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The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
Fifty years after the March on the Pentagon, Norman Mailer’s seminal tour de force remains as urgent and incisive as ever. Winner of America’s two highest literary awards, The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties’ tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his peak.
The time is October 21, 1967. The place is Washington, D.C. Depending on the paper you read, 20,000 to 200,000 protestors are marching to end the war in Vietnam, while helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is a writer named Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation in the day’s events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that shatters the mold of traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth.
Fifty years after the March on the Pentagon, Norman Mailer’s seminal tour de force remains as urgent and incisive as ever. Winner of America’s two highest literary awards, The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties’ tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his peak.
The time is October 21, 1967. The place is Washington, D.C. Depending on the paper you read, 20,000 to 200,000 protestors are marching to end the war in Vietnam, while helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is a writer named Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation in the day’s events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that shatters the mold of traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
About the author
Norman Mailer
276 books1,284 followersNorman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.
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June 10, 2024
I read this wonderful book back in the university semester of 1969/70, when I was managing the little library on the main floor of Leonard Hall, my residence for freshman and junior years.
The preceding spring I had been awarded the University Prize for first year English. And Mr. Hanratty, the chief administrator of Leonard Hall, had duly noted that fact.
Now, as it happened, I had visited the collection as a Freshman, and had seen first-hand how ill-maintained it was.
Complaints must have landed on Mr. Hanratty's desk, and now he was killing two birds with one stone. The carrot on the stick which he held out to me was a mid-sized monthly allowance for book buying. A raging bibliophile on a Spartan budget, how could I refuse?
I leapt at the chance. I could help out, and satisfy my book cravings too!
And so, now that I had the job, I obviously had to MAINTAIN the library as well as stock it. On one of my cleaning forays, I started browsing through The Armies Of The Night. It was tremendous.
Mailer, so brash and brazen in his likes and dislikes - strong drink being a big like, and pretentiousness the biggest dislike - was at heart an insecure and slightly paranoid man.
He was antsy in the extreme with his literary peers. Why? Just say that word LITERARY and Mailer would recoil in dread. For him a literary person was a pretentious person.
Take Robert Lowell. Like Mailer, he championed confessional literature in the 1960's - you woulda thought they'd have hit it off. Not a chance. Growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, Mailer trusted no one.
Sad in a way. He just couldn't see the human side of those much better off. You see, Lowell was a genteel Christian. Poor Mailer was not.
Armies of the Night is a desperate plea for sanity amidst the lunatic melee of the 1968 Republican convention, which would confirm Richard Nixon's desperately polished image of the new Golden Boy of the Right.
Help.
Yes, America would soon need all the sanity it could muster...
But back to Mailer. Reading this book the year after that 1968 melee, I was riveted by his incredibly vivid prose style.
He wrote confessional journalism of the highest calibre. If you want a book of reportage that is brimming with life, read this.
It impressed me so much I adopted his confessional and racy style as my own.
And you still see it 53 years later in reviews like this. And a confessional writing style can lay every card on the table!
So, thanks, Norman Mailer, and may you rest in peace. By showing me my true face that too-busy year you were leading me back to God.
The preceding spring I had been awarded the University Prize for first year English. And Mr. Hanratty, the chief administrator of Leonard Hall, had duly noted that fact.
Now, as it happened, I had visited the collection as a Freshman, and had seen first-hand how ill-maintained it was.
Complaints must have landed on Mr. Hanratty's desk, and now he was killing two birds with one stone. The carrot on the stick which he held out to me was a mid-sized monthly allowance for book buying. A raging bibliophile on a Spartan budget, how could I refuse?
I leapt at the chance. I could help out, and satisfy my book cravings too!
And so, now that I had the job, I obviously had to MAINTAIN the library as well as stock it. On one of my cleaning forays, I started browsing through The Armies Of The Night. It was tremendous.
Mailer, so brash and brazen in his likes and dislikes - strong drink being a big like, and pretentiousness the biggest dislike - was at heart an insecure and slightly paranoid man.
He was antsy in the extreme with his literary peers. Why? Just say that word LITERARY and Mailer would recoil in dread. For him a literary person was a pretentious person.
Take Robert Lowell. Like Mailer, he championed confessional literature in the 1960's - you woulda thought they'd have hit it off. Not a chance. Growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, Mailer trusted no one.
Sad in a way. He just couldn't see the human side of those much better off. You see, Lowell was a genteel Christian. Poor Mailer was not.
Armies of the Night is a desperate plea for sanity amidst the lunatic melee of the 1968 Republican convention, which would confirm Richard Nixon's desperately polished image of the new Golden Boy of the Right.
Help.
Yes, America would soon need all the sanity it could muster...
But back to Mailer. Reading this book the year after that 1968 melee, I was riveted by his incredibly vivid prose style.
He wrote confessional journalism of the highest calibre. If you want a book of reportage that is brimming with life, read this.
It impressed me so much I adopted his confessional and racy style as my own.
And you still see it 53 years later in reviews like this. And a confessional writing style can lay every card on the table!
So, thanks, Norman Mailer, and may you rest in peace. By showing me my true face that too-busy year you were leading me back to God.
February 9, 2019
“Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History.”
― Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History
It has been a long time since I've read Mailer. I read The Executioner's Song when I was a Mormon missionary (in a Lazyboy while my companion snored in the next room) in Grand Junction, Colorado in 1993. I read Harlot's Ghost my after my sophomore year in college. Mailer is fascinating to me. At the same time he is both an irritating egoist chasing the tail of Twain, Hemingway and Fitzgerald (and never quite grabbing it). But he is also, at his best, a tiger of modern journalism. He (and Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and other New Journalists) showed that print wasn't dead. That in the age of TV, however, it needed to reinvent itself and break some of the static and almost dead boundaries. When Mailer is off, he is horrible: his writing is fat (it almost glistens with a literary lard), but, but oh when it is on. When Mailer has grabbed the Universe by the balls, there is almost nothing close to the energy of his words.
It is weird to think this book was written over 50 years ago (the action happened over a few days in late October 1967; the book was published in 1968). But Mailer was my exact age when it all happened. I feel both old and young at the same time. I've been meaning to read this book for years, but now seemed right. It was an accident to read it at the same age Mailer wrote it, but it does give me a bit of perspective in his motives, his perspective, his mood. It also seems appropriate now. No other period quite seems as close to the late 60s as the last few years. I feel like something has to break, or a beast is going to be born. I hope Mailer isn't write and that we aren't in the final stages before a freakish totalitarianism emerges. Perhaps it is already too late. Deliver us from our curse - indeed.
― Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History
It has been a long time since I've read Mailer. I read The Executioner's Song when I was a Mormon missionary (in a Lazyboy while my companion snored in the next room) in Grand Junction, Colorado in 1993. I read Harlot's Ghost my after my sophomore year in college. Mailer is fascinating to me. At the same time he is both an irritating egoist chasing the tail of Twain, Hemingway and Fitzgerald (and never quite grabbing it). But he is also, at his best, a tiger of modern journalism. He (and Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and other New Journalists) showed that print wasn't dead. That in the age of TV, however, it needed to reinvent itself and break some of the static and almost dead boundaries. When Mailer is off, he is horrible: his writing is fat (it almost glistens with a literary lard), but, but oh when it is on. When Mailer has grabbed the Universe by the balls, there is almost nothing close to the energy of his words.
It is weird to think this book was written over 50 years ago (the action happened over a few days in late October 1967; the book was published in 1968). But Mailer was my exact age when it all happened. I feel both old and young at the same time. I've been meaning to read this book for years, but now seemed right. It was an accident to read it at the same age Mailer wrote it, but it does give me a bit of perspective in his motives, his perspective, his mood. It also seems appropriate now. No other period quite seems as close to the late 60s as the last few years. I feel like something has to break, or a beast is going to be born. I hope Mailer isn't write and that we aren't in the final stages before a freakish totalitarianism emerges. Perhaps it is already too late. Deliver us from our curse - indeed.
January 7, 2023
"Armies of the Night" (1968) is a sort of series of chronicles on the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, in other words, the "march on the Pentagon." The author depicts us, in bright colors, without hiding anything of their weaknesses, the leaders of the opposition and their troops: students and professors, black and Latino walkers, Protestant pastors, "liberal bourgeois," hippies... He shows how these people who came from various backgrounds to protest against the Vietnam War, united by courage, did not hesitate to confront the police and military forces with their bare hands. Many protesters ended up in jail, starting with Mailer himself.
October 17, 2014
A Novel History
This loosely "fictionalised" account of the 1967 anti-Vietnam war March on the Pentagon won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
While many of Mailer's political and philosophical concerns could be said to have dated (like much of Sixties culture), I really enjoyed re-reading it.
I suspect that many of my own views about Sixties politics (particularly the relationship between the Old Left and the New Left) were shaped by my first reading.
To that extent, it's had a lasting effect on me, despite its flaws.
History as a Novel
The work is divided into two parts:
* History as a Novel; and
* The Novel as History.
Part I is New Journalism in which the author is inserted into the action. Except he is cast as a semi-fictional third person protagonist, hence it is just as much post-modernist metafiction as journalism.
Mailer was both a speaker and a demonstrator at the events described in the novel. This is how he justifies the choice of himself as protagonist:
"An eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required, further he must be not only involved, but ambiguous in his own proportions, a comic hero...Mailer is a figure of monumental disproportions and so serves willy-nilly as the bridge...into the crazy house, the crazy mansion...Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History."
Despite his overt and unashamed egotism, Mailer also paints himself as a clown in a vaudeville or burlesque show.
Running late for his speech, he can't find the lights in the venue toilet and accidentally urinates on the floor, which event he builds into an extended impromptu metaphor in his speech a few minutes later. Inevitably, he both takes a piss and takes the piss.
The sense of humour doesn't quite balance the egotism, but at least it broadens his rhetorical palette.
The Novel as History
Part II dispenses with this artifice. However, it also quotes liberally from other contemporary accounts of the March on the Pentagon, illustrating the point that, if they had formed the factual basis of History, it would have been erroneous:
"...the mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of any historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced."
In this light, Part I proves to be an equally valid contribution to History, even if it's a subjective account of what went on in the mind of a minor protagonist:
"His history of the Pentagon...insisted on becoming a history of himself over four days, and therefore was history in the costume of a novel."
The two parts are therefore equally contributions towards a History that might be derived from an aggregation of different perspectives.
Stormin' Norman
Mailer's favourite stance on any issue (moral, political or otherwise) is adversary or contrarian:
"The clue to discovery was not in the substance of one's idea, but in what was learned from the style of one's attack (which was one reason Mailer's style changed for every project)."
