by Tom Piazza
The book presents Mailer as a reluctant participant in a mass protest against the Vietnam War that took place in October 1967. A cast of extraordinary characters populates the stage—Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, Paul Goodman, Ed de Grazia—along with a secondary crew of protesters, marshals, homegrown Nazis, police, court bailiffs, and Mailer’s fourth wife back in New York. The author also manages to cram a lot of action into the short span of the narrative. He delivers a drunken speech on the eve of the march, attends a party full of liberal academics, consorts with Lowell, Macdonald, William Sloane Coffin Jr., and other notables gathered for the march, participates in the protest itself, gets arrested, and spends the night in jail.
The publication of the first part of the book in Harper’s created a sensation. A month later, the book’s second part, a shorter and more formal account of the planning and execution of the march, was published in Commentary. They were combined in the finished volume, to which Mailer appended his subtitle, “History as a Novel, the Novel as History.” It was immediately and almost universally recognized as a “triumph,” to use Dwight Macdonald’s word, and went on to win both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Mailer’s most significant discovery in Armies was the technique of writing about himself in the third person, as if he were a character in a novel. “Norman Mailer,” the character, is treated as a mock-heroic protagonist making his way through a complex network of competing interests and sensibilities during that weekend in Washington. Because we get a vivid sense of him early on, we gladly accept the topspin he puts on his perceptions as he serves them up.
He earns a powerful narrative leverage, starting with the very first sentence. “From the outset,” he writes, “let us bring you news of your protagonist.” This lone sentence is followed by an extended excerpt from Time’s snarky report on Mailer’s pre-protest monologue at the Ambassador Theater.
It is a shrewd and effective opening gambit. There is a clearly stated “us” and “you,” so an immediate dramatic relation is set up between the narrative voice and the reader. The voice is bringing us “news”—we love news!—and it is about “your” protagonist, drawing us into a subliminal complicity. Within a page we learn that the “us” who is bringing the news is, in fact, our protagonist himself, a man of many parts, apparently, perhaps containing Whitmanesque multitudes.
The Time excerpt is studded with value judgments masquerading as straight reporting: The upcoming march is referred to as “Saturday’s capers,” and Dwight Macdonald, who shared the stage with Mailer, is “the bearded literary critic.” When the excerpt is done, Mailer quits this curtain-raiser with a single sentence, “Now we may leave Time in order to find out what happened.” We are hooked. And we have been introduced to the book’s underlying principle: the notion that a reporter who is willing to characterize events without first characterizing himself or herself is inherently suspect. One can’t approach the truth without first turning an eye on one’s own subjectivity.
The second chapter, the book’s official beginning, puts this principle into practice immediately. “On a day somewhat early in September,” the narrative begins, “the year of the first March on the Pentagon, 1967, the phone rang one morning and Norman Mailer, operating on his own principle of war games and random play, picked it up. This was not characteristic of Mailer. Like most people whose nerves are sufficiently sensitive to keep them well-covered with flesh, he detested the telephone. Taken in excess, it drove some psychic equivalent of static into the privacies of the brain.”
Since we know that we are hearing this from Mailer himself, we are, again, complicit in the narrative; a game is in progress, and we are being shown the rules. We are going to get our events via a mind that is nothing if not subjective, and yet paradoxically objective about its own subjectivity. We will get descriptions of action (he picks up the ringing phone), background context for the action (it was not characteristic), observations delivered from an unexpected angle with a Mark-of-Zorro flourish (the oversensitive nerves with their sheathing of flesh), and an insistence on sharp detail in metaphor (the static being driven into “the privacies of the brain”). The author will juggle these ingredients in quick succession, always with huge linguistic gusto.
