Nonplussed, with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his suit, Mailer was led into a Volkswagen camper that drove him to an army truck filled with other protestors, but none of his marching comrades were present, no Lowell or Macdonald. The plan had been for everyone to get arrested, and make news. Had they copped out at the last minute?
Mailer and his vanmates were next corralled onto a yellow school bus, which brought them to a post office that would be used as a makeshift holding pen for the protestors. At one point, an unusually rabid protestor started hurling horrid epithets in Mailer’s direction, yelling “You Jew bastard” repeatedly, to which Mailer dished it right back, with a few “dirty Krauts” thrown in for good measure. If he was going to offer himself as a prize prisoner on the altar of justice, he was damn sure going to defend himself with both fists cocked.
Most of the detainees were processed through quickly, with small fines and a promise not to engage in any protest activities near the Pentagon for six months. With $200 in his pocket, Mailer began to hand out bail money to the kids who were broke. While the others were arraigned and released, Mailer remained, and his hopes of making the New York dinner party dimmed. “In jail,” he wrote, “a man who wished to keep his sanity, must never anticipate, never expect, never hope with such high focus of hope that disappointment would be painful. Because there was no place for disappointment to go in prison, except back into one’s cells. Prison was frustration.”
After interminably tedious hours of waiting, word came down that Mailer would be processed not in Washington but in a workhouse in Occoquan, Virginia. Here he was given a ratty cot on which to sleep, but the bright lights obviated any chance of rest. Joining Mailer in Occoquan were Noam Chomsky, Tuli Kupferberg, a fixture of the Greenwich Village underground and co-leader of the Fugs, a folk-rock agitprop group that had played in the Pentagon parking lot during the rally, and David Dellinger. “He was being treated worse than anyone else in jail,” said Kupferberg of Mailer’s incarceration. “They kept him to the last to be arraigned, so he had to wait an extra day, and it was obvious they were gonna make an example of him. No one was urging Norman to stay. Very few people were gonna stay, and I didn’t know what he was going to do.”
Kupferberg refused to cop a plea, which would have resulted in a five-day suspended sentence; it was too convenient, he reasoned, and would make his arrest seem like the obligatory gesture of an antiwar dilettante. Mailer was struck by Kupferberg’s depth of commitment; perhaps his arrest too could become something more meaningful than a hollow symbolic gesture. He decided to plead guilty as well. He would not give himself up and thus confirm for himself the doubts that had dogged him from the very beginning of his engagement with the antiwar movement—that he was a middle-aged man with middle-class values, a writer who could articulate the rage of the outlaw in his writing but couldn’t become an outlaw himself.
Despite a nolo contendere plea, Mailer’s sentence was the harshest yet meted out to the public figures that participated in the march: thirty days, of which twenty-five would be suspended. That meant five days in jail. A hastily handwritten appeal was immediately filed, and after much wrangling with the public prosecutor, Mailer was released on his own recognizance.
The arrest had been a crucible for Mailer, a test of his own resolve to fight the power, but in the end, he was resigned to his role as belletrist rebel. Even Jerry Rubin had to admit that “there was a part of me that knew he would have lost his effectiveness if he’d become a Yippie. Norman was better being Norman Mailer.”
Mailer didn’t go to Washington with a specific magazine assignment, but when he returned to New York it occurred to him that there was a story to be written, perhaps a major piece. He called Midge Decter, the executive editor of Harper’s, and asked her if she would be interested in something. Mailer and Decter’s relationship dated back to the late forties. Commentary, the liberal politics and arts monthly created by Decter’s husband, Norman Podhoretz, in 1945, had raved about both The Naked and the Dead and The Deer Park, and Mailer had contributed occasional pieces to the magazine since the early sixties.
Harper’s editor, thirty-two-year-old Willie Morris, had become the youngest editor in chief in the magazine’s 117-year history in 1967 when John Fischer resigned over a dispute with publisher John Cowles over the magazine’s finances. A native of Jackson, Mississippi, and a Rhodes Scholar, Morris was a writer (his memoir North Toward Home was published to great critical acclaim in 1967) and an editing prodigy. He landed his first publishing job in 1960, as editor of the muckraking biweekly Texas Observer, at the age of twenty-five.
