Hounding Mailer beyond the grave

A few months ago, I suggested a magazine piece called "Everybody Hates Peter," about writer Peter Manso, who divides his time between the Outer Cape and Berkeley, Calif. I didn't offer to write it. I rather like Peter. He's smart, and he writes in a sharp and energetic style. I thought his most recent book, "Ptown: Art, Sex and Money on the Outer Cape," was hilarious and its thesis - "that the nation's most legendary arts colony had been taken over by increasingly wealthy 'separatist' gays" - was refreshingly beyond the pale.

Manso doesn't worry too much about being invited back to parties; I wish there were more journalists like him. He made a whole new boatload of enemies during the trial of Christopher McCowen, convicted of the murder of fashion writer Christa Worthington.

Manso told anyone who would listen that the defendant was a victim of Cape Cod racism. He believes that his grandstanding prompted "an insane district attorney" - that would be Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O'Keefe - to bust him on felony gun possession charges, which have yet to be resolved.

"Peter isn't a journalist - let me say that straight out," comments Hamilton Kahn, the former editor of the Provincetown Banner, who has known Manso since the 1970s. "He doesn't observe conventional standards of ethics and fairness, and he's not particularly interested in the truth. He is an angry and troubled guy."

One thing that has long troubled Manso is his relationship with the now-deceased Norman Mailer. Manso was once Mailer's acolyte, and the two men shared a home in Provincetown in the early 1980s. With Mailer's permission, Manso compiled the readable oral history, "Mailer: His Life and Times," which was reissued last week.

Manso feels that Mailer unfairly trashed him in a letter to the Provincetown Banner that was picked up by New York magazine. Mailer accused him of jimmying many of the quotations in the oral history. The theatrical, two-time Pulitzer winner called his antagonist "poison drip" Manso, and twisted the knife for good measure: "P.D. Manso is looking for gold in the desert of his arid inner life, where lies and distortions are the only cactus juice to keep him going."

With Mailer snugly in the grave, Manso is firing back. His new afterword to the oral biography "Alas, Poor Norman" is a masterpiece of invective, innuendo, and character assassination. Manso sustains the tension and the tone for a good seven pages. Unfortunately the essay is 44 pages long.

Manso dials the feud back to the fall of 1983, when he and Mailer, with female partners, were cohabiting a grand waterfront house on Provincetown's Commercial Street. "The potential of our sharing a house was . . . irresistibly Boswellian," Manso writes. "Norman was my mentor, my godhead, really."

Paradise is not all it is cracked up to be. The great writer has a habit of breaking wind. His children are rambunctious. Dirty dishes stack up in the sink. It's all pretty jejune, although the fact that Roy Cohn, now probably best known for his Mephistophelian role in "Angels in America," was on the property adds a bit of spice. By 1985, the oral history has been published, the two men are on the outs, and Manso is seeking other digs.

"Alas, Poor Norman" devotes about nine pages to manuscript quibbles from the 1985 book - skip these - before Manso settles down to his main theme: how Mailer's talent was hijacked by an unholy trinity of his widow Norris, his authorized biographer Michael Lennon, and his frequent collaborator Lawrence Schiller.

This is not news. Everyone knows that the financial pressures of Mailer's Rabelaisian lifestyle, replete with aggrieved ex-wives and needy children, forced him to perform an extraordinary amount of scut work. Yes, Schiller masterminded a lot of it, like "American Tragedy," a TV movie about the O.J. Simpson trial. And while it's true that Lennon wasn't a very distinguished choice as Mailer's official biographer, Manso's attacks on him come off as pure spite: That job should be mine.

Call me old-fashioned, but I'm taken aback by Manso's repeated slurs of Mailer's widow, Norris. He details her bouts with cancer, which don't seem relevant here, then he mocks "this woman from the sticks" for having worked as a model, and in a pickle factory. Come on. "She is treated most gallantly," Manso said to me. "I spent a great deal of time considering all my comments about all the family members."

Dead men can't fight back, Peter. But if they could, I think this one would knock you on your tail.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com