Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal — a literary feud and kinship like no other

One of the most bitter public feuds in the history of American letters raged between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal from the early 1970s all the way into the mid-eighties, at which point they finally reconciled. It was conducted in print and also in person during various joint television appearances, most spectacularly on an episode of the Dick Cavett talk show in 1971.

Away from the public eye, their feud most memorably manifested at a party in 1977, when Mailer punched Vidal in the face over the latter’s scathing review of Mailer’s newly published book on feminism, The Prisoner of Sex. Legend has it that afterwards Vidal looked at his assailant and said, “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer.”

This was a clash of bona fide literary titans, though both, if honest, would grudgingly have admitted a sneaking regard for the other even when their acrimony was at its most intense — what with the role of creative whetstone each played in the other’s work.

Of the two the work of Norman Mailer, like whisky, is a taste acquired; his prose layered to such a fine point and poise that it could be no other. I still recall reading his work for the first time and feeling daunted at being confronted with one of the finest examples in the English language of what he himself once described…