Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Again and again, for the greater part of his account of the March, Mailer the writer wheels into frame Mailer the Marcher (aka the Participant, the Novelist, the Ruminant, the Beast), and then comments humorously, obscenely, resignedly, unsparingly, and (rarely) solemnly on many salient aspects of his character and history, using, for example, his troubled marriage, timid youth in Brooklyn, army service, shifting political affiliations, and his relations with various literary figures—Paul Goodman, Robert Lowell, and Dwight Macdonald, principally—as a means of presenting the drama of his three days in Washington. There is a problem, of course, with unbridled self-presentation in memoirs: readers get irritated, or bored. Mailer addressed the matter by changing “I” to “he,” or one of the names just noted, and by this simple shift giving himself sanction to talk about Norman Mailer all the more. The device is unsettling at first, but soon works beautifully. He had dabbled with the third person personal, as it might be called, in his Village Voice columns and a few other places, but he said that the idea came from editing Wild 90. Watching the film made him see himself “as a piece of material, as a piece of yard goods. I’d say: ‘Where am I going to cut myself?’ ” Mailer’s evolution as a writer follows step by step, from The Naked and the Dead to Armies of the Night, his slowly growing awareness of the merits of desegregating his personal and his creative lives.

  At the outset of the narrative, he uses a cathedral to describe himself. Architectural metaphors abound in Armies, a reflection of Mailer’s interests and the unusual shape of the building the protesters hope to engage—at one point, he compares the Pentagon to the colossal architecture of ancient Egypt. His boldness, his fits of shyness, his good manners, and the fact that he is often brusque, make him conclude that “the architecture of his personality bore resemblance to some provincial cathedral which warring orders of the church might have designed separately over several centuries, the particular cathedral falling into the hands of one architect, then his enemy.” Not much further on, he extends the architectural imagery by stating that his complex personality “serves willy-nilly as the bridge—many will say the pons asinorium—into the crazy house, the crazy mansion” of that historic moment when American citizens marched on a bastion of the nation’s military might in order to “wound it symbolically.”

  So if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed the crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions, outrageously and often unhappily self-assertive, yet in command of a detachment classic in severity (for he was a novelist and so in need of studying every last lineament of the fine, the noble, the frantic, and the foolish in others and in himself). Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors, since it has habits, even the talent, to regard itself.

  Mailer-now, the writer, observes Mailer-then, the marcher. Although they share the same name and antecedents, they have slightly different sensibilities—Mailer-now has done a bit more, and is in a position to appreciate the small-mindedness and misapprehensions, as well as the generosity and acuity of vision, of his former self, a protagonist, as Mailer said later, who was “half-heroic and three quarters comic.” Mailer-then fumbles and fulminates; he is in flux; but he also sees clearly and acts boldly. Mailer-then took no notes, but remembered well, as Robert Lowell later told Dwight Macdonald: “Curious, when you’re with X [another novelist], you think he’s so sensitive and alert and then you find later he wasn’t taking in anything, while Norman seems not to pay much attention but now it seems he didn’t miss a trick—and what a memory!”

  A scene between Mailer and Lowell at a party before the March will illustrate. Lowell has just finished telling Mailer that he and his wife think Mailer is the “finest journalist in America.” Having received a postcard from Lowell to this effect, he is aware of the poet’s high opinion. He suspects, however, that Lowell sends out many postcards.