However, in pursuit of a "theatre of ideas", he does give ample airtime to his adversaries, and his accounts of their views are often sufficiently fair to allow you to embrace their views in preference to his.
His own views might not always be reliable or persuasive. However, at least he tells you both sides of the story, unlike much contemporary journalism or historical analysis, which frequently contains an unacknowledged but transparent bias.
Moral Action, Not Just Calculus
Until the March, Mailer was content to express his political opposition to the Vietnam War and the social and political culture that generated it, by way of his writing.
The March presented to him both an opportunity and a challenge to go beyond his writing and actually participate in political action. The Novelist became a Participant, as well as a Protagonist in his metafiction.
There comes a time when a moral calculus might not be enough. If you genuinely care about your subject matter, sooner or later it has to be translated into moral or political action on an individual and/or group level.
No matter how small his contribution to the March (he was one of the first ten to be arrested and jailed), he contributed to a tangible, if symbolic, political action.
This action was significant in its own right, quite apart from his documentation of it in novel form.
Unlike some current moral commentators, he was not content simply to describe the predicament of people who might be seen as victims, he sought to do something political about it.
Morality is not just about thinking, it's also about action.
A writer who fails to acknowledge this risks entrapment in the world of art for art's sake. This is not to denigrate the pure artist, only to caution against hagiography of the inactive.
The Theatre of Ideas
Mailer's own politics were difficult to define at most points in his career.
In 1967, if not the whole time, they were in a state of flux and transition.
At no point did he ever really throw his hat in with one Weltanschauung. He remained individualistic, to the point of egotism.
However, the March highlighted the fact that he found himself sandwiched between two adversaries.
The first was the Old Left, the second the New Left.
To some extent, the March was a unique rainbow coalition of the two (plus Mailer, to the extent that he stood outside both camps), and these are genuine rainbow stories. However, the two movements coexisted like two aspects of a dialectic, that would both preserve the old and give rise to something new.
The Old Left
Whatever its goals, the Old Left represented rationality and logic. Mailer refers to its adherence to the "sound-as-brickwork logic of the next step in some hard new Left program". To the extent that it was Marxist, it belonged to the tradition of Scientific Socialism.
However, the excesses of Soviet Communism had undermined both Socialism and confidence in its rationalism. In its Totalitarian manifestation, it was more oppressive than Capitalism. Understandably, the children of the Old Left were seeking an alternative.
Mailer had been on the Board of the Socialist magazine, "Dissent", before finding that he too had moved away from the other members politically (he refers to himself as a "quondam Marxist"), despite remaining "fond" of them personally.
The New Left
The New Left was less dependent on a faith in rationality and logic. The Old Left logic was almost too dull and boring for the children of the New Left:
"The new generation believed in technology more than any before it, but the generation also believed in LSD, in witches, in tribal knowledge, in orgy, and revolution. It had no respect whatsoever for the unassailable logic of the next step: belief was reserved for the revelatory mystery of the happening where you did not know what was going to happen next..."
It adored Che Guevara and modelled its politics and political aesthetic on him. The primary goal was to embrace Revolution as a political strategy. However, Revolution had ceased to be a means to an end. It had become an end in its own right.
Nobody could know what would replace the current economic, social and political order, until the Revolution had succeeded and we saw how all of the cards had landed.
Spontaneity was the primary impulse: "Trust the authority of your senses...If it made you feel good, it was good." If it made you feel good, do it. There was no desire to subject the Revolution to rationality and logic and five year plans.
For the Old Left, this was infantile, dangerous and counterproductive. Why support such a movement if you couldn't tell whether it would simply replace one form of oppression with a reign of terror?
Mailer was more sympathetic to the vision of the New Left than was the Old Left. However, his analysis of the New Left agenda doesn't dig particularly deep, and as a result it suffers from its superficiality. In fairness, the New Left had only just formed and hadn't yet started to focus primarily on Identity Politics. Thus, it's difficult to say what it represented in 1967.
Nihilism and Authority
Mailer doesn't expressly use the "A word" (Anarchism) to describe the New Left. Its advocates are hippies. He often suggests that they believe in Nihilism, not in the sense that it might oppose chaos to order, just that they believe that something has to be torn down, before something can be (re)built in its place.
What the Nihilists and hippies oppose is "the Authority": "their radicalism was in their hate for the Authority". Mailer doesn't refer to it as the State. It seems to be broader than the institution of government. The Authority encompasses the military-industrial complex as well. Within the Capitalist system, there is a conspiracy of the State and Business. Society must conform or be oppressed.
Mailer discovers that he has some nuanced sympathy for these views. He sees in the March "a confirmation of the contests of his own life."
Equally, there are differences. Historically, his drug of choice has been speed (supplemented by whiskey, marijuana and seconal). The hippies' preference is LSD.
Mailer actually suspects that acid enhances the prospects of survival of the Authority, by destroying the minds of the next generation.
Totalitarian Acceleration
At times, Mailer's description of the plight of this generation seems to foreshadow Pynchon and De Lillo:
"The nightmare was in the echo of those trips which had fractured their sense of past and present...nature was a veil whose tissue had ben ripped by static, screams of jet motors, the highway grid of the suburbs, smog, defoliation, pollution of streams, overfertilisation of earth, anti-fertilisation of women, and the radiation of two decades of near blind atom busting..."
Still, Mailer was prepared to overlook this difference, on the basis that the Revolution might be a vital part of a twenty year war that, if won, would result in some economic, social and political alternatives that he was prepared to try out. If the hippies didn't last the distance, well, that was their bad luck.
On the other hand, "nothing was worse than a nihilism which failed to succeed - for totalitarianism would then be accelerated."
The Beast
Mailer's worldview is not restricted to a battle between the individual and the Authority (and its "oncoming totalitarianism").
He describes one of his personae as "the Beast". He doesn't elaborate on this concept in this work. However, it represents his animalistic nature, perhaps an irrational or non-rational Self that is opposed to the oppressiveness of society.
There is little discussion of Freud in the novel (apart from a veiled reference of Marcuse in terms of "the Freud-ridden embers of Marxism"). However, it's possible that the Beast is the Ego and potentially the Id, and that its adversary is the Super-Ego.
Sexuality and Guilt
Mailer raises these issues in the context of his discussion of sex (a subject upon which his ideas now seem to be the most perverse).
Mailer's adversary, Paul Goodman, believes that all forms of sexuality (including homosexuality and onanism) are equally valid. He strives for a choice of sexualities, none of which should be associated with guilt.
On the other hand, Mailer, despite his apparent support of libertarianism, advocates only one valid sexuality (heterosexuality):
"Mailer, with his neo-Victorianism, thought that if there was anything worse than homosexuality and masturbation, it was putting the two together."
He also regards guilt as a vital part of the pleasure derived from sexual activity.
If sex wasn't somehow sanctioned, he believes there would be no drama involved in sexual activity. It would become dull (the worst of all possible crimes). The prospect of guilt introduces an element of theatre and dramatic tension. Individuals need guilt and social sanction, so that they have something with which to do battle and win.
Great Balls of Defiance
Mailer's philosophy requires an adversary which it can defy.
He is not so much interested in harmony as the type of creativity that emerges from conflict. Without a dialectical opposition, there is no excitement, there is no life.
This is how he describes the symbolic battle between demonstrator and soldier:
"I will steal your elan, and your brawn, and the very animal of your charm, because I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit, I am stealing your balls."
Beauty and the Beast
Mailer's ideas descend further into idiosyncrasy when he addresses the role of women, particularly in the act of sex.
Mailer's philosophy is very male-oriented. Women are the object upon which the male subject acts. Sex is the vehicle for the expression of male dynamism and power. Women are mere passive vehicles or conduits for male self-expression. There is no sense of a personal or sexual relationship as mutual or other than an Hegelian Master/Servant relationship (in which the male is always the Master and the female is always the Servant).
Interestingly, men need to go on a journey to discover and realise their version of Mailer's Beast. Men are not born men or beasts. Paraphrasing Simone de Beauvoir, men become men or beasts. Men have to earn their beastliness:
"Nobody was born a man; you earned manhood provided you were good enough, bold enough."
Masculinity and sex are sporting activities, perhaps even blood sports. Just as professional sport puts men to the test, so does sex. Only women are just the playing field upon which the sport is played or acted out.
We Can Be Heroes
If Mailer wanted to portray modern or post-modern life as some sort of heroic encounter between the individual and the State or the Authority or the Big Other (or perhaps even Death itself), he effectively shot himself in the foot by his rampant sixties misogynist, homophobic machismo. As Mailer says of himself in the third person:
"He would have been admirable, except that he was an absolute egomaniac, a Beast - no recognition existed of the existence of anything beyond the range of his own reach."
Regardless, I think there is something to be salvaged from his writing in terms of his focus on dynamism and activism, if not necessarily the constant quest for dialectical opposition or conflict (as a proof of manhood).
Besides, the quality of his prose is consistently excellent, if you forgive him his penis obsession and his peculiar ideological bent.
A Private Mixture
For all his flaws, it's also possible that this work can now be read more fruitfully by later generations.
Ultimately, Mailer defines his political views as "a private mixture of Marxism, conservatism, nihilism, and large parts of existentialism."
This mix might not have made much sense at the time when people tended to occupy one camp or another, but not two or more. Many of these old differentiations don't resonate any longer. Now, it's possible that the inconsistencies between the different camps can potentially be reconciled into one comprehensible worldview or temperament, at least on an individual basis.
Whatever, it's refreshing to read a moral calculus and a primer for action that's comprehensive, well-written and less than 300 pages long.
This loosely "fictionalised" account of the 1967 anti-Vietnam war March on the Pentagon won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
While many of Mailer's political and philosophical concerns could be said to have dated (like much of Sixties culture), I really enjoyed re-reading it.
I suspect that many of my own views about Sixties politics (particularly the relationship between the Old Left and the New Left) were shaped by my first reading.
To that extent, it's had a lasting effect on me, despite its flaws.
History as a Novel
The work is divided into two parts:
* History as a Novel; and
* The Novel as History.
Part I is New Journalism in which the author is inserted into the action. Except he is cast as a semi-fictional third person protagonist, hence it is just as much post-modernist metafiction as journalism.
Mailer was both a speaker and a demonstrator at the events described in the novel. This is how he justifies the choice of himself as protagonist:
"An eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required, further he must be not only involved, but ambiguous in his own proportions, a comic hero...Mailer is a figure of monumental disproportions and so serves willy-nilly as the bridge...into the crazy house, the crazy mansion...Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History."
Despite his overt and unashamed egotism, Mailer also paints himself as a clown in a vaudeville or burlesque show.