Morris and Decter, along with senior editor Bob Kotlowitz, had quickly transformed Harper’s from a sleepy and irrelevant literary monthly (“as fuddy-duddy a magazine as you could imagine,” said Decter) into a lively and essential forum for arts and political coverage, with contributions from such writers as David Halberstam, Elizabeth Hardwick, Neil Sheehan, Alfred Kazin, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Irwin Shaw, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth. Mailer knew he would be in good company, and Decter was thrilled that Mailer had thought of the magazine. Morris, who had first met Mailer in Austin in 1961 when was editing the Texas Observer, felt Mailer was “in many ways a literary genius,” and he was equally as enthusiastic about bedecking the revamped Harper’s with Mailer’s byline. There had been past attempts by Morris to get Mailer to contribute to the magazine during his tenure as associate editor, but Mailer’s fee was too exorbitant, and John Fischer had never been a fan. When Morris argued vociferously for Harper’s to publish an excerpt from Mailer’s 1966 anthology Cannibals and Christians, Fischer rejected it.
Now that the opportunity to publish Mailer had again presented itself, there was no way Morris was going to let the writer walk. Morris sensed this would be a watershed piece, “one that would strike to the taproots of all that was happening at that moment in the nation.” In order to get Mailer his rate without forcing Harper’s to pay an exorbitant amount, Mailer’s agent, Scott Meredith, had the idea to sell the Pentagon story as a book as well. Mailer would be given a wide berth to write long, perhaps twenty thousand words, more than enough to justify a smallish but timely title.
Morris and Decter arranged meetings with a number of publishers. When the editor in chief of Macmillan had the temerity to ask Decter about the sales figures for Why Are We in Vietnam? the meeting was peremptorily cut short. Meredith eventually handled the sale of the book for $25,000 to Bob Gutwillig at New American Library; Harper’s would pay $10,000 for the article, a fifty-cents-a-word bargain. But Mailer would have to move fast; NAL didn’t want to sit on a book whose subject matter would go stale in a few months’ time, and Harper’s needed to close their issue in less than eight weeks. The story, it was agreed, would run in the February 1968 issue.
The money was in place, but Morris had yet to have a single conversation with Mailer, who, according to Meredith, was in seclusion at his beach house in Provincetown. It was a trick of fate that found Mailer, who was accompanied by the boxer Jose Torres, face-to-face with Morris one afternoon on the corner of Forty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue near the Algonquin Hotel, where Morris was having drinks with a reporter from the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
“We just closed the deal,” Morris told Mailer.
“I know, I know. This one could be kind of good. I’ll be in touch.”
Two weeks later, Morris received a phone call from Mailer. The story was getting long; he would need more time. The February issue wasn’t tenable now; Morris would try to run it in March instead, with a final printer’s deadline of January 10.
The writing came slowly at first. Mailer’s reporting at the Pentagon was circumscribed by his role as a participant; any pretense of a full-scale accounting of the event was out the question. He was unsure about the tone and scale of the piece; what was required was a deeper understanding of the counterculture’s political landscape, the inner workings of the various factions and how they responded to each other. Fr
om his assistant Sandy Charlebois, an activist and insider who had spent a fair amount of time with the Diggers’ Emmett Grogan in San Francisco and had helped create the name “Yippies” with Rubin and Hoffman, Mailer received deep background on the origins of street theater as political outreach. Mailer dispatched Charlebois to interview Rubin extensively, and Mailer himself grilled Paul Krassner, Dellinger, and other participants in the Pentagon march.
Given the ambitious scope of the project at hand, Mailer’s domestic situation provided a constant source of distraction. His already parlous relationship with his wife, actress Beverly Bentley, was disintegrating into violent bouts of recriminatory, boozy verbal strafing. At one point during the writing process, Beverly claimed that Mailer had performed voodoo on her stereo system because the needle had unaccountably dropped off when he had left the house one night. “You’re evil!” she screamed. The piece, Mailer recalled, “was written in a towering depression. I did it in two months and those were some of the worst weeks of my life. I would come home each night and think it was terrible.”
