An appreciation by Alan Taylor

NORMAN Mailer, who died yesterday at the age of 84, was to fiction what Muhammad Ali was to boxing. Not that he ever floated like a butterfly or stung like a bee. Rather, Mailer was like a bull elephant in a bed of roses. Once he arm-wrestled with Ali, who feigned pain as Mailer tried to best him. "You oughta pay attention," Ali told his entourage, "cause this is the writer champ like I'm the fighter champ. This guy makes a million a book, so listen to him."

Mailer was then (the early 1960s) at the height of his fame, having started with a splash in 1948 with The Naked And The Dead, one of the first - if not the best - American novels to emerge from a writer who served in the second world war.

His military career was varied. He served in the Pacific initially in regimental intelligence, then as an aerial photograph expert, a rifleman in a reconnaissance platoon, and finally as a cook. Discharged in 1946, he spent a year and a half writing The Naked And The Dead, which was published to instant acclaim and phenomenal popular success, making Mailer an overnight celebrity. Upon its UK release, the publisher felt it necessary "no longer to quote the book in detail, nor to quote the immense figures of its sales in the USA".

Thus Mailer's course was determined at the outset. His was the generation of Joseph Heller and Saul Bellow, John Updike and Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth. Their self-appointed task was to write the Great American Novel, ignoring the claims not only of Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald but the more legitimate ones of Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton and Henry James.

In Mailer's case, this resulted in a tsunami of print, some of it more readable and durable than others. In the beginning war was his theme, but as the years passed Mailer himself seemed to be what most fascinated him. The title of his 1959 book Advertisements For Myself was just that, a ragbag of pieces much of which Mailer's own blurb writer conceded was "mediocre".

It included an advertisement for his second novel, Barbary Shore (1951), reviews of which demonstrated just how quickly critics can fall out of love with someone with whom they were once besotted. Moronic, mindless, sordid, crummy, disgusting, junk - these were just a few of the cowpats slung in Mailer's direction.

All of which bolstered his considerable ego and sense of embattlement. He was always, it seemed, in one scrap or another. Ahead of an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show he head-butted Vidal, who responded by punching him in the stomach. A bad review, it was later revealed, was at the heart of this feud, which ran for decades. In New York, that melting pot of competitiveness and envy, Mailer's success and his liking for publicity made him countless enemies, including gays and feminists. The word macho could have been invented for him.

Certainly, his relationships with women tended towards the volcanic. He was married six times, his last wife, Norris, who survives him, being the longest-lasting. Among his previous wives was Lady Jeanne Campbell, the daughter of the Duke of Argyll, and the granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook. She was Mailer's third wife. His second, Adele Morales, he stabbed after a fist-fight.

The reason for that, as for so many of Mailer's travails with women, was his congenital infidelity. "On a global level," one of his female friends once commented, "the hostility Norman created was enormous." The fact is that he was struggling as a writer, making him rely more on drink and drugs, which served only to induce violent mood swings.

But still the books came. Mailer was like a punch-drunk scrapper who refused to throw in the towel, always hoping that in the next round he could turn the fight in his favour. A short, larger-than-life man, he took whatever was thrown at him and climbed back into the ring. He was a brawler, albeit one with charisma.

When not writing novels, he wrote about people he believed were on a par with himself: Marilyn Monroe, JFK, Ali, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jesus. With Mailer, fiction and reality often blurred, which admitted him to the ranks of the New Journalists. His output alone was enough to keep reviewers full-time employed, but this did not endear him to many of them. Of Ancient Evenings (1983), a sprawling novel set in the Egypt of the pharaohs, Harold Bloom, perhaps the most eminent contemporary American literary critic, wrote: "Subscribers to the Literary Guild a book club will find in it more than enough humbuggery and bumbuggery to give them their money's worth." Not surprisingly, Mailer was not amused.

He was born in New Jersey in 1923, into a Jewish family with origins in Russia. Mailer was the anglicised reading of their name, given to Mailer's grandparents when they emigrated. "Nobody knows what the name was originally," he once said. "Mailorovski? Mailorovich? Yeh, something out of Dostoevsky! Norman Isaacovich Mailorovski!" He was brought up in Brooklyn and educated at Harvard, where he began to write short stories.

When famous, he took Vidal's advice and never missed an opportunity to appear on television. Nor was he ever shy of showing his face in public. Unlike many fellow Americans, he liked to travel and first appeared in Edinburgh in 1962 at the notorious Writers' Conference, which was organised by the publisher John Calder.

His last public appearance in person was in 2000 at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Last year he was interviewed live via a satellite link at the Book Festival by Andrew O'Hagan. He looked frail but remained combative, his blue eyes still twinkling, if a little bleary.

Once asked what can ruin a first-rate writer, he answered from the heart: "Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice "

Say what you like about Norman Mailer, but no-one could ever have accused him of that.