Mailer’s prose obsessively amends its own perceptions, makes parenthetical observations, qualifies, anticipates, demurs, constantly tries to stand outside itself. He was, in fact, a species of performance artist, discovering metaphors en route and mingling them with dazzling audacity. Here he is, riffing on his discomfort at a party thrown by some liberal backers of the march: “The architecture of his personality bore resemblance to some provincial cathedral which warring orders of the church might have designed separately over several centuries. . . . Boldness, attacks of shyness, rude assertion, and circumlocutions tortured as arthritic fingers working at lace, all took their turn with him, and these shuttlings of mood became most pronounced in their resemblance to the banging and shunting of freight cars when he was with liberal academics.” If your sensibilities are ruffled by a mixed metaphor, comic grandiosity, or long sentences, steer clear of Mailer.
Through it all, Mailer is crucially aware not just of his own motivations, but of how they might play to the public. “Mailer,” he writes, “had the most developed sense of image; if not, he would have been a figure of deficiency, for people had been regarding him by his public image since he was twenty-five years old. He had, in fact, learned to live in the sarcophagus of his image—at night, in his sleep, he might dart out, and paint improvements on the sarcophagus. During the day, while he was helpless, newspapermen and other assorted bravos of the media and literary world would carve ugly pictures on the living tomb of his legend.”
One would be tempted to find a new name for this point of view—“first person third,” perhaps—and think of it as a technical innovation, but for two facts. Mailer winks at the first of these facts upon awakening in his hotel, the Hay-Adams, on the morning of the march, then never mentions it again. “One may wonder,” he writes, “if the Adams in the name of his hotel bore any relation to Henry.” Yes, one may, but nobody need wonder afterward where Mailer got the idea of writing about himself in the third person. By alluding to the author of The Education of Henry Adams, Mailer tips his hat, and his hand, to his fellow Harvard alumnus and consummate insider/outsider. The Education, published in 1918, may lack Mailer’s bravado and sheer joy in language, but it does use the same first-person-third technique to locate its author in an ambiguous social and historical position. (Adams’s book, by the way, also won a Pulitzer, presented posthumously in 1919.)
The other fact is that innovations, if they are indeed innovations, usually spawn techniques useful to succeeding practitioners of the form. But the technique of The Armies of the Night is so completely suffused with Mailer’s personality, his peculiar mix of ego and charm, of self-regard and self-deprecation, his intelligence and occasional clumsiness, that subsequent attempts by other writers to use the first person third have inevitably read as embarrassing, inadvertent homages.
Mailer recognized early on, before a lot of writers, that politics—most of contemporary public life, in fact—was turning into a kind of theater. Actions on the political stage had a symbolic weight that often outbalanced what might previously have been thought of as their practical consequences. This development was the wedge that eventually drove an unbridgeable divide between the Old Left, with its programmatic preoccupations and endless appetite for dogma, and the New Left, with its vivid sense of the theatrical. It was also the subtext of the 1967 march. The real dynamics of public life were shifting away from the old tabulations of political give-and-take. Instead, the cut of a candidate’s suit, or the unfortunate presence of his five o’clock shadow, would travel out over the television sets of the nation and affect people’s perceptions on a level that bypassed any substantial argument.
The media, to use Mailer’s terminology, was driving public events deeper and deeper int
o the “privacies” of every citizen’s brain, short-circuiting linear thinking in favor of image-driven manipulation. And this was precisely why traditional reportage had become ill-equipped for locating the truth of “what happened.” What we needed, insisted Mailer, was a different approach: “The novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historic inquiry.”
Needless to say, this development dovetailed perfectly with Mailer’s own impulses. And yet (and this is perhaps Mailer’s most important saving grace), he was deeply ambivalent about it. Highly sensitive to the theater of events and personae, Mailer was alive to the ways in which the manipulation of surfaces could, and would, be used to deaden the public’s ability to think, to sift and evaluate information. Writers, public officials, advertising people, politicians, speechwriters—all were in possession of a dangerous weapon, and they were obliged to use it with singular care. “Style,” Mailer wrote, much later, in an introduction to a book by former SDS member Carl Oglesby about the JFK assassination, “is not the servant of our desire to inform others how to think, but the precise instrument by which we attempt to locate the truth.”