Running late for his speech, he can't find the lights in the venue toilet and accidentally urinates on the floor, which event he builds into an extended impromptu metaphor in his speech a few minutes later. Inevitably, he both takes a piss and takes the piss.
The sense of humour doesn't quite balance the egotism, but at least it broadens his rhetorical palette.
The Novel as History
Part II dispenses with this artifice. However, it also quotes liberally from other contemporary accounts of the March on the Pentagon, illustrating the point that, if they had formed the factual basis of History, it would have been erroneous:
"...the mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of any historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced."
In this light, Part I proves to be an equally valid contribution to History, even if it's a subjective account of what went on in the mind of a minor protagonist:
"His history of the Pentagon...insisted on becoming a history of himself over four days, and therefore was history in the costume of a novel."
The two parts are therefore equally contributions towards a History that might be derived from an aggregation of different perspectives.
Stormin' Norman
Mailer's favourite stance on any issue (moral, political or otherwise) is adversary or contrarian:
"The clue to discovery was not in the substance of one's idea, but in what was learned from the style of one's attack (which was one reason Mailer's style changed for every project)."
However, in pursuit of a "theatre of ideas", he does give ample airtime to his adversaries, and his accounts of their views are often sufficiently fair to allow you to embrace their views in preference to his.
His own views might not always be reliable or persuasive. However, at least he tells you both sides of the story, unlike much contemporary journalism or historical analysis, which frequently contains an unacknowledged but transparent bias.
Moral Action, Not Just Calculus
Until the March, Mailer was content to express his political opposition to the Vietnam War and the social and political culture that generated it, by way of his writing.
The March presented to him both an opportunity and a challenge to go beyond his writing and actually participate in political action. The Novelist became a Participant, as well as a Protagonist in his metafiction.
There comes a time when a moral calculus might not be enough. If you genuinely care about your subject matter, sooner or later it has to be translated into moral or political action on an individual and/or group level.
No matter how small his contribution to the March (he was one of the first ten to be arrested and jailed), he contributed to a tangible, if symbolic, political action.
This action was significant in its own right, quite apart from his documentation of it in novel form.
Unlike some current moral commentators, he was not content simply to describe the predicament of people who might be seen as victims, he sought to do something political about it.
Morality is not just about thinking, it's also about action.
A writer who fails to acknowledge this risks entrapment in the world of art for art's sake. This is not to denigrate the pure artist, only to caution against hagiography of the inactive.
The Theatre of Ideas
Mailer's own politics were difficult to define at most points in his career.
In 1967, if not the whole time, they were in a state of flux and transition.
At no point did he ever really throw his hat in with one Weltanschauung. He remained individualistic, to the point of egotism.
However, the March highlighted the fact that he found himself sandwiched between two adversaries.
The first was the Old Left, the second the New Left.
To some extent, the March was a unique rainbow coalition of the two (plus Mailer, to the extent that he stood outside both camps), and these are genuine rainbow stories. However, the two movements coexisted like two aspects of a dialectic, that would both preserve the old and give rise to something new.
The Old Left
Whatever its goals, the Old Left represented rationality and logic. Mailer refers to its adherence to the "sound-as-brickwork logic of the next step in some hard new Left program". To the extent that it was Marxist, it belonged to the tradition of Scientific Socialism.
However, the excesses of Soviet Communism had undermined both Socialism and confidence in its rationalism. In its Totalitarian manifestation, it was more oppressive than Capitalism. Understandably, the children of the Old Left were seeking an alternative.
Mailer had been on the Board of the Socialist magazine, "Dissent", before finding that he too had moved away from the other members politically (he refers to himself as a "quondam Marxist"), despite remaining "fond" of them personally.
The New Left
The New Left was less dependent on a faith in rationality and logic. The Old Left logic was almost too dull and boring for the children of the New Left:
"The new generation believed in technology more than any before it, but the generation also believed in LSD, in witches, in tribal knowledge, in orgy, and revolution. It had no respect whatsoever for the unassailable logic of the next step: belief was reserved for the revelatory mystery of the happening where you did not know what was going to happen next..."
It adored Che Guevara and modelled its politics and political aesthetic on him. The primary goal was to embrace Revolution as a political strategy. However, Revolution had ceased to be a means to an end. It had become an end in its own right.
Nobody could know what would replace the current economic, social and political order, until the Revolution had succeeded and we saw how all of the cards had landed.
Spontaneity was the primary impulse: "Trust the authority of your senses...If it made you feel good, it was good." If it made you feel good, do it. There was no desire to subject the Revolution to rationality and logic and five year plans.
For the Old Left, this was infantile, dangerous and counterproductive. Why support such a movement if you couldn't tell whether it would simply replace one form of oppression with a reign of terror?
Mailer was more sympathetic to the vision of the New Left than was the Old Left. However, his analysis of the New Left agenda doesn't dig particularly deep, and as a result it suffers from its superficiality. In fairness, the New Left had only just formed and hadn't yet started to focus primarily on Identity Politics. Thus, it's difficult to say what it represented in 1967.
Nihilism and Authority
Mailer doesn't expressly use the "A word" (Anarchism) to describe the New Left. Its advocates are hippies. He often suggests that they believe in Nihilism, not in the sense that it might oppose chaos to order, just that they believe that something has to be torn down, before something can be (re)built in its place.
What the Nihilists and hippies oppose is "the Authority": "their radicalism was in their hate for the Authority". Mailer doesn't refer to it as the State. It seems to be broader than the institution of government. The Authority encompasses the military-industrial complex as well. Within the Capitalist system, there is a conspiracy of the State and Business. Society must conform or be oppressed.
Mailer discovers that he has some nuanced sympathy for these views. He sees in the March "a confirmation of the contests of his own life."
Equally, there are differences. Historically, his drug of choice has been speed (supplemented by whiskey, marijuana and seconal). The hippies' preference is LSD.
Mailer actually suspects that acid enhances the prospects of survival of the Authority, by destroying the minds of the next generation.
Totalitarian Acceleration
At times, Mailer's description of the plight of this generation seems to foreshadow Pynchon and De Lillo:
"The nightmare was in the echo of those trips which had fractured their sense of past and present...nature was a veil whose tissue had ben ripped by static, screams of jet motors, the highway grid of the suburbs, smog, defoliation, pollution of streams, overfertilisation of earth, anti-fertilisation of women, and the radiation of two decades of near blind atom busting..."
Still, Mailer was prepared to overlook this difference, on the basis that the Revolution might be a vital part of a twenty year war that, if won, would result in some economic, social and political alternatives that he was prepared to try out. If the hippies didn't last the distance, well, that was their bad luck.
On the other hand, "nothing was worse than a nihilism which failed to succeed - for totalitarianism would then be accelerated."
The Beast
Mailer's worldview is not restricted to a battle between the individual and the Authority (and its "oncoming totalitarianism").
He describes one of his personae as "the Beast". He doesn't elaborate on this concept in this work. However, it represents his animalistic nature, perhaps an irrational or non-rational Self that is opposed to the oppressiveness of society.
There is little discussion of Freud in the novel (apart from a veiled reference of Marcuse in terms of "the Freud-ridden embers of Marxism"). However, it's possible that the Beast is the Ego and potentially the Id, and that its adversary is the Super-Ego.
Sexuality and Guilt
Mailer raises these issues in the context of his discussion of sex (a subject upon which his ideas now seem to be the most perverse).
Mailer's adversary, Paul Goodman, believes that all forms of sexuality (including homosexuality and onanism) are equally valid. He strives for a choice of sexualities, none of which should be associated with guilt.
On the other hand, Mailer, despite his apparent support of libertarianism, advocates only one valid sexuality (heterosexuality):
"Mailer, with his neo-Victorianism, thought that if there was anything worse than homosexuality and masturbation, it was putting the two together."
He also regards guilt as a vital part of the pleasure derived from sexual activity.
If sex wasn't somehow sanctioned, he believes there would be no drama involved in sexual activity. It would become dull (the worst of all possible crimes). The prospect of guilt introduces an element of theatre and dramatic tension. Individuals need guilt and social sanction, so that they have something with which to do battle and win.
Great Balls of Defiance
Mailer's philosophy requires an adversary which it can defy.
He is not so much interested in harmony as the type of creativity that emerges from conflict. Without a dialectical opposition, there is no excitement, there is no life.
This is how he describes the symbolic battle between demonstrator and soldier:
"I will steal your elan, and your brawn, and the very animal of your charm, because I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit, I am stealing your balls."
Beauty and the Beast
Mailer's ideas descend further into idiosyncrasy when he addresses the role of women, particularly in the act of sex.
Mailer's philosophy is very male-oriented. Women are the object upon which the male subject acts. Sex is the vehicle for the expression of male dynamism and power. Women are mere passive vehicles or conduits for male self-expression. There is no sense of a personal or sexual relationship as mutual or other than an Hegelian Master/Servant relationship (in which the male is always the Master and the female is always the Servant).
Interestingly, men need to go on a journey to discover and realise their version of Mailer's Beast. Men are not born men or beasts. Paraphrasing Simone de Beauvoir, men become men or beasts. Men have to earn their beastliness:
"Nobody was born a man; you earned manhood provided you were good enough, bold enough."
Masculinity and sex are sporting activities, perhaps even blood sports. Just as professional sport puts men to the test, so does sex. Only women are just the playing field upon which the sport is played or acted out.
We Can Be Heroes
If Mailer wanted to portray modern or post-modern life as some sort of heroic encounter between the individual and the State or the Authority or the Big Other (or perhaps even Death itself), he effectively shot himself in the foot by his rampant sixties misogynist, homophobic machismo. As Mailer says of himself in the third person:
"He would have been admirable, except that he was an absolute egomaniac, a Beast - no recognition existed of the existence of anything beyond the range of his own reach."
Regardless, I think there is something to be salvaged from his writing in terms of his focus on dynamism and activism, if not necessarily the constant quest for dialectical opposition or conflict (as a proof of manhood).
Besides, the quality of his prose is consistently excellent, if you forgive him his penis obsession and his peculiar ideological bent.
A Private Mixture
For all his flaws, it's also possible that this work can now be read more fruitfully by later generations.
Ultimately, Mailer defines his political views as "a private mixture of Marxism, conservatism, nihilism, and large parts of existentialism."
This mix might not have made much sense at the time when people tended to occupy one camp or another, but not two or more. Many of these old differentiations don't resonate any longer. Now, it's possible that the inconsistencies between the different camps can potentially be reconciled into one comprehensible worldview or temperament, at least on an individual basis.
Whatever, it's refreshing to read a moral calculus and a primer for action that's comprehensive, well-written and less than 300 pages long.
