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Scavenger of eternal truthsNorman Mailer in the 1960s

I went to Wharton with Donald Trump. We wereboth from praetorian families in Queens – hismore martial than mine – in the first line ofdefense on the crabgrass frontier. We went outone night together to a hotel behind RittenhouseSquare. His date was a wised-up girl from Phila-delphia society who dreamed of becoming astripper; mine was a retreating waitress, with ahyena body that gave off a whiff of the inquisi-tive. After the drinks – Don drank seltzer – wetook them to a room we’d booked upstairs. Mydate gashed my face with her high-heel after Itried to shuffle her into one of the bedrooms.There was panting from Don’s quarters, thesound of a teetering vase, then mechanicalchanting, until a final flesh-on-flesh “Whaa-aap!” A volley of sweet-talk followed. “If youwant to be a dancer, there’s nobody who’s goingto stop you, not even your father,” Don whis-pered. “I know some of the best dancers in thistown. The finest.” He was soft-voiced, clerical;a big papa trainer in her corner. That year Donshoveled his charm around campus and made hisattention a rare metal. His mania gathered up theparticles of other people’s giddy subservience. Ididn’t see much of him after the night on Ritten-house. During the final finance exam, I remem-ber him unfurling the answers on small printscroll that he’d fitted inside an extra-bulbouscufflink. I’m now a retired bank manager inEerie, PA. We summer on Lake Michigan andmy daughter just graduated from Oberlin.

That’s a poor stab at how NormanMailer’s Trump novel might haveopened. And there would have beena Trump novel – you could have bet

on it – after Mailer finished, or abandoned, hisprojected three-volume historical novel aboutHitler, only the first of which, Castle in theForest, appeared in his lifetime (Mailer aban-doned much of his best work midway; thepromised sequel to Harlot’s Ghost nevercame). The spectacle of celebrity entertain-ment come home to rot was prime Mailer terri-tory. He lived it, he knew it to the marrow –to use one of his cherished phrases, he was“equal” to it. Did Mailer ever bump intoTrump in the arteries of New York society? Ofcourse. He was at Trump’s launch party forThe Art of the Deal (they shared RandomHouse as their publisher), he once rode inTrump’s helicopter with Jack Nicholson, andone Mailer biographer reports that he received$50,000 for appearing alongside Don King

THOMAS MEANEY

N o r m a n M a i l e r

C O L L E C T E D E S S A Y S O F T H E 1 9 6 0 S

500pp. Library of America. £29.99 (US $35).978 1 59853 559 4

F O U R B O O K S O F T H E 1 9 6 0 S950pp. Library of America. £39.99 (US $45).

978 1 59853 558 7Edited by J. Michael Lennon

in a Trump Air commercial, which left him“feeling absolutely corrupt, I tell you”.

Despite all his absurdities, Mailer was thepostwar writer who feasted the most off themaggot-diet of American political entertain-ment – the one who grasped the nature of theexchange between entertainment and politicsmost firmly. In their very form, his books andpieces, with their exhibitionistic ardour andmanic self-preening, dramatized alternativevalues by exaggeratedly inhabiting the onesalready on offer. As his one-time friend Nor-man Podhoretz put it, Mailer “was trying toprove that the best way for an American to dealwith the ambition for worldly success … wasto throw himself unashamedly into it in thehope of coming up again on the other side”.Mailer might have recognized more than a fewimpulses of his own in the current Americanpresident, though without the special antennaethat made Mailer alive to ideas of justice andhonour that make the president’s gambits lowvoltage and unforgivably boring by compari-son. Mailer believed that demagoguery wasthe natural political mode suited to Ameri-cans. It was only by luck and tenacity thatthey’d ever managed to switch the setting tovarious unsatisfactory forms of democracy.

