Life Sentences

For all the reams of copy in which he has probed his own psyche, Mailer has never written about the stabbing. He never felt ready: "If you can't do it so it enlarges not only your own focus, but the focus of others, you're better off not writing about it."

Something similar, he felt, was true of Grass. He had waited until he was ready for his confession. In his case the moment finally came, and he has now produced a masterpiece. The extract in the New Yorker, Mailer said, was "certainly the best thing" in the magazine for a decade.

Whether the focus of others has been enlarged is less certain. Grass never made the obvious comment to his baying interviewers, although he intimated it to me, and it was clearly in his mind: Stop being so righteously sure that you would always know how to act morally, even in a democracy where you won't be killed for protesting. It's only now, hundreds of billions of dollars and uncounted deaths later, that the American public thinks the Iraq War was a bad idea.

At the reception, Grass greeted some admirers and gave me his take on the evening ("Always the same questions!"). Then, with a copy of Onion in hand, he ambled over to Mailer, who was in a wheelchair. Grass began to inscribe the book to him.

With Mailer's handsome praise for Grass still echoing in my ears, I expected something that would mark the moment as historic. Heller is dead, Vonnegut is dead. But here were the last two great novelists of World War II, in the same room for probably the last time.

I peered over Grass's shoulder, hoping for something inspired, on the level of James Jones inscribing From Here to Eternity to Mailer, "my most feared friend, my dearest rival."

Alas, nothing like that here. Grass He wrote that the book was for Norman Mailer and then, shunning all emotion, merely signed his name.

David Stretifeld is a business reporter for the Los Angeles Times. This piece will appear in his work in progress, "Mit Romanschriftstellern Leben" ("Living with Novelists").