  The first card he’d ever received from Lowell was on a book of poems, Deaths for the Ladies and other disasters it had been called, and many people had thought the book a joke which whatever its endless demerits, it was not. Not to the novice poet at least. When Lowell had written that he liked the book, Mailer next waited for some word in print to canonize his thin tome; of course, it never came. If Lowell were to begin to award living American poets in critical print, two hundred starving worthies could in fairness hold out their bowl before the escaped Novelist would deserve his turn. Still, Mailer was irked. He felt he had been part of a literary game. When the second card came a few years later telling him he was the best journalist in America, he did not answer. Elizabeth Hardwick, Lowell’s wife, had just published a review of An American Dream in Partisan Review which had done its best to disembowel the novel. Lowell’s card might have arrived with the best of motives, but its timing suggested to Mailer an exercise in neutralmanship—neutralize the maximum of possible future risks. Mailer was not critically equipped for the task, but there was always the distant danger that some bright and not unauthoritative voice, irked at Lowell’s enduring hegemony, might come along with a long lance and presume to tell America that posterity would judge Allen Ginsberg to be the greater poet.

  This was all doubtless desperately unfair to Lowell who, on the basis of two kind cards, was now judged by Mailer to possess an undue unchristian talent for literary logrolling. But then Mailer was prickly.

  When Mailer and Lowell meet in Washington, the poet repeated his remark. “Yes, Norman, I really think you are the best journalist in America.” Mailer replied that he sometimes thought he was “the best writer in America.” Lowell, now on the defensive, replied, “Oh, Norman, oh, certainly,” he said, “I didn’t mean to imply, heavens no, it’s just that I have such respect for good journalism.” Mailer answered with “false graceousness” that writing a good poem was much more difficult.

  Despite the unusual, even eccentric, nature of Mailer’s point of view in the book, its assumptions and purposes are apparent. Anyone familiar with the modern novel recognizes that the double perspective used by the best writers show us the world through the eyes of their characters without effacing themselves as narrators. A fictional character, one who is changing before our eyes, is presented. The third person personal allowed Mailer to present his sometimes brave, sometimes clownish, sometimes earnest, often peckish, invariably opinionated, regularly comic, and usually honest self without necessarily sounding as if he is preaching for his own saint. By writing about himself instead of a fictional look-alike, Mailer is nevertheless obliged by his point of view to write about some aspects of the real world of events, in this case, a large civil protest with an uncertain outcome. Half of the genius of the book resides in the fact that Mailer’s sight extends so clearly to the circumference of his awareness. “The eye is the first circle,” says Emerson, “the horizon which it forms is the second.” In Armies of the Night, we see, as it were, the structure of Mailer’s eye and the angles of his vision on various aspects of the March, extending to its periphery with glimpses beyond. He is an intrepid explorer of his own psyche, but his explorations in this narrative (and the five that follow it through 1975), lead us closer to, not further away from, the problems of the republic.

  Mailer depicts himself clearly while also tackling a variety of reportorial and analytic tasks—for example, presenting an authoritative analysis of the near-final demise of the Old Left and its “sound-as-brickwork logic of the next step” polemical abstractions, and the rise of the New Left with its focus on the most immediate injustices in the nation. As one of the youngest of the Old Left figures, and godfather to the New, Mailer weighs the assets and liabilities of both, firing commentary from his existential Gatling gun at a long line of emerging or revitalized causes, beginning with poverty and civil rights and ending with sexual freedom, free sp
eech, and environmentalism. The New Left’s alphabet soup of groups, he notes, shares these causes almost randomly except for a fierce opposition to the war, the common cause of all the constituent groups.

  As one scholar, Sandy Vogelgesang, has noted, the March on the Pentagon was the symbolic event that “marked the move from dissent to resistance.” Before the March, many leftist intellectuals questioned whether such actions could result in any real change; Mailer himself wondered about the effectiveness of the March when he spoke to Mitchell Goodman at the beginning of Armies. But the March became a firebrand that ignited other acts of resistance, and while tracing its influence with precision may be impossible, it was and is written about and cited repeatedly. Most of the major figures who marched with Mailer—Noam Chomsky, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Paul Goodman, Lowell, Macdonald, and Yale chaplain Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr.—continued to participate in various antiwar activities. Nothing written about the March (and arguably nothing written about resistance to the Vietnam War) had a more forceful impact on turning the tide of opinion against the war. As the same scholar puts it, “Future historians must consult Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night to understand how and why the American Intellectual Left moved to ‘resistance’ against Johnson’s Vietnam War and, in fact, to comprehend the radicalized intellectual consciousness of the 1960s.”