Almost all of the negatives typically thrownat Mailer – if anyone still bothers to throw any-thing at him – cling awkwardly to their target:that he was a misogynist, that he was venal, thathe was a political romantic, that he was mor-bidly self-absorbed. When your politics areabout resuscitating the life-worlds of EdmundBurke and Thomas Aquinas via the methods

of Walt Whitman and Leon Trotsky, yourprogramme is designed to cruise out of rangeof the expected flak. What’s more interestingabout the perspective of Mailer’s fictional sur-rogates is less that they’re “phallocentric” (aseven one of Mailer’s female characters puts it),but they expand into such bloated caricaturesof the preoccupations of the mid-centuryAmerican male formed in Hemingway’sshadow (the idea of women as a site of contest,the unceasing fear of homosexual tendenciesgurgling within; Mailer once got into a barfight when someone insulted his dog: “Nobodycalls my dog a faggot!”) that they underminethe original ideal. Here is Stephen Rojack, thedisgraced ex-Congressman war hero of AnAmerican Dream (1965), who, after defenes-trating his society wife, follows the murderwith quick sex with their German maid. Hethen descends into the netherworld of NewYork where he falls in love with a kept womanof a black gangster whose “stud” status impelshis eros forward:

Her ass was indeed a prize – with my hands onher, life came back to me again across all gla-ciers of my fatigue. But we did not meet aslovers, more like animals in a quiet mood, comeacross a track of the jungle to join in a clearing,we were equals. So we made love without pre-liminary – not thirty seconds had gone by beforeI slipped quietly into her. The separate cheats ofher body and her life collected on one scale ofjustice to match the weight I could on mine – herlife up to this moment was the equal of my own,good to good, bad to bad, the submerged visionof my sex moved with a freedom from vanity or

the haste to give pleasure. It was cool in mood,as if we were two professional dancers in a longslow study alone at night on a moonlit floor. Ifelt I could go on forever.

This kind of scene was replicated ad nau-seam in Mailer’s novels. The trouble with thewriting is less that it eschews the female per-spective – do you pick up a Sally Rooney novelto better grasp the mechanics of male desire? –than that Mailer had a habit of over-freightingevery encounter with a woman with metaphys-ical ballast. A scavenger of eternal truths, itnever seems to have occurred to him that hismacho obsessions might have anything to dowith his historical circumstances: he believedthere was an ineradicable quantum of violencesuppressed in all relations between men andwomen. Nevertheless, Mailer was probably thelast major American writer of the twentiethcentury who was willing at every turn to riskridiculousness. When, a few years ago, ElaineBlair observed in the New York Review ofBooks that today’s American male novelistshave a way of presenting male characterswhose loser status is meant to extract a moresympathetic hearing about their sexual procliv-ities from their female readers, you can appre-ciate the gulf between them and a novelist whoreferred to his own member as “the retaliator”.

The longtime Mailer consigliere and biogra-pher J. Michael Lennon has squeezed a goodlyportion of Mailer’s best writing into thisdouble-berth Library of America funeralcortege box set. The book-length worksinclude the novels An American Dream, andthe nearly unreadable Why Are We in Viet-

New York City, 1968

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nam?, along with his two metafictional mas-terworks, The Armies of the Night and Miamiand the Siege of Chicago (both 1968), in whichMailer tried to conduct an even higher-ampedchronicling of his times than John Dos Passoshad done for his in U.S.A. Mailer’s investiga-tions into some of the most raucous politicalevents of the 1960s are somewhat shaming fora younger generation which has not produced(at least not yet) any non-fictional account ofthe Occupy demonstrations of the early part ofthis century that compares with Armies andMiami – with the possible exceptions of a NewYorker web piece by Keith Gessen about hisown arrest in Zuccotti Park, and the savage,preternatural political economy treatise Hin-terland by Phil A. Neel.

The essays Lennon has assembled in Vol-ume Two of the LoA set include Mailer’s openletters to Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy, Rich-

ard Nixon and others, in his speak-truth-to-power mode. (Mailer believed that his essay“Superman Comes to the Supermarket” hadgot Kennedy elected and that this made him,Mailer, responsible for the administration’sactions.) There are also some book reviewsthat resist the time-serving nature of the genre:memorable attacks on Lyndon Johnson’scampaign book, on Mary McCarthy’s TheGroup, and an extended assault on NormanPodhoretz’s Making It, a book which wasitself in large part an attempt to reckon withand escape Mailer’s influence. Lennon’s briefwas to collect Mailer’s writing from the 1960s,which means omitting some important essays,in particular The White Negro (1957), butthere is more than enough here to make thecase that Mailer was – in Robert Lowell’swords, which Mailer resented – “the best jour-nalist in America”.

