02.2

“Machismo Isn’t that Easy to Wear.” Article-interview by Oliver Burkeman. Guardian, 5 February. Mailer, who was about to turn 79 when interviewed in Provincetown, said “Machismo is that faint zephyr I can still barely hear on the other side of the hill.” Mailer discusses his books, the stabbing of his wife Adele—“you really might say the worst elements of it have been digested over the years—by me, I mean. I can’t speak for Adele. It’s our children who suffered with it more than we did.” Brookeman makes a number of errors in the piece, all of which could have been eliminated by some fact-checking. For example, he says that Mailer stabbed his wife with a pair of scissors. He can’t be criticized, however, for another error, which he picked up from Mary Dearborn’s biography (92.2). She states that Mailer beat up a sailor for questioning the heterosexuality of his dog. In fact, Mailer had both of his eyes gouged after being attacked by two men when walking his poodle in the fall of 1956, and had to spend a week in a darkened room. See 13.2, 211–212.