Army of One

A panel discussion followed the screening. Among the panelists was British documentarian Dick Fontaine, who'd made the film. At one point, a young woman rose to confess her puzzlement at Mailer the movie star.

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"He seems a little crazy," she said.

Fontaine didn't bother to dispute this characterization. He just offered advice on tracking down Mailer the real.

"In order to see him at all clearly," Fontaine said, "you have to read this book."

* * *

Yes, you do. If you want to understand the prodigious, prodigal talent we've just lost, you have to read "The Armies of the Night."

Never mind that Mailer wrote more than two dozen other books, some lauded, others panned. Never mind that in the great American attention-grabbing game, his larger-than-lifeness came to rival his writing. This was a man, as Yale ubercritic Harold Bloom once observed, whose life and work couldn't possibly be separated.

"Truly he is his own supreme fiction," Bloom wrote. "He is the author of 'Norman Mailer,' a lengthy, discontinuous, and perhaps canonical fiction."

When Bloom wrote that, he was thinking of Mailer's 1959 collection "Advertisements for Myself." But "The Armies of the Night" comprises the most revealing portrait of Mailer that its author or anyone else has ever drawn.

Its power stems, as Mailer archivist and biographer J. Michael Lennon noted at Georgetown, from a crucial artistic choice.