The competitive fire behind some of theseessays is nearly impossible to conceive oftoday. Try to imagine any contemporaryAmerican writer contemplating a 15,000-word hit piece on all perceived peers. It’s areminder that the writers of the immediatepostwar period, well into the 1960s, usingEdmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley astheir barometicians, still measured themselvesagainst the Lost Generation of the 1930s andfound themselves wanting.

In the review-essay “Some Children of theGoddess” – the “Goddess” is the Great Amer-ican Novel, which, being a bitch, cannot, bysome special Mailer logic, attract the ambi-tions of women – Mailer rounds on the talentaround him: William Styron (“Styron was try-ing to write a book about good and evil, and hisgood was as vacuous as the spirit of an emptywater bag”); James Jones (“Jones’s book is

better remembered as satisfying , as if one hadstudied geology for a semester and now knewmore”); James Baldwin (“He knows what hewants to say, and that is not the best conditionfor writing a novel”); William Burroughs(“one gets intimations of a mind which mighthave come within distance of Joyce, exceptthat a catastrophe has been visited on it, a blowby a sledge hammer, a junkie’s needle whichleft the crystalline brilliance crashed intobits”); Joseph Heller (“what makes one hesi-tate to call his first novel great or even major isthat he has only grasped the inferior aspect ofHell”); John Updike (“there are long over-fingered descriptions in exacerbated syntax,airless crypts of four or five pages, huge innerexertion reminiscent of weight lifters, a stalesweet sweat clings to his phrases”); PhilipRoth (“Roth’s short stories in Letting Go justdig little holes in many suburban lawns untilfinally the work of reading it becomes almostas depressing as must have been the work ofwriting it”); J. D. Salinger (“Franny and Zooeyand Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpentersseem to have been written for high-schoolgirls”); Saul Bellow (“he creates individualsand not the relations between them”).

There is a reliable balm self-pitying NorthAmerican writers can turn to when they wish toconfirm their despair and prove that the glorydays of literary New York are gone forever:you go on YouTube and watch the last piratedupload of D. A. Pennebaker’s documentaryTown Bloody Hall. The scene is 1971: a groupof four women on a panel – including Ger-maine Greer and Diana Trilling – along withother assorted worthies in the audience (SusanSontag and Elizabeth Hardwick) have beenassembled to discuss women’s liberation, or todiscuss Norman Mailer’s views on women’sliberation. The stage set-up with Mailer as theauthoritarian moderator was built for comedy,which the novelist Cynthia Ozick exploited tonotorious effect:

Ozick: Mr Mailer, in Advertisements for Myselfyou said, quote, “A good novelist can do withouteverything but the remnant of his balls”. Foryears and years I’ve been wondering, Mr Mailer,when you dip your balls in ink, what color inkis it?Mailer: Ozick, if I don’t find an answer in ahurry, I think we’re going to have to agree thecolor is yellow. I will cede the round to you. Idon’t pretend that I’ve never written an idiotic orstupid sentence in my life.

To watch the film from the other side of the#MeToo movement is very nearly surreal: agroup of second-wave feminists is treated asif they were bloodthirsty sans-culottes benton exterminating humour and pleasure. Whatis perhaps more strange is how alternatelyvindictive and generous Mailer could be, inthe midst of his predictable contrarianism, indefending a series of untenable positions.And how a writer whose first editions todaysell for 90 cents at the Strand, is unquestiona-bly considered the central writer of the centralcity of the literary world, the American Bal-zac – as visitors such as V. S. Naipaul con-ceded. When Jacqueline Ceballos in TownBloody Hall refers to Mailer as “the establish-ment”, you can see, in multiple senses, whatshe means.

He lived as if literature were only one,though possibly more vital and complex,dimension of a life full of other pursuits: hefounded the Village Voice, ran for Mayor ofNew York and the Harvard Board of Overseers,

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wrote endless letters to editors, campaigned forcauses high and low, made some silly movies,appeared constantly on television, and digestedall of these experiences into prose. Mailer evenwent to the trouble of reviewing reviews of hisown television performances and carrying thearguments he had had on air onto the page,where he could better corner his enemies. In “ATelevision Show with Nelson Algren”, whichLennon has shrewdly included in the volumes,Mailer spends his entire piece trying to con-vince Algren that he didn’t really mean it whenhe said on a talk show that William Styron washis favourite writer.

