If you haven't read it yet, don't miss Roger Kimball's devastating obit for Norman Mailer, who as Woody Allen once quipped, donated his ego to science long ago. Read the whole thing, but for me, this passage really stood out:

A few years before, at a party he threw to announce his mayoral candidacy on the “Existentialist” ticket, Mailer got drunk and stabbed his wife Adele (number two), nearly killing her. (In 1969, Mailer ran for mayor again, this time on the “Secessionist” ticket, which included proposals that New York City become the fifty-first state and that disputes among young criminals be settled by jousting tournaments in Central Park.) Adele declined to press charges, and so Mailer escaped this outrage with a fortnight in Bellevue for observation.

Mailer’s obsession with violence against women seems to have had a long gestation. Carl Rollyson opens his biography of Mailer with the story of John Maloney, a drunkard and a friend of Mailer and William Styron. In 1954, Maloney stabbed his mistress and fled. He was later jailed but released when charges were dropped. Styron recalled that at the time Mailer said to him: “God, I wish I had the courage to stab a woman like that. That was a real gutsy act.” That tells one all one needs to know about Norman Mailer’s idea of “courage.”

What is perhaps most alarming about Mailer’s violence against his wife was that it seems to have titillated more than it repelled his circle of friends. In any event it brought very little condemnation. “Among ‘uptown intellectuals,’” Irving Howe wrote “there was this feeling of shock and dismay, and I don’t remember anyone judging him. The feeling was that he’d been driven to this by compulsiveness, by madness. He was seen as a victim.” Readers who wonder how stabbing his wife could make Mailer a “victim”—and who ask themselves, further, what Mailer’s being a victim would then make Adele—clearly do not have what it takes to be an “uptown intellectual.”

And then add to it the drug-fueled primitive William Burroughs, who played William Tell with his common-law wife Joan Vollmer in 1951, with disastrous results, as his Wikipedia biography notes:

In 1951, Burroughs shot and killed Vollmer in a drunken game of "William Tell" at a party above the American-owned Bounty Bar in Mexico City. He spent 13 days in jail before his brother came to Mexico City and distributed funds to Mexican lawyers and officials, which allowed Burroughs to be released on bail while he awaited trial for the killing, which was ruled culpable homicide. Vollmer’s daughter, Julie Adams, went to live with her grandmother, and William S. Burroughs, Jr. went to St. Louis to live with his grandparents. Burroughs reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent Mexican attorney worked to resolve the case. According to James Grauerholz two witnesses had agreed to testify that the gun had gone off accidentally while he was checking to see if it was loaded, and the ballistics experts were bribed to support this story. Nevertheless, the trial was continuously delayed and Burroughs began to write what would eventually become the short novel Queer while awaiting his trial. However, when his attorney fled Mexico after his own legal problems involving a car accident and altercation with the son of a government official, Burroughs decided, according to Ted Morgan, to "skip" and return to the United States. He was convicted in absentia of homicide and sentenced to two years, which was suspended.

Birth of a writer

Original Ace Double edition of Junkie (a.k.a. Junky) from 1953, credited to "William Lee". This was Burroughs's first novel publication. Burroughs later said that shooting Vollmer was a pivotal event in his life, and one which instigated his writing:

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death... I live with the constant threat of possession, for control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invador [sic], the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

O.J. Simpson is currently spending the second half of his life in a well-deserved career purgatory, his reputation presumably ruined permanently. I have no idea of how aware he is of Mailer and Burroughs, but I wonder what he would think if knew how easy it was for them to get off virtually scott free from such bloody acts in the early days of what would ultimately become long and well-rewarded careers.