91.3

“Mailer and Vidal: The Big Schmooze.” Interview by Carole Mallory. Esquire, May, 105–106, 108–112. Less of an interview than a Mailer-Gore Vidal conversation, this piece moves rapidly and humorously over a lot of ground. It is focused as much on the end of the American century as it is on purely literary matters. They discuss LaRochefoucauld, Herman Melville, J.F.K. (at some length), L.B.J., George Bush, John Cheever, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Saddam Hussein and Eugene McCarthy. Mailer states, “I’m not saying that I write as well as Melville, but my style was absolutely shaped by his love of long, rolling sentences that contain inversions and reverses and paradoxes and ironies and exclamation points and dashes.” See 77.4–77.9, 85.6.