In the light of today’s endemic spin, such a sentiment would seem a touching artifact of a simpler time, if it weren’t so achievable by any individual sitting alone in a room trying to locate the truth. The prerequisite is the sense that it is both possible and desirable. Citizen Mailer turns the act of seeing, the workings of consciousness itself, into the ultimate civic act—a responsibility shared by everyone in the privacies of his or her brain. There is something profoundly democratic in his insistence that the individual’s sensibility could meet the largest events on equal terms, with one’s own centering and irreducible humanity as the common denominator.
As a writer and as a man, Mailer was always in a state of tension. His mind and heart were planted in a wholly American flux—improvisatory, protean, deeply ambiguous in intention, supremely egotistical and supremely civic-minded. These tensions give his work its deepest dynamism, turning it into a theater of opposing psychic forces. At the same time, Mailer was not quite a wholly American spirit. Or say that his Americanness existed in extraordinary tension with his respect for European intellectual and artistic traditions. When, toward the end of Advertisements for Myself, he promises to write a novel worthy of being read by “Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway,” 80 percent of the honor roll has been read before an American is mentioned.
Mailer retained an almost sentimental attachment to the novel form, yet his major gift was not the ability to imagine living, three-dimensional fictional characters. What he did have a genius for was dramatized dialectic. He loved to interview himself; his 1966 collection Cannibals and Christians contains three self-interviews, and more followed through the years. The form of Armies is itself a kind of dialogue, in two halves, between two different modes of discourse.
In every sense—stylistic, cultural, political—he was stretched between two worlds. Never programmatic enough for the Old Left, neither was he ever anarchic enough to fully sign on to the New Left’s Grand Guignol. Although at times Mailer liked to characterize himself as the Devil (or at least a devil) while criticizing America’s “Faustian” ambitions, he was far from Goethe’s “spirit that negates.” Rather, he found in his own Hebraic, and specifically Talmudic, tradition (his grandfather was a rabbi) perhaps his deepest conviction: the sense that there is something central, necessary, and even sacred in doubt, in the nuanced weighing of competing intellectual and moral and spiritual claims. And this allowed him to put his own ego, his outsized talents, his brilliance and narcissism, in the service of a higher calling. Because of that, The Armies of the Night remains one of the most enlivening, and most deeply American, testaments ever written.
From the Columbia Journalism Review
November/December 2008
Norman Mailer: A Remembrance
Norman Mailer was the writer who made me want to be a writer. And when he died, I lost a friend of nearly twenty-seven years. The transformation of a hero into a friend with strengths and failings, and shared memories, is not always easy or natural, but Norman insisted upon it. Famously aware of his fame, of the reputation that preceded him and created a perimeter around him, he always did what he could in an individual encounter to dismantle the unreality that such preconditioning tends to generate.
Norman was, for me as for so many others, an essential presence, a psychic fact. He was a mind and a spirit in action in the world, a protagonist, and he made sentences and entire books that are themselves protagonists of a sort. The Naked and the Dead, The Armies of the Night, The Executioner’s Song, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Advertisements for Myself, An American Dream, not to mention everything else he wrote . . . These books act upon you, whether you like them or not. There was nothing passive about the act of writing for their author, and there is nothing passive about the result. Several decades ago, I spent some weeks in a college aesthetics course examining the question of whether a work of art can be said to be a physical object. Whatever the answer turned out to be in the abstract, Mailer’s works are not objects—they are subjects. Mailer’s work helped me see that part of the activity of an artist is to transform objects into subjects.
