Life writ large in capital letters

Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust, and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old mouldering Hemingway, might come to read.''

By the time these words appeared in Advertisements For Myself, a book whose title parenthesised its own excesses, American critics and readers had already acclaimed him as a prodigy with The Naked and The Dead; they had assaulted him for the ''monolithic flawless badness'' of Barbary Shore; seven publishers had rejected The Deer Park on grounds of obscenity. His 1957 essay, The White Negro, was understood to be a defence of criminality. His hangovers were notorious.

So Mailer set out to inform the American literary establishment that if it wanted simultaneously to exalt and humiliate him, he would go and do the job better himself. Advertisements For Myself un-sheathed sword after sword, first to slash out at the world with, and then for Mailer to fall on. In it he howled out his desire to write the impossible great book, to be president even. What he now calls ''The Rage'' had begun.

Both his life and writing were bordering on the psychotic. After stabbing his second wife, Adele, in 1961 Mailer was sent, on arraignment, to Bellevue psychiatric hospital. There he refused to succumb to analysis. This fact he explains as a need to fend off any encroachment on his creative impulses, to allow writing to win out over living.

There is no expectation, in speaking to him, of entering into intimate or argumentative territory. But you don't get the feeling of missing anything important, either. By the age of 74 the merging of man and writer is pretty well complete. It is hard to think of another English-speaking artist who can so authentically be him-self and a cross-generational spokesman at the same time.

''Any number of people can write well,'' he growls affably, ''but to be a professional writer who goes on for decade after decade - what you've gotta have is an absolute ability to live with opposites in yourself, extreme opposites in yourself, and there's a tendency in psycho- analysis to reduce those opposites, to let living be a little more frictionless. And that's exactly what can finish you

as a writer.''

I meet him the day after he has read out to a large audience in Glasgow's new Waterstone's bookshop his own obituary, written, of course, by himself. It is a fabulous burlesque of his life, peopled by dozens of wives and tribes of children; of his liabilities outweighing his assets by $8m and critics still baying for his blood. Andy Warhol is allowed the final word: ''I always thought Norman kept a low profile, that's what I liked about him.''

All references to his ad-vanced years speak of someone who has got to know himself well, even if not all the component parts make complete sense together. He talks about how every move you make when you're old has to be existential. It is a word he uses often, and with a very part-

icular inflection. For him it

has the meaning, I think, of a vivid awareness of the presence of something. He des-cribes the Jesus he has created in his latest novel, The Gospel According to the Son, as ''an existential man; a man living on the very edge of his abilities and wits''.

The idea that by writing a novel about Christ, written in the first person, Mailer might be creating yet another advert for himself set off exactly the kind of press he was expecting. '''Oh God, here comes that megalomaniac Mailer again - first he thinks he's Picasso and now he thinks he's the Messiah.'''

Yet it wasn't loud enough or, despite the first-person narrative, outrageous enough to create a convincing controversy. What he describes as the ''aesthetic given'' of his retelling of the gospels was its brevity and this in itself marks an element of self-control which is both more modest, and more typical of Mailer's commitment to his subject matter, than many commentators in the US were ready to admit.

AND it comes at the

end of a 15-year period which has seen two genuinely vast books about America come to light: Harlot's Ghost - a 1285-page novelisation of the CIA - and Oswald's Tale - a 900-page biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as his biography of Picasso's early life. For a man in his

latter years Mailer is certainly still working at the edge of his abilities and wits.

Writing about Jesus, he says, was in many ways a

continuation of his voyage through the darkness of modern history. The end of the Cold War has only renewed his horror at the forces of corporate capitalism. ''I was furious the way we celebrated it in America - we were carrying

on like we'd won a major war and all we did was bankrupt them. Russia was through long before Ronald Reagan came into office. It was disgusting. It was like a big firm wrecking a smaller one. There was a very shrewd, cold, ugly confidence in what we were doing.''

''So Jesus becomes, if you will, a weapon against the vice of global capitalism. This is

the way Jesus and Marx

come together; they're both saying that greed will leach out every other human value, that money is indeed the source of all evil.''

Even if The Gospel According to the Son isn't the book that Marx and Proust and Hemingway would all read, it is one without which it would be harder to see how near Mailer has come to achieving his ambitions. He still intends to do the second half of Harlot's Ghost at another 600 pages or so. He may be the last of the

big writers, the writers who believed that the novel was the ultimate modern form and that fulfilment of it required most of a life's energies.

Meanwhile he doesn't see America accepting him yet. (He points out that Allen Ginsberg has been almost deified since his death despite being reviled while alive.) So he appreciates a trip to Britain where he describes his reception as ''agreeable'', being ''just some bloke who's written some books and might have something interesting to say''.

Although he does remember the 1962 Edinburgh Book Festival, in which Hugh MacDiarmid and Alexander Trocchi fought it out, as being like no other literary festival he has been to: ''Medievally dark in its conflicts. And the drinking . . . I did things which I could find no explanation for 48 hours later.''

He finds it funny to hear about last year's Booker Prize argument in which critics were accused of neglecting home-grown talent and having too much reverence for American writers. ''If the English writers are mad that Americans are being treated too well, then they've got a right to be mad.

''I remember years ago when I used to resent how well British writers were treated in America and it's still true to a degree - English writers don't receive the

same bile that we do. And maybe that's as it should be. Courtesy to visitors.''