January 8, 2021
The Pentagon rose like an anomaly of the sea from the soft Virginia fields, its pale yellow walls reminiscent of some plastic plug coming out of the hole made in flesh by an unmentionable operation. There it sat, geometrical aura complete, isolated from anything in nature surrounding it.
Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Award for this account of the October '67 March on the Pentagon, the March an act of protest against the Vietnam War. Wikipedia notes that the book is associated with other nonfiction novels of the time, such as Capote's In Cold Blood, Thompson's Hell's Angels, and Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
As I reread the book, my copy an old Signet paperback with a cover that I can't find listed on GR, I had to contend with two non-diegetic running commentaries in its narrow margins. One was written by whoever read the Signet paperback before I did- let's refer to that commentary as RC1- and RC2 was written by 2018 Mike, who read Armies before a trip to Washington that year. RC2 naturally has a few things to say about Mailer's narrative, some of them even halfway sensible, but focuses to a disappointing extent on RC1, often commenting with open contempt. '18 Mike seems to have been especially irritated by the fact that the writer of RC1 felt the need to underline the word "existential" and its variations whenever they appeared; more than once underlined some unremarkable sentence and wrote in capitals I LIKE THAT ('18 Mike, obviously dealing with issues of unresolved anger and hostility, drew an arrow to those words the second time they appeared, and wrote "fuck you"); and made comments like "refers to himself in third-person- interesting." Is it really that interesting or relevant, '18 Mike wanted to know, and how is it that you didn't notice Mailer was doing that until page 62?
But maybe I was too judgmental of RC1. I have read a fair amount of Mailer's nonfiction, so to me the style of this book is just Mailer doing his nonfiction thing- observing everything exterior and interior, both the physical world and the shifts in his own consciousness, in minute detail (it's also very familiar because so much modern nonfiction owes a debt to Mailer and the New Journalists)- but maybe whoever wrote RC1 is right, maybe it's worth thinking about the stylistic choices Mailer made in approaching this material.
Early in the book, Mailer somewhat disarmingly suggests that "the March on the Pentagon was an ambiguous event whose essential value or absurdity may not be established for ten or twenty years, or indeed ever." If any meaning can be derived from it however, he adds, it must be derived through the act itself, in the moment, rather than beforehand by what he refers to as "the ironclad logic of the next step" (first we attack the Pentagon, X, which naturally will lead to Y...), or afterwards, when each side will inevitably claim victory for its ideas. Instead, he regards the action on the Pentagon as he regards writing- not as a way of articulating (or setting down on paper) what one is already conscious of believing, but as a way of discovering what one truly thinks. And Mailer really does attempt to mimic consciousness throughout, breathlessly correcting and amending himself mid-sentence, possibly setting a world-record for commas in the process, seeking ideas that may be just off to the side of conscious thought.
Given that this is not a traditional way to write history or journalism, Mailer employs the style of a novel, one feature of which is that yes, as noted in RC1, it's written in third-person, and follows a narcissistic main character named Mailer, a "semi-distinguished and semi-notorious" writer of 44 years of age, absurd and comic in his contradictions, not the least of which involves balancing a sense of societal responsibility with a steadily waning hope that he can get back to New York that very evening in time for a high-brow party he's been invited to (where, Mailer being Mailer, he would probably enjoy alienating the other guests with tales of his revolutionary activities). Maybe the effect has worn off to a degree in the intervening decades, given the extent to which interiority and self-deprecation have become common features of nonfiction writing, but there's still something refreshing about being reminded that even noble actions are often accompanied by self-involved and ignoble thoughts. Mailer's contemporaries of course would have interpreted events in their own ways. Chomsky is a very different kind of writer and thinker than Mailer was, and yet he is a minor character in this novel, occupying the bunk next to Mailer's after they're both arrested. Chomsky, according to Mailer, was a "slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity. Chomsky- by all odds a dedicated teacher- seemed uneasy at the thought of missing class on Monday."
Mailer, for his part, instead of endorsing the ironclad logic of the next step on one hand, or law and order propaganda on the other (quoted here is a good example of the latter, a New York Times account which focused on the obscenity of the slogans some of the protestors were chanting, but not the actual obscenity of dropping napalm on people halfway across the world), writes about the selfish and somewhat ridiculous truth of interior experience, his experience anyway, a place that traditional history doesn't have access to.
...fear of the consequences of this weekend in Washington, for he had known from the beginning it could disrupt his life for a season or more, and there was even the danger it could change him forever. He was forty-four, and it had taken him most of those years to enjoy his pleasures where he found them...it was no time to embark on ventures which could give one more than a few years in jail. Yet, there was no escape.
The last sentence isn't meant literally, of course; if you achieve a certain level of wealth and fame in America, there is escape- almost always. Mailer didn't have to go to Washington, he didn't have to publicly pledge to aid and abet draft resisters...and yet on a certain level he did. He and Chomsky had extremely different personalities and writing styles, and Mailer's commitment to this idea pales in comparison to Chomsky's, but I think what Mailer also understood in his own way was that being a serious writer, or even a serious person, meant there was no escape from the social, moral and political issues of your age. That if his country was engaged in an unjust war, that had something to do with him. At the same time, he acknowledged that this engagement might involve great risk, and openly questioned his own commitment to it. As he put it in his less-appreciated follow-up to Armies, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, "He liked his life. He wanted it to go on, which meant that he wanted America to go on- not as it was going, not Vietnam- but what price was he really willing to pay?"
If you read Armies, I think you should also read Siege. In fact, I still prefer the latter. It's less hurriedly-written, the writing is sharper, and the events it describes are even more dramatic. Armies is immediate and visceral, but also feels rushed- Mailer admits as much in the text- and his willingness to follow every strand of conscious thought sometimes leads him to dead-ends. Furthermore, maybe it's because I've just had the luxury of reading Vincent Bevins's The Jakarta Method, but it's hard to ignore Mailer's America-centric perspective; he gets a little romantic here and there, invoking the ghosts of the American Revolutionary and Civil Wars, drawing a connection across time but not so much across countries; that is to say, he misses a chance to connect the American Left's resistance to the Vietnam War with the struggles of oppressed people across the world (including those in Vietnam), who were often facing even harder odds and greater danger than dissidents in the US.
That being said, I particularly appreciate the chapter "Why are We in Vietnam?" Mailer doesn't make his case with the geopolitical sophistication of Chomsky, but he is more attuned to the unconscious currents of the zeitgeist. Instead of repeating shibboleths from either the left or the right, he does his best to come to his own conclusions, namely that the domino theory is bullshit, that the Cold War is really a religious war waged between Christianity and Communism with zealots on both sides, that "the average good Christian American secretly loved the war in Vietnam", and that, while Mailer is not a pacifist by any means, the Vietnam War is a "bad war", as are all wars that require "an inability to reason as the price of retaining one's patriotism."
Ultimately, Armies of the Night feels very relevant at the moment, when we once again have a flourishing protest movement in the US, and are faced with questions about how best for it to be effective, about violent vs. nonviolent resistance, about what each of us is willing to risk, about the appropriate response when protesters in Portland are being thrown into unmarked vans and denied habeas corpus. Mailer does not offer definitive answers, but he does describe how it felt to be in the midst of things, not as a statistic in the advancement of one historical movement or another, but as an individual.
The Pentagon for its part endures, and continues to thrive. Just this past summer, the US Senate allocated $740.5 billion to the Pentagon, the majority of both Democrats and Republicans rejecting an amendment proposed by Senators Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey to cut the Pentagon's budget by 10%.
February 28, 2022
If this had been published in the nineteenth century or before, instead of in the era of mass-market paperbacks I think we'd be calling this one of the classics on par with Swift, et. al.
In the grand scheme of things, the Vietnam War protest march on the Pentagon that Mailer chronicles was not one of the important events of US history, or even of the Vietnam War, really. Mailer instead uses it for a sweeping and passionate study in microcosm of the psyche of America, and the place of a relatively centrist white male of his generation regarding it.
The book is a writerly effusion of the most delectably undisciplined sort, messy, overreaching, verbose, digressive, but when the punchlines come they come hard and sharp, and timeless in their relevance.
It's very much an author-centric book. The hero and anti-hero of the book is himself, Mailer, discussing himself, his flaws, his ideas, and his ego in the third person. Some reviewers here, normies that they be, thought the book should have best been scribed in the first person "I" -- thus robbing the account of several layers of what Mailer is trying to do here, not the least of which is to give the book a knowing sense of humor, along with a questioning of his own motivations -- always a healthy exercise. Luckily, such people are not writers, merely woefully inadequate readers.
Really though, despite its subtitle, this is not a novel, it fits squarely in the category of historical essay. The third-person format simply allows Mailer to create of himself a character, a way to play with himself, so to speak. No, not like that, though there are some adventures with bodily fluids, and one might call this a frivol in authorial masturbation. But, what an onanist he is.
Norman Mailer was a shambolic mess, the epitome of privilege, if you will, and he got away with some odious behaviors, in a time when bad publicity was as good as good publicity. For all of that, The Armies of the Night remains a relevant work -- much has not changed, and many of the alarming aspects of the American psyche and body politic described herein have only ramped up into what Mailer terms the insanity of the American Center, the self-victimhood of the hoi polloi whipped up into an unthinking frenzy. Thus, this is recommended, as long as you can put in proper perspective certain outdated notions common to Mailer and men of the day. I see scant evidence that many people, and readers, today can do that. But that's not really my problem. Critically stepping back to sift out the pearls -- and learn from the unreliable narrator -- is a learned skill of experience.
This was a tour-de-force, an astute and beautifully wrought analysis the psychology of crowds and the American political animal. It remains relevant enough to rediscover and ponder today.
EG-KR@KY 2021
In the grand scheme of things, the Vietnam War protest march on the Pentagon that Mailer chronicles was not one of the important events of US history, or even of the Vietnam War, really. Mailer instead uses it for a sweeping and passionate study in microcosm of the psyche of America, and the place of a relatively centrist white male of his generation regarding it.
The book is a writerly effusion of the most delectably undisciplined sort, messy, overreaching, verbose, digressive, but when the punchlines come they come hard and sharp, and timeless in their relevance.
It's very much an author-centric book. The hero and anti-hero of the book is himself, Mailer, discussing himself, his flaws, his ideas, and his ego in the third person. Some reviewers here, normies that they be, thought the book should have best been scribed in the first person "I" -- thus robbing the account of several layers of what Mailer is trying to do here, not the least of which is to give the book a knowing sense of humor, along with a questioning of his own motivations -- always a healthy exercise. Luckily, such people are not writers, merely woefully inadequate readers.