After attempting a number of approaches, Mailer as a last resort tried the third person; the “I” would become a character called Norman Mailer. Even then, he wasn’t confident that it was the right way, but it carried him deeper into the story than he had managed thus far. After ten thousand words and a great many bouts of self-reproach, he was convinced it was clicking.
Writing about yourself in the third person, particularly within the context of nonfiction, was a rare and highly eccentric device to use in 1967, but it had a distinctive literary precedent. Journalist Henry Adams—the grandson of John Quincy Adams, the son of a U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, and a Harvard graduate who would teach medieval history at the university—rejected in 1877 the appurtenances of privilege and title that had been his birthright to devote himself to extensive travel and a rigorous, years-long study of American history, the centerpiece of which was a nine-volume history of America under the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. But it wasn’t until Adams sat down to record the events of his own life that he forged an unprecedented approach to historiography—fusing social criticism with larger historical currents in the form of a memoir. The Education of Henry Adams was self-published by its author in 1907, one hundred folios that Adams sent to the country’s best and brightest in the hope that it would spark sweeping social reform.
Mailer wasn’t a particularly close reader of Adams’s book, but a chapter had been assigned in his freshman English class at Harvard: “I remember thinking at the time what an odd thing to write about yourself in the third person. Who is this fellow, Henry Adams, talking about himself as Henry Adams?” Adams’s influence was latent; he remained in Mailer’s mind “as a possibility, the way a painter might look at a particular Picasso or Cezanne and say to himself, ‘That’s the way to do it.’” “On the one hand, it seemed interesting to speak of a protagonist named Norman Mailer,” he said. “On the other, it was odd. It’s a very funny way to look at oneself.”
The third-person technique liberated Mailer from the reductive “housing projects of fact and issue” that he felt prevented traditional reportage from examining the often complex matrix of impulses and root causes behind a mammoth act of resistance such as the march on the Pentagon—its decentralized command structure, the prevarications among the nonstudent academics and fellow travelers among Mailer’s tweedy contemporaries, and the warring philosophies between Dellinger and Rubin that threatened to derail the objectives of the march. But more important, it freed up Mailer to write about himself in a clinically detached way—to map his own complex motives, emotions, and impressions as carefully as he might delineate a character in a novel. He would become a “true protagonist of the best sort… half-heroic, and three-quarters comic.”
Once Mailer began writing as “Mailer,” the words came at a furious clip. The third-person device enabled him to transition freely between public events and interiority and write as discursively as he pleased. After six weeks of work in Provincetown, he called Decter and told her, “It’s getting long.”
But the magazine’s deadline was approaching, and Mailer was still writing. If the story was going to make it into the March issue, then Morris and Decter would have to trudge up to Provincetown and start preparing the still incomplete manuscript. Shortly after the first of the year, Decter and Morris flew up the Cape in a puddle-jumper that gave Decter wretched flight sickness. The two editors arrived at Mailer’s three-story redbrick retreat on Cape Cod Bay, where a hothouse atmosphere of industriousness prevailed. Sandy Charlebois was dutifully typing Mailer’s handwritten story, while the writer, who was ensconced in his office on the second floor for twelve-to fourteen-hour stretches, produced more pages. In six weeks, Mailer had produced almost eighty thousand words—a messy and frequently amended assemblage, with countless notes scribbled in the margins and serpentine sentences wrapped around paragraphs. A makeshift distribution system was put into place: Charlebois retrieved the pages from Mailer and typed. Mailer made corrections and handed the manuscript pages to Morris, who made his notes. Decter then read the pages, rewriting Mailer’s crabbed handwritten changes in legible type to eliminate the need for another draft. Mercifully, the editing was minimal. “The kind of editing one does with him is to say, ‘In this part here you really should explain a little more. You go over that a little too fast—it’s hard for the reader to follow the point you’re making,’” said Decter. “That kind of stuff, but that’s not editing, and he was never testy about any of these suggestions. Mailer’s an absolute pro.”
