A few years later I had Mailer as a guest on Firing Line.(The Week ...)(Norman Mailer)

A few years later I had Mailer as a guest on Firing Line. "Seeing Buckley and Mailer on the tube yesterday I can't get over it," one critic wrote in the New York Avatar, which was briefly the court circular of the underground press. "The greatest representation of the two extremes I've seen in a long time. Conservative meets liberal, right meets left, before meets after. Buckley didn't know what the f*** Mailer was talking about, it just jammed his computer, he even had to resort to childish insults to try and keep up his end." ("Norman Mailer decocts matters of the first philosophical magnitude from an examination of his own ordure, and I am not talking about his books," I had said.)

"Mailer's steady stream of reject material," Mel Lyman went on, "was just too much for Buckley's computer to take, it started smoking. Computers don't get mad, they just smoke when they're overloaded. Buckley is a computer, Mailer is a man. A man can only be categorized and computerized to a certain extent, the greater part of him lies out of definition. Greatness can be recognized only. That is why Buckley went all to pieces when Mailer spoke of the 'greatness' he saw in Castro. Buckley could only see the un-American activities accredited to the man, Castro. He could only see him as far as he could define his actions. Mailer could look right at him, like a child, and see a great force, an inner strength, a fearlessness that had ...