  One theme of Armies is his ruminations on the March as the beginning of a long war. He draws on memories of his combat experience as a guide to the struggle he foresees, hopes for, and dreads, as well as his awareness of the nearby battlefields of Bull Run, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Walking together on the morning of the March, he and Lowell and Macdonald are in good spirits, “for the war spoke of future redemptions.” The day is clear, “and the thin air! wine of Civil War apples in the October air! edge of excitement and awe—how would this day end? No one could know.” Mailer is forty-four years old and it has taken him all of his years “to be able to enjoy his pleasures where he found them, rather than worry about those pleasures which eluded him,” and yet now he might face imprisonment for civil disobedience. If he was too old to be a revolutionary à la Castro, living in a mountain camp as a guerrilla, he was also “too incompetent” and “too showboat, too lacking in essential judgment—besides, he was too well known!”

  He would pay for the pleasures of his notoriety in the impossibility of disguise. No gun in the hills, no taste for organization, no, he was a figurehead, and therefore he was expendable, said the new modesty—not a future leader, but a future victim: there would be his real value. He could go to jail for protest, and spend some years if it came to it, possibly his life, for if the war went on, and America put its hot martial tongue across the Chinese border, well, jail was the probable perspective, detention camps, disassociation centers, liquidation alleys, that would be his portion, and it would come about the time he had learned how to live.

  The three men agree on their expendability and conclude that after leading the March, they should get arrested as soon as practicable. After much frustration in crossing the bridge into Virginia in some semblance of orderly rows and files, the unruly army of protesters debouches into a road leading to the Pentagon. The column disintegrates as it arrives. Mailer feels ennobled and happy “as if finally one stood under some mythical arch in the great vault of history.” The sense of a nation divided liberated “some undiscovered patriotism in Mailer so that he felt a sharp searing love for his country in this moment, and on this day, crossing some divide in his own mind wider than the Potomac, a love so lacerated he felt as if a marriage were being torn and children lost.” He is ready to act and reflects on why soldiers in the front line of battle are ready to die: “there is a promise of some swift transit; one’s soul feels clean.” He steps over a low rope (“It was as if the air had changed, or light had altered; he felt immediately much more alive—yes, bathed in air—and yet disembodied from himself, as if indeed he were watching himself in a film”), and within minutes is arrested. Lowell and Macdonald hesitate, miss their opportunity, and fly back to New York. Mailer goes to jail.

  The remainder of the first part of the narrative, “History as a Novel,” is given over to his adventures while incarcerated. The next morning, unshaved, unkempt, and “feeling like the people’s choice between Victor McLaglen and Harpo Marx,” he appears before a magistrate who fines him $50, gives him a thirty-day sentence (twenty-five days suspended), and releases him on $500 bail. He will appeal the decision. He has missed a dinner party—hosted we finally learn, by Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick—which “had every promise of being wicked, tasty, and rich.” Mailer’s time in the federal workhouse in Occoquan, Virginia, was none of these things, but it enabled him to meet a variety of fellow protesters, guards, and minor officials; he gives quick intaglio portraits of several, and a longer one of a member of the American Nazi Party, with whom he nearly comes to blows. None of these match his high-relief depiction of Lowell, one of the narrative’s greatest assets.