I encountered that work for the first time in 1977. I was just out of college, living in New York and playing jazz piano in bars and nightclubs here and there. I had taken a job as a clerk at the Barnes and Noble Sale Annex, now defunct, on Eighteenth Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. After a lackluster career as an English major, reading Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, I had begun to think that literature wasn’t really my thing. Jazz music was alive in every line—it depended for its rationale on being alive in every line, the sense of bets being entered, and antes increased, as the soloist’s thought was spun out. Literature, I thought, couldn’t compete. Then one day, bored shelving books, I picked up a hardback copy of An American Dream. I recognized the author’s name—I had seen him on TV once or twice. The cover didn’t look like your standard literary book—it had loud colors and a picture of a beautiful woman implanted in the design. I turned it over and there was his face—the shag rug of tangled curls, and the look in the eye, as if he had been caught in the middle of something, a weird, violent, charming, slightly crazed light in those eyes.
Reading the book was like stepping on a land mine. Mailer brought you where he was—he didn’t just describe the sights and sounds and smells but supercharged those sense realities with the narrator’s extreme emotional states. You encountered lust and murderous rage, shrewdness and naïveté, charm and clumsiness, close observation and paranoid projection, all mixed in together, stirred with a willingness, a manic desire, a need, to take risks. Wild foreshortenings of language and combinations of unlikely imagery set up constantly shifting holograms of mood. I didn’t know it was possible to get that kind of intensity in narrative prose. I started reading everything by him, and about him, that I could get my hands on.
Before long, I began taking walks in the warm months, across the Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn Heights, in hopes of running into him. It’s a slightly embarrassing admission, but I was cheered later to find that one of Norman’s favorite musicians, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, had done something similar as a young man in the 1940s in Harlem, hoping to catch a glimpse of his hero, the saxophone patriarch Coleman Hawkins. And anyway, just the walk across the bridge was inspiring—the harplike cables rising on both sides of you, the wooden boardwalk, the echoes of Hart Crane and Whitman, old iron and steel New York, the harbor muscle and movement and glinting sun off the water below.
In the late spring of 1980, I went for one of my walks on a bright Saturday. After poking around Montague Street,
grabbing a slice of pizza and walking down Hicks Street and back up Henry Street, looking out at the harbor and the downtown skyline across the water, I started to head back to the bridge, along Columbia Heights from Montague. That was when I saw him from a block away, crossing Columbia Heights toward the row of brownstones that backed up against the view of the harbor. He was unmistakable—silver-grey hair, denim shirt, looking at the ground as he walked with a rolling gait, plainly deep in thought.
It was a shock. I’m not sure that I ever truly expected to encounter him, but there he was. I had no idea what I would say, but I assumed I’d think of something. I quickened my steps to catch up with him and, as I drew nearer to him, and then abreast of him, I could see that he was indeed looking at the ground, following some idea along some deep corridor of thought. I felt instantly unqualified to interrupt him. Yet what was I there for, if not to interrupt him? My heart was pounding. As I started to walk past him, I looked at him, with the moment sliding through my fingers, and at that moment, from the depths of wherever he was, he looked up at me, like someone briefly assessing a possibly developing situation through a pair of binoculars, and gave me a short, preemptive nod of acknowledgment. Stunned, I could do no more than nod back and say, “Hi.” That provoked a secondary, smaller nod, and he descended back into his thoughts, and I continued walking.
Do I need to say that I kicked myself all the way home to the West Village? I consoled myself with the notion that I truly did not want to interrupt him if he was working something out in his head, and this may even have been partly true. In any case, I wrote him a letter that afternoon, the kind of letter you can only write when you are in your early twenties, telling him about what had just happened, and that I hadn’t wanted to interrupt him but had been kicking myself anyway, that I had read his books and was trying to write fiction, that I had written about jazz but I wanted to write novels, that I had taken a job as a messenger at The New Yorker, and that I was writing a long nonfiction account of a jazz festival I’d attended in Senegal—the letter must have been three pages long—and I closed by telling him that I wanted him to know how much his work meant to me and that I was going to be a writer and I wanted him to know about me. I mailed the letter to him at his address on Columbia Heights, which I had somehow found out.