The Armies of the Night seems setto remain Mailer’s most enduringbook. The premiss is very funny:Mailer, the arch-egotist – “con-

demned to be an individual”, in Thom Gunn’sfine phrase – is determined to meld his unal-loyed ego into a compound greater than him-self: the 1967 march against the Vietnam Warin Washington. It is a fusion that Mailerardently wills, but cannot quite bring off. Firstthere is the issue that the friend who has askedhim to join the march is not a fellow winner:

Mailer hated to put in time with losers. Likemany another man of varied affairs consideredworthy by some, worthless by others, there hadbeen all too many years when he had the reputa-tion of being a loser; it had cost him much. Whilehe could hardly, at this stage of his career, lookback on a succession of well-timed and gen-erally established triumphs, his consolation inthose hours when he was most uncharitable tohimself is that taken at his very worst he was atleast still worthy of being a character in a novelby Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do itwith a boom!

When he gets down to Washington, there arealso distractions that divert our hero from hisquest:

New York had not spoiled him, because it hadnot chosen to, but New York had certainlywrecked his tolerance for any party but a verygood one. Like most snobs he professed tobelieve in the aristocracy of achieved quality –“just give me a hovel with a few young artists,bright-eyed and bold” – in fact, a party lackedflavor for him unless someone very rich or socialwas present.

Mailer could be politically romantic aboutall sorts of things – he was stubbornly, stupidlyopposed to birth control; when he ran formayor in New York he thought juvenile delin-quents should solve their disputes in joustingpageants in Central Park. But when it came tothe main foreign policy question of the time –the Vietnam War – Mailer’s diagnosis wasmuch more on point than that of any foreignpolicy mandarin on offer. Here he is, in TheArmies of the Night, laying out how Americahad made a mistake by fighting communismwhen it could have sat back and toasted thevarious nationalisms popping up across thedecolonizing world:

No, Asia was best left to the Asians. If theCommunists absorbed those countries, and suc-ceeded in building splendid nations who madethe transition to technological culture withoutundue agony, one would be forced to applaud; itseemed evident on the face of the evidence inVietnam, that America could not bring techno-logy land to Asia without bankrupting itself inoperations ill-conceived, poorly comprehendedand executed in waste. But the greater likelihoodwas that if the Communists prevailed in Asia

they would suffer in much the same fashion.Divisions, schisms, and sects would appear. Anendless number of collisions between primitivecustom and Marxist dogma, a thousand dailypullulations of intrigue, a heritage of cruelty,atrocity, and betrayal would fall upon theCommunists. It was not difficult to envision atime when one Communist nation in Asia mightlook for American aid against another Commu-nist nation. Certainly Russia and China would beengaged in a cold war with each other fordecades. Therefore to leave Asia would be pre-cisely to gain the balance of power. The answerthen was to get out, to get out any way one could.Get out. There was nothing to fear – perhapsthere never had been. For the more Communismexpanded, the more monumental would becomeits program, the more flaccid its preoccupationwith world conquest. In the expansion ofcommunism was its own containment.

That is Mailer in 1967, casually dispensingclairvoyance that it would take the US foreignpolicy elite another few decades to cotton onto.It is the kind of thing heterodox sages of Inter-national Relations such as John Mearsheimerare celebrated for realizing fifty years later.

