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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator and this week my guest is the academic Richard Bradford,

whose new book is Tough Guy, The Life of Norman Mailer. Richard, welcome.

Now, this is a book which, let's say, doesn't start from a position of adoration of Norman

Mahler as a literary figure. I've just picked out a couple of phrases. You described one thing as highbrow idiocy

at its worst, another chaotic mixture of coprophilia and manichy and gibberish, elsewhere

hilariously terrible, and saps our will to remain awake. Was he just no good at all?

He wasn't no good at all. His debut novel, The Naked and the Dead,

was regarded, I think, quite rightly as one of the best novels of the Second World War.

Because it was excellent documentary realism when he served in the Pacific, he took notes endlessly when he was talking to fellow

servicemen so he could get all the accents and idioms right. And when he wrote to his first wife,

there were genuine letters of love and so on and so on. But what he was also doing was making

notes about where he'd been and about the landscape and where he was passing through, knowing that when he got back, he'd have a fairly straightforward and immediate record. And that's how he put the novel together. And it did result in an excellent book. And it made him. He went from nowhere to fame and pretty considerable

wealth. But there, there afer, in terms of pure fiction, he went downwards. But already, as you

describe it, you know, he was treading that kind of borderline between fiction and reportage in,

well, at least ostensibly, was a straight novel, wasn't he?

Yeah.

He more or less gave up.

Well, he went back to it later, but following his two next novels,

he didn't write any fiction until probably the 1970s and 80s,

but in the interim, he decided to try out this blend of

realism, reporting on events that could be authenticated by looking at other media and so on

...