Tough Guy by Richard Bradford

Author:Richard Bradford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448218165
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

This is terrifyingly convincing, particularly his private redefinition of sanity as exploring ‘areas of experience’ that others are ‘afraid of’. Presumably this included his assumption that attempted murder was within his authorial gift.

The magistrate, Reuben Levy, stated that ‘Your recent history indicates that you cannot distinguish fiction from reality’. Levy, we must assume, was referring only to recent events, but if we take into account Mailer’s continuous attempts over the previous decade to turn what others saw as reality into his own vision of a utopia of orgasmic violence, then his comment is crisply apt. Mailer spent the subsequent seventeen days in Bellevue Hospital, under detention along with other suspected criminals. While there he made notes on, among other things, his conversations with ‘Fred W’, who had cut the throat of his lover with a broken beer bottle and confessed in detail to the police in return for a pack of cigarettes and a pint of sherry. Mailer probably thought he was mixing with those who would prosper in his mayoral nirvana. He remained confident that he would continue with his campaign following his release from Bellevue.

In his absence Adele refused to make a complaint against him to the police, despite having stated that he had stabbed her, and when Mailer faced a grand jury on 30 January 1961 she again refused to sign a letter corroborating potential charges. Instead, she declared that she and her husband were ‘perfectly happy together’. On 9 March, after several inconclusive court procedures, Mailer pleaded guilty to felonious assault and was placed on probation. On 13 November he received a three-year suspended sentence. Ironically, the sentencing took place a week after the mayoral election. Mailer had dropped out shortly before pleading guilty in March.

In 1961 the recommended sentence for attempted murder was fifteen years minimum, extending to twenty-five years at the discretion of the court. Mailer was treated generously, partly because those who witnessed or were aware of the events of 19 November offered vague or conflicting accounts of what occurred. His guilty plea, and the irrefutable fact that his victim was almost fatally injured, seemed, in the eyes of the sentencing judge, to merit a penalty roughly equal to that routinely issued to first-offence burglars. Exemption by literary entitlement perhaps.

During the early months of 1961 the Mailers tried to repair their marriage. He was grateful to Adele for refusing to press charges, and she stated later that the trauma suffered by their daughters from the press coverage could be healed by them being reunited as a family. Also, she was convinced that stabbing was a reasonable price to pay for being the wife of a genius, as she would later make clear in The Last Party.

In early 1961, between the numerous court appearances, Gore Vidal invited the couple to Edgewater, his estate on the Hudson River, along with Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Mary McCarthy, Richard Rovere and others from the cultural hierarchy. Ostensibly this was a show of solidarity, but in truth Vidal had arranged the party as an exercise in schadenfreude.

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