It still feels premature to hazard a verdict,but, meta-fiction aside, it’s the journalism thatseems more permanent and alive than mostof the straight fiction in these twin volumes. Iwould nominate Mailer’s 1964 Esquire piece,“In the Red Light”, about the RepublicanNational Convention that year, as the bestsingle piece of American political reportage ofthe period, possibly rivalled only by Garry

Wills’s freakishly lucid Nixon Agonistes. Thestakes in the Goldwater campaign were, asusual for Mailer, existential. Try not to thinkabout the present as you read this:

Goldwater was a demagogue – he permittedhis supporters to sell a drink called Gold Water,twenty-five cents a can for orange concentrateand warm soda – let no one say it went down likepiss: he was a demagogue. He was also sincere.That was the damnable difficulty. Half-Jewand blue-eyed – if you belonged to the breed,you knew it was manic depressive for sure: aman who designed his own electronic flagpoleto raise Old Glory at dawn, pull her down at dusk– he had an instinct for the heart of the disease –he knew how to bring balm to the mad, or at leastto half the mad; Goldwater would have much tolearn about Negroes. But one thing was certain;he could win. He would be breadwinner, hus-band and rogue to the underprivileged of thepsyche, he would strike a spark in many drysouls for he offered release to frustrations deeperthan politics. If Mailer saw brutish, impish thuggery to his

right, he sensed a kind of political nihilism on,or within, his left in figures like his friend andcompetitor James Baldwin. In The Armies ofthe Night, he registers a fit of impatience withBaldwin’s occasional backsliding towards atheologically inflected vision of cosmic jus-tice:

Then came a memory of James Baldwin andDiana Sands on a show called Night Line wheretelevision viewers could make a telephone call tothe guests. Baldwin had received a call from a

liberal which went, “I’d like to help, and I’m ask-ing you how.” “Don’t ask me, baby,” said Bald-win, “ask yourself.” “You don’t understand,”said the liberal, “I know something about thesematters, but it’s getting confusing for me. I’masking you in all sincerity where you think myhelp could be best offered.” “Well, baby,” saidBaldwin, “that’s your problem.” And DianaSands, pinky extended in total delicate black-lady disgust, put the receiver back in the cradle.“You see,” said Baldwin, talking to Les Crane,the master of ceremonies, “I remember what anold Negro woman told me once down South.She said, ‘What the white man will somedaylearn is that there is no remission of sin.’ That Inever forgot,” said Jimmy, “because you see it’sperfectly possible the white will not be forgiven,not for a single cut or whipping or lynch mob orrape of a black woman,” his voice now as softand reminiscent of the wind as some Africanman of witchcraft. And I had to throttle animpulse to pick up the phone and call Baldwin,and say, “You get this, baby. There’s a shit-stormcoming like nothing you ever knew. So ask your-self if what you desire is for the white to kill everyblack so that there be total remission of guiltin your black soul.” And the mind went outstill again.

This passage gets at some of Mailer’s morepragmatic side: that well-meaning whites andoppressed blacks had to band together againstthe bad whites (Diana Sands had recentlyplayed the female lead in Baldwin’s play Bluesfor Mr Charlie). In one decade, the bad whitewas Goldwater, trigger-happy with nuclearweapons; in another, it was George W. Bush,trigger-happy in the face of dictators. WhatMailer delivered in pieces such as “In the RedLight” was something more than what goes by“New” or “Gonzo” journalism: he wanted toblast the present with his own passions andrecord what ricocheted back at him. In thisrespect at least, if not in others, the literarypolitical writers who covered campaignsand right-wing protests after him – HunterThompson, Martin Amis, David Foster Wal-lace, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Patricia Lock-wood, George Saunders, Joshua Cohen,Christian Lorentzen – are all his heirs. ForMailer, literary-political reportage had to tran-scend the analytical and play in a propheticregister. It was not the first draft of historybut his own time comprehended in its fullpsychic delirium.

I encountered Mailer once at a Paris Reviewparty at George Plimpton’s townhouse, whenI was twenty and he must have just clearedeighty. He was like an incandescent lepre-chaun, beet red, singed white hair, arctic eyes,almost a caricature of the romantic writer,with Inspiration running through his body likean electrical current. He penguin-steppedaround a pool table and asked me to bring overa small stool so that he could stand on it abovethe assembled guests. “Well, we have fightheading toward us. The trouble with Kerry” –it was a political speech – “is that he’s a wind-surfing man …” Mailer exhorted us all to keepthe demagoguery in its present incarnation atbay. You suspect he would have been amongthe first to recognize that the present Republi-can dispensation is the advance of the sameblight. Yet in the current part-time occupant ofthe White House, he would at least have foundsomething to work with, something madeof the same material, a phoney from anotherouter borough, working in an adjacent racket,dead set on making it.