有时我认为我的工作可能最终可以看出，因为一些文学同价（明显减少了规模大幅减少）到毕加索。我的副，我的力量是开始。通常我开始良好 - 这只是我对整理似乎没什么兴趣。似乎足以启动一块，远远足以瞥见可能是什么可能性和限制，然后继续前进。这对这一事件接近我们时间的离散脾气。

This interview was an experiment. Unfinished one obviously. As an attempt to breach an opening into The Psychology of the Orgy, it has a few charms. It may even be possible to write a good book this way; such a book would be a novel. I can think of nothing very much like it, except perhaps for Gide’sc, but the difference is most particular. Inc, Gide stepped aside from his Self, and appeared nominally as André Gide-the-Interviewer speaking to some young talented homosexual artist, a man not unlike the hero ofThe Immoralist。He thus divided his dialogue between two Gides: a young, conventional, severe, most well-mannered and rather agitated young prig, (the ''I'' ofc) and the subject, a saturnine, scientifically articulated, rather sinister (in the proper tone of the period) man of talent.

In this fragment—The First Day’s Interview—the encounter is less narcissistic. The subject isa诺曼·梅勒,疲惫的,愤世嫉俗的,现在哲学ly turned hipster of middle years; the interviewer is a young man of a sort the author was never very close to. The vector of the dialogue is therefore opposite toc。在那本书中,身边的出现在传统的隋t and tries to take a trip across the room into himself. He is hoping to seduce his readers. On the contrary, in this piece printed here, the author in full panoply is pretending to travel back to society in order to seduce the brain of the young critic he never was. One might call it a Counter-Diabolism to Gide’s method, and be not at all presumptuous—if one managed, small matter, to finish the book.

INTERVIEWER: Is this going to be an important book?

MAILER: Perhaps my most important book.

INT.: Why?

邮寄者：因为它的主题。

int。：你会谈论谋杀案。

邮件：以及其他一些东西。

int .:如果我可能猜到你的主题的普遍存在......

邮寄者：请做。

INT.: Well, I imagine you’ll have something to say about suicide. And perversion?

MAILER: Yes.

INT.: And cancer of course.

MAILER: One shouldn’t be flippant about cancer.

INT.: I get the impression that often you are.

MAILER: It’s only because I have not been ready to explain what was behind the remark.

INT.: Whereas now you will.

MAILER: A more or less formal attempt will be made.

INT.: I hope so. At any rate let me repeat the list: Murder, suicide, perversion, cancer; the orgy?

MAILER: Yes.

int .:将被调用The Psychology of the Orgy?

MAILER: Perhaps.

INT.: The orgy. That calls to mind some of your declarations about the orgasm.

邮件：我不喜欢那个词。

int .:你几乎让它成为谈论它的客厅游戏。

MAILER: If I did, I'm sorry.

int。：你必须知道你在做什么。

邮件：这就是为什么我很抱歉。我这样做是为了吸引对自己的关注。现在我付出了代价。

INT.: You seem to think you can get away with anything if you tell the truth about yourself. The fact of the matter is that I for one would like to like you. I like your work.(Pause)As a matter of fact I have to admit I like it more today than I did when it came out.

MAILER: Yes.

INT.: But I don’t like your aggressiveness. Why can’t you let the work speak for itself. Why all these ...

MAILER: Stunts?

INT.: Precisely. Why must you attract attention to yourself?

MAILER: I’m weary of that now. But at the time I felt as if I were sick, and attention given to me by others was my fastest cure.

INT.: Did it work that way?

MAILER: I don’t know. One never knows. I did succeed in getting attention, and everyone takes me more seriously today, but I must wonder if I haven’t lost something.

INT.: What might that be?

MAILER: My will to work. It all seems less desperate today. The need to get the work out, I mean.

INT.: I should think so. The rules for literary conduct are the effective essence, after all, of the experience of a good many writers in the past. You break too many rules. I know that people critical of your ideas often advance the argument that you have insufficient respect for the culture of the past.

邮奖者：这是一种说法，“不足以尊重过去的过去的经验。”

INT.: I should think so.

邮寄者：我必须同意。这是一个缺乏，我得到的老年人，我越想出我的才华 - 如此 - 这缺乏这种缺乏。

INT.: “Such as it is.” You become positively modest.

MAILER: Allow me a convention or two. I would like some of the people who detest my work, and can’t bear me, to go a little of the way into this book.

INT.: This interview.

MAILER: This interview. Modesty helps. Modesty is a lubricant for unpleasant intrusions.

int .:在性交中。

MAILER: Let's not get into difficulties right away.

INT.: All right. Let’s not. You asked me here as a literary referee to help you keep close to your subject. You said you needed that.

MAILER: I do. My mind is as weak as the mind of an old man. It wanders. It dissipates. I cannot finish everything I like to finish. And this subject is too large to wander about in alone.

int .:谋杀和自杀。癌症和狂欢。我应该这么认为。因此，你想要的存在，作为助产士。

MAILER: I think better when I’m talking to someone. That’s the first symptom of a writer who’s losing his talent. Writing after all is one of the sublimations of onanism. As one gets away from such vices, one loses one’s talent.

INT.: How quickly you sweep over complexities.

MAILER: But that is why I want an interview. I have no patience left for quiet exposition. In conversation you can put writing and onanism in a phrase. People know what you’re talking about or they don’t. In an essay you must obey formal concerns which I have not the enthusiasm to obey any longer.

INT.: But you cannot do an important work unless you submit to one or another formal discipline. We just agreed on that.

MAILER: I contradict myself already. Except I don’t really. It’s not a matter of what I would like to do. It’s reduced right now to do what I can do. I’ve tried to command a sustained essay on this subject—I can’t seem to get over the first few pages. My style immediately becomes tiresome. It takes on the empty sonorous tones of the kind of writers whose work I despise because they write authoritatively without a full spectrum of experience. They do not know enough about their subject to write a book. Which fits my condition. So my style becomes as bad as theirs.