A third of the way into Mailer’s manuscript, Morris knew he had something special on his hands. But it was far longer than the original projection of twenty thousand words. When Decter and Morris did the final count, it topped out at ninety thousand. Morris called Kotlowitz:
“It’s marvelous.”
“That’s great. How many words?”
“Ninety thousand.”
“Ninety thousand?”
“About that.”
“You think we should run it in installments—two, three?”
“I think we should run it all at once.”
“All of it?”
“I really do.”
“Well, why the hell not?”
When Kotlowitz finally read the story, he was “mesmerized and stunned. There was no question we had to do it in full. I didn’t think the piece was inflated by a single word. The momentum and propulsion of the piece was so powerful. I was so excited; it was an editor’s dream. I knew that no one, upon reading the story, would forget this issue.”
John Cowles wasn’t so sure. The conservative publisher of Harper’s, whose family owned the magazine as well as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspaper, felt the story was far too long and too enamored of the leaders of the left as front-runners in a social revolution. “He was bewildered by it,” said Kotlowitz. “Nor did he advocate devoting an entire issue to a single piece, because it would set a bad precedent for other writers wishing to do the same.”
Even some Harper’s staffers were bewildered by the piece. When a copy editor questioned whether the crude language was suitable for a mainstream magazine, and sarcastically wondered how Mailer might write when he was sober, “Willie told her to sit down, shut up, and not say a word,” according to Decter. But even Mailer had second thoughts about the use of so much scatology. When the editing was finally complete and Morris and Decter were about to head back to New York, Mailer turned to Morris and asked, “What will my father think?”
“The Steps of the Pentagon,” which ran in the March 1968 issue of Harper’s, was a dazzler, the greatest sustained work of reportage that Mailer had written thus far—reportage in the Mailer sense, at least. “The Steps of the Pentagon” was a multihued tableau: a vividly impressionistic account of the march, a clear-eyed critique of the left and its leadership, a series of spot-on profiles of Lowell, Macdonald, and other prominent participants, and a self-portrait
of the writer as an “ambiguous comic hero,” constantly vacillating between doing the right thing and catering to his own questionable self-interests. In less capable hands, the story might have read as a confused jumble, but Mailer’s ability to pleasingly syncretize the disparate parts lifted “The Steps of the Pentagon” into the realm of nonfiction literature.
Mailer’s third-person device, which he had questioned from the very start, allowed him to write about himself as a protagonist in the march but also a character for whom he gives no quarter.
Mailer was a snob of the worst sort. New York had not spoiled him, because it had not chosen to, but New York had certainly wrecked his tolerance for any party but a very good one. Like most snobs he professed to believe in the aristocracy of achieved quality—“Just give me a hovel with a few young artists, bright-eyed and bold”—in fact, a party lacked flavor for him unless someone very rich or social were present.
Mailer’s gift for using careful observation as a psychological divining rod had never been utilized as effectively. Here’s Mailer writing about Lowell’s reaction to Mailer’s soused speech at the Ambassador:
Lowell looked most unhappy. Mailer, minor poet, had often observed that Lowell had the most disconcerting mixture of strength and weakness in his presence, a blending so dramatic in its visible sign of conflict that one had to assume he would be sensationally attractive to women. He had something untouchable, all insane in its force; one felt immediately that there were any number of causes for which the man would be ready to die, and for some he would fight, with an axe in his hand and Cromwellian light in his eye.
Mailer resents Lowell for his confident command of the Ambassador audience during his poetry reading: “Lowell’s talent was very large, but then Mailer was a bulldog about the value of his own talent. No, Mailer was jealous because he had worked for this audience, and Lowell without effort seemed to have stolen them.” (Years later, Lowell would comment that Mailer’s piece was “one of the best things ever written about me.”)
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Page 24