Really though, despite its subtitle, this is not a novel, it fits squarely in the category of historical essay. The third-person format simply allows Mailer to create of himself a character, a way to play with himself, so to speak. No, not like that, though there are some adventures with bodily fluids, and one might call this a frivol in authorial masturbation. But, what an onanist he is.
Norman Mailer was a shambolic mess, the epitome of privilege, if you will, and he got away with some odious behaviors, in a time when bad publicity was as good as good publicity. For all of that, The Armies of the Night remains a relevant work -- much has not changed, and many of the alarming aspects of the American psyche and body politic described herein have only ramped up into what Mailer terms the insanity of the American Center, the self-victimhood of the hoi polloi whipped up into an unthinking frenzy. Thus, this is recommended, as long as you can put in proper perspective certain outdated notions common to Mailer and men of the day. I see scant evidence that many people, and readers, today can do that. But that's not really my problem. Critically stepping back to sift out the pearls -- and learn from the unreliable narrator -- is a learned skill of experience.
This was a tour-de-force, an astute and beautifully wrought analysis the psychology of crowds and the American political animal. It remains relevant enough to rediscover and ponder today.
EG-KR@KY 2021
August 17, 2014
Occasionally I have to pay homage to my roots. No. Not the Detroit suburbs or the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church. To the 1960s where I spent what turns out to be my formative years.
In the past week I have read three Kindle mysteries that got my adrenalin pumping and my conscience thinking I had to do something better with my time. Part of the attraction was my new Kindle Paperwhite so I was feeling disloyal to old fashioned hard covers. Part of it was that I was burned out by serious classics that were not meeting my needs for entertainment. William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe were not turning me on!
So I was about to turn to a book in the Southern author Karin Slaughter series when I realized I had to do something momentous instead. And what to my wondering eyes should appear? This somewhat battered and dust jacket free Norman Mailer from 1968. I was married and had a young son and graduated from the University of Michigan that year. Formative times.
I found The Armies of the Night fairly quickly on my disorganized book shelves and took this to be a sign. And I began my flashback to 1968. The book is Mailer’s story of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon.
Mailer was a hoot! Just ask him and he will tell you! He was not shy and was pretty impressed with himself. So maybe you have to be in something of an oddball mood with some connection to the 1960s to really get into Norman. I am often in that kind of a mood.
Some think that creative people are often people with problems, mental health problems as the suicide of Robin Williams is sadly bringing to the public consciousness this week. I have a bit of a crazy streak that is somewhat controlled by psychiatric drugs. But, thank goodness, my meds are not perfectly tuned so I get to have some crazy moments. Those moments served me well in reading this book.
I should mention that this book won both the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and the National Book Award in 1969. I do not know much about the politics of such prestigious awards other than to assume that some politics do exist. Norman Mailer was a larger than life character who was in his mid-forties at the time this book was published in the heat of the antiwar movement.
The day before the March on the Pentagon there was an action at the Justice Department where 994 draft cards were turned in. The strange thing about my own draft card is that I cannot remember exactly what happened to it although I no longer had it by the end of the war. I was at enough events where draft cards were burned or turned in that I cannot remember exactly when my card and I parted company. Seems like a strange thing not to remember considering how pivotal not being drafted was for me. If drafted, I was not positive what I would do but going to Canada or jail seemed like the most probable outcome at the time.
How did this book happen? How did Norman Mailer, who at best was a part of the conservative Left, come to participate in this seemingly radical and revolutionary action? Here is one story of the coming together of this nonfiction novel.
In Mailer’s own words:
While the first three-quarters of The Armies of the Night is the story of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon told in the third person from the experience of author Norman Mailer and is styled at “History as a Novel”, the final quarter takes a broad view of the same event styled as the “Novel as History.” This is the story of a 1967 event told contemporaneously that received a lot of media attention when it happened and when the story was published. The book received critical acclaim as well as condemnation. The war in Vietnam was a polarizing event.
The bulk of the book is as a memoir, the personal and subjective (but supposedly factual) recollections of the author as he experienced the events of the four days around the March. Mailer was a strong personality, a name dropper and highly opinionated. He has a point of view that is not disguised although the style is “he” rather than “I”.
If you do not have some familiarity with the era either by having lived through the period or by having studied it closely, you will miss much of the potential enjoyment of the book. The book is after all about being “along for the ride” on both a physical and mental trip. The book gets an extra star if you are reliving the experience. Maybe even two extra stars if you were a part of the event. It is not a book that attracts a younger readership and has not really born the years well.
The final quarter of the book might be interesting to the more general reader who is interested in the 1960s and 1970s protest and Vietnam period. It has some interesting details about how a major protest event was organized both technically and politically. It outlines the compromises made on both sides – government and protestors – and tells some of the stories that must necessarily be balanced to tell the “true” story of the event.
The Armies of the Night gets four stars from me but one is that extra star because it caused me to re-experience part of my life in 1967 when I was turning 21. I had already moved safely through my period of being draft eligible and was then exempt as a young father. Exempted from killing or being killed (or being jailed or fleeing to Canada) by having a baby. Strange world that Mailer wrote about. Maybe irrelevant to most people in 2014.
In the past week I have read three Kindle mysteries that got my adrenalin pumping and my conscience thinking I had to do something better with my time. Part of the attraction was my new Kindle Paperwhite so I was feeling disloyal to old fashioned hard covers. Part of it was that I was burned out by serious classics that were not meeting my needs for entertainment. William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe were not turning me on!
So I was about to turn to a book in the Southern author Karin Slaughter series when I realized I had to do something momentous instead. And what to my wondering eyes should appear? This somewhat battered and dust jacket free Norman Mailer from 1968. I was married and had a young son and graduated from the University of Michigan that year. Formative times.
I found The Armies of the Night fairly quickly on my disorganized book shelves and took this to be a sign. And I began my flashback to 1968. The book is Mailer’s story of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon.
Mailer was a hoot! Just ask him and he will tell you! He was not shy and was pretty impressed with himself. So maybe you have to be in something of an oddball mood with some connection to the 1960s to really get into Norman. I am often in that kind of a mood.
Some think that creative people are often people with problems, mental health problems as the suicide of Robin Williams is sadly bringing to the public consciousness this week. I have a bit of a crazy streak that is somewhat controlled by psychiatric drugs. But, thank goodness, my meds are not perfectly tuned so I get to have some crazy moments. Those moments served me well in reading this book.
I should mention that this book won both the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and the National Book Award in 1969. I do not know much about the politics of such prestigious awards other than to assume that some politics do exist. Norman Mailer was a larger than life character who was in his mid-forties at the time this book was published in the heat of the antiwar movement.
Along with the likes of Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the style and devices of literary fiction onto fact-based journalism. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_M...
The day before the March on the Pentagon there was an action at the Justice Department where 994 draft cards were turned in. The strange thing about my own draft card is that I cannot remember exactly what happened to it although I no longer had it by the end of the war. I was at enough events where draft cards were burned or turned in that I cannot remember exactly when my card and I parted company. Seems like a strange thing not to remember considering how pivotal not being drafted was for me. If drafted, I was not positive what I would do but going to Canada or jail seemed like the most probable outcome at the time.
He said a little of what he had thought while watching the other: that he had recognized on this afternoon that the time had come when Americans, many Americans, would have to face the possibility of going to jail for their ideas, and this was a prospect with no cheer because prisons were unattractive places where much of the best in oneself was slowly extinguished, but it could be there was no choice. This war in Vietnam was an obscene war, the worst war the nation had ever been in, and so its logic might compel sacrifice from those who were not so accustomed.
How did this book happen? How did Norman Mailer, who at best was a part of the conservative Left, come to participate in this seemingly radical and revolutionary action? Here is one story of the coming together of this nonfiction novel.
After reading distorted accounts of the demonstration and of his own role in it in Time magazine and in The Washington Post, Mailer began to write his own version in two parts—a novelistic history of himself over four days, followed by a collective history consisting of his own ruminations on the historical context and the significance of the entire event. After recounting his personal experiences as a witness to and participant in the October, 1967, antiwar march, Mailer provided a more detached explanation of the context for the growing opposition to Pentagon policies. Criticizing the misperceptions and distortions of mainstream journalism, he offered an alternative overview of just what happened before, during, and after the incidents he described in the first section of his book. His experience culminated in the creation of The Armies of the Night, a hybrid of history and fiction that, for all of its critique of social disorder, concluded with a paean to America. Source: http://www.enotes.com/topics/armies-n...
In Mailer’s own words:
The March tomorrow would more or less work or not work. If it didn’t, the Left would always find a new step – the Left never left itself unemployed (that much must be said for the conservative dictum that a man who wants to, can always find work) if the March did more or less succeed, one knew it would be as a result of episodes one had never anticipated, and the results might lead you in directions altogether unforeseen. And indeed how could one measure success or failure in a venture so odd and unprecedented as this? One did not march on the Pentagon and look to get arrested as a link in a master scheme to take over the bastions of the Republic step by step, no, that sort of sound-as-brickwork-logic was left to the FBI. Rather, one marched on the Pentagon because . . . because . . . and here the reasons became so many and so curious and so vague, so political and so primitive, that there was no need, or perhaps no possibility to talk about it yet, one could only ruminate over the morning coffee.
While the first three-quarters of The Armies of the Night is the story of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon told in the third person from the experience of author Norman Mailer and is styled at “History as a Novel”, the final quarter takes a broad view of the same event styled as the “Novel as History.” This is the story of a 1967 event told contemporaneously that received a lot of media attention when it happened and when the story was published. The book received critical acclaim as well as condemnation. The war in Vietnam was a polarizing event.
The bulk of the book is as a memoir, the personal and subjective (but supposedly factual) recollections of the author as he experienced the events of the four days around the March. Mailer was a strong personality, a name dropper and highly opinionated. He has a point of view that is not disguised although the style is “he” rather than “I”.
If you do not have some familiarity with the era either by having lived through the period or by having studied it closely, you will miss much of the potential enjoyment of the book. The book is after all about being “along for the ride” on both a physical and mental trip. The book gets an extra star if you are reliving the experience. Maybe even two extra stars if you were a part of the event. It is not a book that attracts a younger readership and has not really born the years well.
The final quarter of the book might be interesting to the more general reader who is interested in the 1960s and 1970s protest and Vietnam period. It has some interesting details about how a major protest event was organized both technically and politically. It outlines the compromises made on both sides – government and protestors – and tells some of the stories that must necessarily be balanced to tell the “true” story of the event.
the important thing, the only thing, was to have an action at the Pentagon, because that, given the processing methods of the American newspapers, would be the only thing to come out of the event. Since the American Revolution must climb uphill blindfolded in the long Capitalistic night, any thing which was publicity became a walking stick.
