.