  In 1969, when a friend asked him if he was embarrassed by Mailer’s description of him, Lowell replied, “No, in fact I was quite flattered. Norman didn’t have to say all that about me.” Writing to Mailer right after he had read the first part of Armies, Lowell said, “I’ve been trying to shake off mannerisms etc. you note. Of course one can’t. Probably I am more sharply outlined, Bostonish, noble, sorrowful in Mailer than in life.” Mailer’s account—which Lowell pointedly says is not journalism, but comedy and history, “seems as true as one could ask.” Two years later, he said that while Mailer had made him “a Quixote in the retinue of Sancho Panza,” it was still “the best, almost the only thing written about me as a living person.” He goes on to say that he and Mailer were not close before the March, but became so afterward, and that he had written to Mailer to say he hoped that they would “remain as good friends in life as in fiction.” Lowell later published a collection of brief poems, Notebook, 1967–68, which includes two on the March, and another, “For Norman Mailer.” It begins with a jibe at the corporation man whose heart is a watch. Mailer is the counter figure at the end of the poem: a man in a blue suit who “disproves the many false faces I see as one.” The inscription on Mailer’s copy reads, “For Norman, This brief though true return for your kind portrait, from Cal” (Lowell’s nickname from youth was Caligula).

  Lowell had another observation on Armies of the Night. He said it was possible that “the form of the book came from me. Not from anything I said but from contrasting me symbolically with himself.” This contrast starts in the opening pages and continues right up until Mailer is arrested. After the party where they jousted, Mailer and Lowell move on to the Ambassador Theater, where they speak at a fundraiser. Mailer, the “Prince of Bourbon,” drinking from a borrowed mug, observes his friend as they wait to go on. Lowell had “the expression on his face of a dues payer who is just about keeping up with the interest on some enormous debt.” He looked most unhappy with the bad acoustics, the unruly crowd, and the cold floor and with the “fatally vulgar” Mailer. Lowell is perceived as possessing a mixture of strength and weakness, “a blending so dramatic in its visible sign of conflict that one had to assume he would be sensationally attractive to women.” He was a man who would fight to the death for some causes, “with an axe in his hand and a Cromwellian light in his eye.”

  It was even possible that physically he was very strong—one couldn’t tell at all—he might be fragile, he might have the sort of farm mechanic’s strength which could manhandle the rear axle and differential off a car and into the back of a pickup. But physical strength or no, his nerves were all too apparently delicate. Obviously spoiled by everyone for years, he seemed nonetheless to need the spoiling.

  He looks over and gives what Mailer reads as a look of dismay, one which says, “Every single bad thing I have ever heard about you is not exaggerated.” Mailer looks back, and thinks ruefully:

  “You, Lowell, beloved poet of many, what do you know of the dirt and the d
ark deliveries of the necessary? What do you know of dignity hard-achieved, and dignity lost through innocence, and dignity lost by sacrifice for a cause one cannot name. What do you know about getting fat against your will, and turning into a clown of an arriviste baron when you would rather be an eagle or a count, or rarest of all, some natural aristocrat from these damned democratic states?”

  Mailer didn’t participate in the March with the idea of writing about it. The event, therefore, unrolled naturally with no imaginative forcing, which, like his time in the army and in Bellevue, was the kind of experience he found most valuable. When the March was over, his first thought was, “What a good short story I’ve got.” He called Scott Meredith and told him about what he had seen and done, and the ever-enterprising Meredith negotiated a $10,000 fee for an article in Harper’s, which the magazine’s editor, Willie Morris, said “was an astronomical figure” for that time. Morris, who had met Mailer in Austin in 1963 through Mailer’s old friend Barbara Probst Solomon, moved in 1963 from the editorship of the Texas Observer to Harper’s, and in 1967 published an acclaimed memoir, North Toward Home. As an associate editor, Morris had tried to get Mailer into Harper’s, but his superiors rejected his recommendation. But Mailer’s new stature changed things, and Morris arranged the deal with Meredith—twenty thousand words to be written in a month. Later that day, walking up Sixth Avenue, he ran into Mailer and Farbar. He told Mailer that he had spoken with Meredith. Immediately, Morris recalled, Mailer “crouched like a boxer—he used to do that a lot in those days, like he was shadowboxing with me—and he said, ‘I know you did; I’ve just talked to him. I’m going to Provincetown tomorrow, and I will have a great twenty thousand words in one month from today.’ ”