The Armies of the Night gets four stars from me but one is that extra star because it caused me to re-experience part of my life in 1967 when I was turning 21. I had already moved safely through my period of being draft eligible and was then exempt as a young father. Exempted from killing or being killed (or being jailed or fleeing to Canada) by having a baby. Strange world that Mailer wrote about. Maybe irrelevant to most people in 2014.
February 6, 2022
So Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer feigned deep conversation. They turned their heads to one another at the empty table, ignoring the potentially acolytic drinkers at either elbow, they projected their elbows out in fact like flying buttresses or old Republicans, they exuded waves of Interruption Repellent from the posture of their backs, and concentrated on their conversation, for indeed they were the only two men of remotely similar status in the room. (Explanations about the position of Paul Goodman will follow later.)
3.3 stars rounded down from exhaustion. This was far too long. I came for Lowell but as he faded from the pages so did my interest. Mailer's style here is distinct and impressive, the sharp third person of one Norman Mailer stumbling through history while bemoaning his four marriages and the idea that his stirred conscience could halt the war in Vietnam is an intriguing premise and this was insightful journalism.
Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia.
Yet after bemoaning the grandstanding of the intelligentsia and movement leadership Mailer offers his own theories on this divisive state, one this nation has yet to emerge from nor it appears to change. I am being rather reductive there but identity which was sought to thwart the middle class honky tundra , but it has instead created disparate minor flashpoints all of which distract from the existential.
3.3 stars rounded down from exhaustion. This was far too long. I came for Lowell but as he faded from the pages so did my interest. Mailer's style here is distinct and impressive, the sharp third person of one Norman Mailer stumbling through history while bemoaning his four marriages and the idea that his stirred conscience could halt the war in Vietnam is an intriguing premise and this was insightful journalism.
Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia.
Yet after bemoaning the grandstanding of the intelligentsia and movement leadership Mailer offers his own theories on this divisive state, one this nation has yet to emerge from nor it appears to change. I am being rather reductive there but identity which was sought to thwart the middle class honky tundra , but it has instead created disparate minor flashpoints all of which distract from the existential.
September 10, 2019
This book upon its publication in 1968 swept the highest awards for non-fiction, the Pulitzer and National Book Awards. This was one of the more entertaining and well written books that I only gave three stars to.
The book is largely about Mailer himself and is written in the 3rd person which was frustrating to read. It would have been so much better if Mailer had simply inserted the word I instead. In fact I began to make the word substitution myself and it flowed more readily. The other aspect of the book is that it is quite dated, there is little reference or historical background for those current events of 1967.
I hope my review does not dissuade anyone from reading because this writing style was en vogue for a time.
3 stars. More literary value than the rating indicates. For what it’s worth I have read Mailer’s other two famous works: The Naked and the Dead (disliked, too bloated) and The Executioner’s Song (one of the best books I’ve read).
The book is largely about Mailer himself and is written in the 3rd person which was frustrating to read. It would have been so much better if Mailer had simply inserted the word I instead. In fact I began to make the word substitution myself and it flowed more readily. The other aspect of the book is that it is quite dated, there is little reference or historical background for those current events of 1967.
I hope my review does not dissuade anyone from reading because this writing style was en vogue for a time.
3 stars. More literary value than the rating indicates. For what it’s worth I have read Mailer’s other two famous works: The Naked and the Dead (disliked, too bloated) and The Executioner’s Song (one of the best books I’ve read).
January 9, 2008
Norman Mailer, Norman Mailer. I believe I will take a page from Mr. Christopher Hitchens, who did NOT have a problem blasting Jerry Falwell on national television while the corpse was still warm (http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/05...), and make some honest yet unflattering remarks about Mailer, whose goodreads update feed currently shows him reading The Handbook for the Recently Deceased.
This book is kind of a 'literary' atrocity. It is everything I would expect from an overblown superfamous ego, and nothing that I would expect should win the goddamned National Book Award AND the Pulitzer!!
Two hundred and fifty pages of Mailer on Mailer. Wherein Mailer discusses Mailer in the third person ("and then Mailer had his 15th drink ..."), his wives, favoritism for his sons over his daughters, a few flip remarks about Vietnam, a brief and annotated lattice-like history of the civil rights movement and key players, and much self-congratulatory aggrandizement about the cool NY literary parties of which his attendance was (at least in his eyes) all but mandatory.
WTF!
For fear that this book wasn't a fair representation of the man/myth, I'm now reading The Executioner's Song. I was dreading it, because 1050 pages of Mailer on Mailer would be too much for me to bear. BUT, it is great so far. It is clearly Mailer's fuck you to Capote's In Cold Blood. It is 1050 pages to Capote's 250, and follows a similar journalistic arc - the everyman American psychokiller, his arrest, trial, and death. I'm only 200 pages in, but I do bet Capote felt a bit upstaged. . . And, 200 pages in, I've encountered not even a back-handed reference to Mailer!
This book is kind of a 'literary' atrocity. It is everything I would expect from an overblown superfamous ego, and nothing that I would expect should win the goddamned National Book Award AND the Pulitzer!!
Two hundred and fifty pages of Mailer on Mailer. Wherein Mailer discusses Mailer in the third person ("and then Mailer had his 15th drink ..."), his wives, favoritism for his sons over his daughters, a few flip remarks about Vietnam, a brief and annotated lattice-like history of the civil rights movement and key players, and much self-congratulatory aggrandizement about the cool NY literary parties of which his attendance was (at least in his eyes) all but mandatory.
WTF!
For fear that this book wasn't a fair representation of the man/myth, I'm now reading The Executioner's Song. I was dreading it, because 1050 pages of Mailer on Mailer would be too much for me to bear. BUT, it is great so far. It is clearly Mailer's fuck you to Capote's In Cold Blood. It is 1050 pages to Capote's 250, and follows a similar journalistic arc - the everyman American psychokiller, his arrest, trial, and death. I'm only 200 pages in, but I do bet Capote felt a bit upstaged. . . And, 200 pages in, I've encountered not even a back-handed reference to Mailer!
December 31, 2009
This book made me hate Norman Mailer. Really. I wished him dead after reading this book. And this after I had read and fallen in love with his book "Executioner's Song." This book is narcissism pure and simple, the fact that it won the National Book Award makes me question the validity of that award. After I read this book, I picked up the memoir written by Mailer's second wife Adele, the one he stabbed.(Yeah, did you know Mailer actually stabbed one of his wives? One gets the impression he wanted to emulate Gary Gilmore, but while Gary was willing to accept death for his crimes, old Norman was getting weepy at the thought of spending a week in jail.)
This book is full of references to people of the late 60s that the current generation is not going to relate to. It's a book of its time that doesn't hold up today.
This book is full of references to people of the late 60s that the current generation is not going to relate to. It's a book of its time that doesn't hold up today.
February 17, 2020
I read this thing 49 years ago when I was still in high school. At the time I found it wonderful As a behind the scenes view of an anti-Viet Nam war demonstration, it was tremdendously topical.
In retrospect it appears to be an example of gonzo journalism as Mailer described his own experiences rather than the demonstration per se. As I had not yet read anything by Hunter S. Thompson, it seemed then very new.
Juvenile Fiction and adult fiction are separate categories. I suppose then that the "Armies of the Night" counts as Juvenile Non-fiction. As such it is still terribly dated. Don't waste your precious time on a book which for a year or two may have been pertinent.
In retrospect it appears to be an example of gonzo journalism as Mailer described his own experiences rather than the demonstration per se. As I had not yet read anything by Hunter S. Thompson, it seemed then very new.
Juvenile Fiction and adult fiction are separate categories. I suppose then that the "Armies of the Night" counts as Juvenile Non-fiction. As such it is still terribly dated. Don't waste your precious time on a book which for a year or two may have been pertinent.
December 29, 2017
This is a vivid and compelling portrait of the 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon, but Mailer often gets in his own way (a sentiment with which he might be obliged to agree, based on his own role in the story). Not without reason is he counted among the so-called Midcentury Misogynists and not infrequently does his prose begin to feel rather like the tiresome monologue of a man who greatly enjoys hearing himself talk, to no real purpose. All that said, this book won awards for a reason and there is insight alongside the insufferable self-importance, which makes it a worthwhile read for anyone interested in this particular piece of history.
February 19, 2008
Brilliant. Immediate, vivid, engaging, fly-on-the-wall account of some serious world/historical shit hitting the american fan.
A classic, and deservedly so.
Interesting: Mailer said that he had been surprised when he came upon the refer-to-yourself-in-the-3rd-person voice that was the essential narrative innovation of the book.
He said that when he was a student at Harvard he'd been assigned "The Autobiography of Henry Adams" and thought the third person referential move was odd and put the book aside and hadn't thought about it for years...
July 23, 2018
A obra que melhor represente a História da EUA do século XXI. Através deste livro pode compreender melhor a guerra no Vietname. Uma guerra sangrenta que dividiu os americanos.
É uma história diferente por misturar o texto jornalístico com o texto ficcional. O herói Mailer organiza uma marcha ao Pentágono que pretende acabar com as injustiças, e mostrar o que as intervenções violentas do exército. Inspira-se na marcha dos negros. E demonstra a violência e o "matança" daquela horrível guerra.
"Os exércitos da noite" corresponde a um romance dentro de um romance. Possui a narrativa do jornalista e a narrativa do historiador. No fim surge um mito de uma nação que fez-se grande através de muitos sacrifícios, nem todos eles merecidos.
É uma história diferente por misturar o texto jornalístico com o texto ficcional. O herói Mailer organiza uma marcha ao Pentágono que pretende acabar com as injustiças, e mostrar o que as intervenções violentas do exército. Inspira-se na marcha dos negros. E demonstra a violência e o "matança" daquela horrível guerra.
"Os exércitos da noite" corresponde a um romance dentro de um romance. Possui a narrativa do jornalista e a narrativa do historiador. No fim surge um mito de uma nação que fez-se grande através de muitos sacrifícios, nem todos eles merecidos.
October 22, 2023
Everything has an equal and an opposite reaction. Some books are overlooked by critics but win an audience in the end. Others get the plaudits but turn out to be entirely worthless. The worst thing about the New Journalism was how it curdled into the belief that the reporter mattered more than his story. Here, that belief disfigures an entire book. One to avoid.
January 14, 2022
Earlier this month, we heard vague and possibly unsubstantiated rumors that a major publisher was scuttling a book by Norman Mailer because a staffer had objected to the title of his notorious 1957 essay "The White Negro." This semi- or pseudo-controversy reminded me that I'd never actually read an entire book by Mailer, though I'd done much browsing in his egotist miscellany Advertisements for Myself (1959), where I'd first read the offending essay years ago.
