00.11

“Tough Guys Don’t Twitch.” Article by Sebastian Smee. Panorama (Complimentary magazine of Ansett Australia Airline), August, 24–29. Account of the joint appearance of Mailer and Martin Amis at a New Yorker literary festival in a Manhattan synagogue, hosted by editor David Remnick. Amis begins: “When I read Mailer as a young man, I thought: ‘This guy’s trying to influence me.’ Like every writer of my generation, I’ve had to toil with the unstoppable and unignorable energy of Norman Mailer.” After Amis reads a short story, Mailer is introduced as “the American Balzac” by Remnick, and then reads from his essay “Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots” (77.7).