Today's left identitarians, confronting an embarrassingly explicit early version of their own worldview, understandably object to that manifesto of the 1950s "hipster." Mailer defines the figure of the white man as Beat Existentialist walking the mean streets of Cold War America at its coldest and contemplating an emancipatorily psychopathic act in supposed imitation of "the Negro," who "has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries," who
In Mailer's offensive verbiage, we discern the late bell hooks's "Postmodern Blackness" and the Afropessimists' permanently enslaved anti-subject jamming all circuits of a state and civil society nexus founded on the libidinal enjoyment of vampirizing his vitality. A gender-swapped Sula, accompanied by a plague of robins, struts between his lines; so it's no surprise to find Toni Morrison at The National Book Awards Ceremony in 2005, allowing for his "almost comic obtuseness regarding women and race" but nevertheless championing Mailer as a "worthy adversary" and a "true original"—and then literally hanging a medal around his neck. How could Morrison garland this would-be Bluebeard? (And when it comes to Mailer's nearly murderous misogyny, Tomiwa Owolade informs us that Didion, Oates, Steinem, and, yes, Baldwin didn't especially object. Which is no excuse, only contextualization.) I assume she believed—as I do—that no matter what we might have been told by the suddenly recrudescent "2014 Tumblr Girl," literary merit is not judged in courts legal or moral.
To think about Mailer's literary merit, then, I found a copy of his classic The Armies of the Night (1968) in my apartment and read it. Subtitled History as a Novel / The Novel as History and written in the third person, this is a fictionalized nonfiction account of Mailer's participation in a march on the Pentagon in Fall 1967 to protest the Vietnam War alongside other literary luminaries like poet Robert Lowell and critic Dwight Macdonald. The '60s literary ferment of New Journalism, gonzo journalism, and the "nonfiction novel," in which writers like Capote, Wolfe, and Didion also figured, obviously influenced Mailer's experimental pirouette across the fiction-nonfiction line and back again; and Mailer, with his strong sense of the American literary heritage, also drew on a tradition of documentary and reportage in American realism going back to Twain, Crane, Hemingway, and Steinbeck.
The book's first section, which takes up more than three-fourths of the whole, gives us "History as a Novel": an absorbing, eloquent, and often hilarious modernist novel following the literary celebrity Norman Mailer and the minute movements of his consciousness from his hesitant agreement to join the march through his arrest for deliberately crossing a military police line as a public gesture of solidarity with the protestors. The brief second section, "The Novel as History," leaves behind the personal to document the organization and events of the entire march, for most of which the imprisoned Mailer was absent. Except for his reflections in this part on the conflict between the Old and the New Left, which was dramatized more dynamically in the first section, "The Novel as History" can be skimmed—unless you are actually a historian.
For literary purposes, "History as a Novel" is what commands our attention, not least because of its central character, the cantankerous, offensive, and charming Mailer, a Whitmaniacal ego so vast it threatens to contain all of America, even when he's telling us about how he drunkenly missed the urinal and pissed on a hotel's bathroom floor. In this book, he calls himself, in Whitmanian catalogue,
Gopnik, though, writing in the throes of 2018, overpraises Mailer for writing about "a recognizable Trump-era caste" of rural whites. When Mailer speculates about the inner lives of the largely southern white working-class military, police, and government officials he meets, the results are if anything more fantastical or projected than his reveries about African-American subjectivity, just the usual horror-movie staple about repressed evil in the hinterland:
No, Mailer's triumph is ambivalently, ambiguously to observe and describe the changes in his own milieu. He sees the emergence of an entirely different "recognizable Trump-era caste" than poor whites—that of a radical political left entirely subsumed by the cultural concerns of the professional middle class. Mailer observes this coup from the insightfully slanted perspective of "a Left Conservative" who "tried to think in the style of Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke." His Burkean fidelity to the organic and the sublime allows Mailer to understand why the Old Left, with what he calls its "logic of the next step," i.e., its credulous faith in progressive history, was unable to answer the needs of an affluent consumer society ever more managed by technocratic experts.
Such a society will dialectically call forth from itself a rebellion of the instincts and emotions like the one hymned in "The White Negro." This is why Mailer pledges his loyalty on the march not to the Old Leftists of his own generation but to the hippies playing rock, smoking pot, and handing out flowers, in their sandals and flower crowns, looking "at once like Hindu gurus, French musketeers, and Southern cavalry captains."
Their aesthetic revolt seems to him an antidote to the technocrat "totalitarianism"—his usage of this word, by the way, is in line with Arendt's—which "render[s] populations apathetic" through "the destruction of mood." Denouncing deodorant as a symbol of the administered society, he prefers the hippies' fragrant radicalism to their parents' anodyne liberalism, which in a memorable passage about the party that greets him on his arrival in Washington, he judges fully complicit in the society symbolized by the fearsome, empty techno-war idol of the Pentagon:
Though he ends his nonfiction novel on the lyrical, triumphant note of hailing the hippies' American "rite of passage" through protest, a similar "rite" as earlier generations (including his own) had enjoyed on the frontier or at war, the uneasy feeling lingers that these flower children will inherit the very five-sided structure they'd vainly wished to levitate off the earth. Still, his peroration on America—a place where "God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power"—is a welcome reprieve from today's left, who seem as if they can hardly say the name of the nation without spitting.
In the end, then, Mailer's most effective protest against sterile, murderous totalitarianism is his literary performance of his own chaotic, witty, irreducibly physical, irrepressibly philosophical, careeringly poetic personality. The true armies of the night are the roiling forces in his vast body and soul. While I was left wondering if an actual novel—a fictional novel—would feel thin and unpeopled in comparison to this song of his self, I came away from this book with little doubt about Mailer's literary merit.
Today's left identitarians, confronting an embarrassingly explicit early version of their own worldview, understandably object to that manifesto of the 1950s "hipster." Mailer defines the figure of the white man as Beat Existentialist walking the mean streets of Cold War America at its coldest and contemplating an emancipatorily psychopathic act in supposed imitation of "the Negro," who "has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries," who
could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm.Such prose today feels like it might peel the paint from the walls. As Geoff Shullenberger reminds us, Mailer's most distinguished African-American contemporaries decisively rejected his vision:
Lorraine Hansberry, Ralph Ellison, and especially James Baldwin (an erstwhile Mailer friend and admirer)…objected most of all to Mailer’s celebration of the supposed sexual potency and liberatedness of black men, which they viewed, plausibly, as reiterating the racist stereotypes of the “square” white America Mailer claimed to reject.Hansberry, Ellison, and Baldwin were humanists of great cultivation—Marxist, liberal, Christian—but Mailer's argument, uncomfortable as it may make us in its phrasing today, and much as we can detect its troubling modernist provenance (Freud, Lawrence), was arguably ahead of its time as a proto-postmodern celebration of the decentered subject resisting modern domination through the aleatory flows of his bodies, pleasures, languages, and desires.
In Mailer's offensive verbiage, we discern the late bell hooks's "Postmodern Blackness" and the Afropessimists' permanently enslaved anti-subject jamming all circuits of a state and civil society nexus founded on the libidinal enjoyment of vampirizing his vitality. A gender-swapped Sula, accompanied by a plague of robins, struts between his lines; so it's no surprise to find Toni Morrison at The National Book Awards Ceremony in 2005, allowing for his "almost comic obtuseness regarding women and race" but nevertheless championing Mailer as a "worthy adversary" and a "true original"—and then literally hanging a medal around his neck. How could Morrison garland this would-be Bluebeard? (And when it comes to Mailer's nearly murderous misogyny, Tomiwa Owolade informs us that Didion, Oates, Steinem, and, yes, Baldwin didn't especially object. Which is no excuse, only contextualization.) I assume she believed—as I do—that no matter what we might have been told by the suddenly recrudescent "2014 Tumblr Girl," literary merit is not judged in courts legal or moral.
To think about Mailer's literary merit, then, I found a copy of his classic The Armies of the Night (1968) in my apartment and read it. Subtitled History as a Novel / The Novel as History and written in the third person, this is a fictionalized nonfiction account of Mailer's participation in a march on the Pentagon in Fall 1967 to protest the Vietnam War alongside other literary luminaries like poet Robert Lowell and critic Dwight Macdonald. The '60s literary ferment of New Journalism, gonzo journalism, and the "nonfiction novel," in which writers like Capote, Wolfe, and Didion also figured, obviously influenced Mailer's experimental pirouette across the fiction-nonfiction line and back again; and Mailer, with his strong sense of the American literary heritage, also drew on a tradition of documentary and reportage in American realism going back to Twain, Crane, Hemingway, and Steinbeck.
The book's first section, which takes up more than three-fourths of the whole, gives us "History as a Novel": an absorbing, eloquent, and often hilarious modernist novel following the literary celebrity Norman Mailer and the minute movements of his consciousness from his hesitant agreement to join the march through his arrest for deliberately crossing a military police line as a public gesture of solidarity with the protestors. The brief second section, "The Novel as History," leaves behind the personal to document the organization and events of the entire march, for most of which the imprisoned Mailer was absent. Except for his reflections in this part on the conflict between the Old and the New Left, which was dramatized more dynamically in the first section, "The Novel as History" can be skimmed—unless you are actually a historian.
For literary purposes, "History as a Novel" is what commands our attention, not least because of its central character, the cantankerous, offensive, and charming Mailer, a Whitmaniacal ego so vast it threatens to contain all of America, even when he's telling us about how he drunkenly missed the urinal and pissed on a hotel's bathroom floor. In this book, he calls himself, in Whitmanian catalogue,
a warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter…One of the roughs, a kosmos! (I note that the wife tally would eventually come to six.) This, I think, is what Adam Gopnik meant when he called The Armies of the Night "a poem," in the same way that certain other American nonfiction classics—Letters from an American Farmer, Walden, The Souls of Black Folk, Slouching Towards Bethlehem—seem to chant or sing rather than to argue or reason. Moreover, as Toni Morrison said, Mailer is often wrong, even to the point of affront; but his positions are never predictable, unintelligent, or without interest. Even at their worst, they are powerfully expressed; art their best, they are often prescient because observant, as Gopnik also notes.
Gopnik, though, writing in the throes of 2018, overpraises Mailer for writing about "a recognizable Trump-era caste" of rural whites. When Mailer speculates about the inner lives of the largely southern white working-class military, police, and government officials he meets, the results are if anything more fantastical or projected than his reveries about African-American subjectivity, just the usual horror-movie staple about repressed evil in the hinterland:
Enough of the old walled town had once remained in the American small town for gnomes and dwarves and knaves and churls (yes, and owls and elves and crickets) to live in the constellated cities of the spiders below the eaves in the old leaning barn which—for all one knew—had been a secret ear to the fevers of the small town, message center for the inhuman dreams which passed through the night in sleep and came to tell their insane tale of the old barbarian lust to slaughter villages and drink their blood….Gnomes? Elves? Talking spiders? Southern Gothic is one thing, but this is too far a flight of fancy even for the nonfiction novel. In any case, the villages of Vietnam were designated for slaughter by "the best and the brightest," not by some insect pogrom spirit of the sticks.
No, Mailer's triumph is ambivalently, ambiguously to observe and describe the changes in his own milieu. He sees the emergence of an entirely different "recognizable Trump-era caste" than poor whites—that of a radical political left entirely subsumed by the cultural concerns of the professional middle class. Mailer observes this coup from the insightfully slanted perspective of "a Left Conservative" who "tried to think in the style of Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke." His Burkean fidelity to the organic and the sublime allows Mailer to understand why the Old Left, with what he calls its "logic of the next step," i.e., its credulous faith in progressive history, was unable to answer the needs of an affluent consumer society ever more managed by technocratic experts.
Such a society will dialectically call forth from itself a rebellion of the instincts and emotions like the one hymned in "The White Negro." This is why Mailer pledges his loyalty on the march not to the Old Leftists of his own generation but to the hippies playing rock, smoking pot, and handing out flowers, in their sandals and flower crowns, looking "at once like Hindu gurus, French musketeers, and Southern cavalry captains."
Their aesthetic revolt seems to him an antidote to the technocrat "totalitarianism"—his usage of this word, by the way, is in line with Arendt's—which "render[s] populations apathetic" through "the destruction of mood." Denouncing deodorant as a symbol of the administered society, he prefers the hippies' fragrant radicalism to their parents' anodyne liberalism, which in a memorable passage about the party that greets him on his arrival in Washington, he judges fully complicit in the society symbolized by the fearsome, empty techno-war idol of the Pentagon:
His deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics, as if their lives were his own life but a step escaped. Like the scent of the void which comes off the pages of a Xerox copy, so was he always depressed in such homes by their hint of oversecurity. If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame for such success into the undernourished lap, the overpsychologized loins, of the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist.To be honest, I've had just this thought at just this type of party. Yet Mailer also understands, if dimly, that the college students in revolt, the ones who chant slogans on the prison bus because, as "bright kids" rather than jocks, "they had never traveled on a high school victory bus," will become the powers-that-be someday. Likewise, Mailer's "almost comic obtuseness" about race in several no doubt offensive passages contrasting the protest's Black Power presence ("I'll kill you, Whitey, burn baby") with the "Negro liberals" he'd known at the 1963 March on Washington, nevertheless manages also to register the coming identity politics that will fracture the left as much as anything else.
Though he ends his nonfiction novel on the lyrical, triumphant note of hailing the hippies' American "rite of passage" through protest, a similar "rite" as earlier generations (including his own) had enjoyed on the frontier or at war, the uneasy feeling lingers that these flower children will inherit the very five-sided structure they'd vainly wished to levitate off the earth. Still, his peroration on America—a place where "God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power"—is a welcome reprieve from today's left, who seem as if they can hardly say the name of the nation without spitting.
In the end, then, Mailer's most effective protest against sterile, murderous totalitarianism is his literary performance of his own chaotic, witty, irreducibly physical, irrepressibly philosophical, careeringly poetic personality. The true armies of the night are the roiling forces in his vast body and soul. While I was left wondering if an actual novel—a fictional novel—would feel thin and unpeopled in comparison to this song of his self, I came away from this book with little doubt about Mailer's literary merit.
July 4, 2008
In this nonfiction novel, Mailer depicts the Mailer character (the Mailer character should not be mistaken for the wilier flesh-and-blood Mailer) as a glowering, self-important drunk whose main objective is to marinate in whiskey and public adulation.
By Mailer's own admission, his attendance at the 1967 March on the Pentagon is a concession to his moral opposition to the Vietnam war, which he would rather practice in the company of fellow aesthetes at exclusive cocktail parties. Reluctantly, he attends the march, flinging contempt in every direction: at comfortable liberal academics ("like the scent of the void which comes off the pages of a Xerox copy"), at hawkish conservatives, at the United States ("corporation land"), at the young ("utterly lobotomized away from the sense of sin"), at the old, at radicals ("smelted down the the irreducible Puritan"), and at himself. In fact, Mailer reserves praise only for those who regard him with skepticism, piercing the thin skin of his intellectual nobility to reveal the crass, angry, disturbed man underneath. The Mailer character is unappealing in most ways, save an occasional kindness (playing games with the kids in jail) and the fact that his every repugnance is a meta-act of elaborate, tongue-in-cheek self-abasement.
The "novel as history" is followed by 50 pages of "history as novel," a comparatively dry review of the various accounts of the March on the Pentagon, the fractious liberals, the celebration and defiling of conservative power, all told from a dozen different, mutually incompatible perspectives. Mailer hammers home the point that no retelling of the events of 1967 can or will be objective or factually reliable. Hence his "novel as history," hence his brash anti-hero. I am tempted to say that Mailer's bombast is neutralized by the ruthless critical eye he applies to himself, but that would be inaccurate. By turning himself into a celebrity curmudgeon, Mailer celebrates his own flaws. But he also celebrates those of his political allies and enemies, and somehow, in spite of the pointed subjectivity, or by way of it, his novel rings of truth.
By Mailer's own admission, his attendance at the 1967 March on the Pentagon is a concession to his moral opposition to the Vietnam war, which he would rather practice in the company of fellow aesthetes at exclusive cocktail parties. Reluctantly, he attends the march, flinging contempt in every direction: at comfortable liberal academics ("like the scent of the void which comes off the pages of a Xerox copy"), at hawkish conservatives, at the United States ("corporation land"), at the young ("utterly lobotomized away from the sense of sin"), at the old, at radicals ("smelted down the the irreducible Puritan"), and at himself. In fact, Mailer reserves praise only for those who regard him with skepticism, piercing the thin skin of his intellectual nobility to reveal the crass, angry, disturbed man underneath. The Mailer character is unappealing in most ways, save an occasional kindness (playing games with the kids in jail) and the fact that his every repugnance is a meta-act of elaborate, tongue-in-cheek self-abasement.
The "novel as history" is followed by 50 pages of "history as novel," a comparatively dry review of the various accounts of the March on the Pentagon, the fractious liberals, the celebration and defiling of conservative power, all told from a dozen different, mutually incompatible perspectives. Mailer hammers home the point that no retelling of the events of 1967 can or will be objective or factually reliable. Hence his "novel as history," hence his brash anti-hero. I am tempted to say that Mailer's bombast is neutralized by the ruthless critical eye he applies to himself, but that would be inaccurate. By turning himself into a celebrity curmudgeon, Mailer celebrates his own flaws. But he also celebrates those of his political allies and enemies, and somehow, in spite of the pointed subjectivity, or by way of it, his novel rings of truth.
July 11, 2022
An example of the New Journalism that emerged with Mailer and other writers like Truman Capote and Thomas Wolfe, in which the journalism employed conventions of fiction in telling a story. In this book, Mailer describes the March on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. Mailer himself was present among the other marchers (including Dr. Benjamin Spock, linguist Noam Chomsky and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg). One of the techniques Mailer employs in his book is to describe the March as if he were its central protagonist; another is to describe his actions and thoughts in the third person. As Mailer comments in the book, this “schizophrenic” approach functions to emblematize the madness of American policy with regard to Vietnam. Events Mailer describes include a speech he makes prior to the March (and his thoughts while in the men’s room before making his address), the March, his arrest and his thoughts while sitting in a prison cell. Hyper-masculinized, egotistic, provocative—Mailer at his best.
Acquired copy I am currently using 2000
Attic Books, London, Ontario
Acquired copy I am currently using 2000
Attic Books, London, Ontario
March 25, 2016
Look, the fact that I wanted to throw this book against the wall on at least five separate occasions probably means it has some merit because at least it elicited some sort of emotion. I'm sure there are even some intelligent thoughts in here. I respect the fact that Mailer can create a character I dislike so much (himself). The descriptions of brutality towards the end were shocking, which is what they should be. Also, Mailer was on Gilmore Girls, so I really tried to like this.
All that considered, I absolutely hated this book. I just detested the writing style. I did not connect to anything and I skimmed large passages (so take this commentary with a grain of salt) because I just couldn't be bothered. Mailer takes himself FAR too seriously. Also, I can't get over the fact that he stabbed his wife and still won two Pulitzers. I mean I know it's not the Nobel peace prize, but on what level is that okay.
This is not in any way an articulate review, and I won't bother with one because I don't want to think about this book much longer than I have to. I'm sure there are reasons to like it, but I really don't.
All that considered, I absolutely hated this book. I just detested the writing style. I did not connect to anything and I skimmed large passages (so take this commentary with a grain of salt) because I just couldn't be bothered. Mailer takes himself FAR too seriously. Also, I can't get over the fact that he stabbed his wife and still won two Pulitzers. I mean I know it's not the Nobel peace prize, but on what level is that okay.
This is not in any way an articulate review, and I won't bother with one because I don't want to think about this book much longer than I have to. I'm sure there are reasons to like it, but I really don't.
April 8, 2022
one of the most extraordinary and profound novels i've read in years. when mailer is On, no one can touch the man. it didn't hurt that the first few chapters of the book formed an incisive portrait of aspects of Your Humble Reviewer that he couldn't have put into such fine words himself. i reread it immediately upon completion, something reserved for only the best books. a true delight.
March 11, 2023
Time to reread this
May 15, 2019
Could've been interesting but I found the writing so tedious I couldn't get through it. Didn't finish.
April 8, 2023
This seems to be one of the fundamental achievements on which Mailer's lasting reputation stands,-- it won him his first Pulitzer and was a key text in the "New Journalism" movement-- with even those who don't care much for him overall often conceding the book's quality (along with that of The Naked and the Dead and/or The Executioner's Song, usually), and it's easy to see why: it takes a (very) critical view of what is now an almost universally unpopular war and has many, many passages of the sort of flowing, vivid prose that Mailer at his best could turn out with seeming effortlessness, without much in the way of the kind of "Mailerisms" (the fascinations with violence, the occult, astrology and the like are mostly downplayed or absent, as are some of his thornier tendencies re: sex, race, etc.), plus he's also willing to poke fun at himself in the third-person passages concerning his participation in the central March on the Pentagon and the run-up to and aftermath of it. I realize that all seems like the prelude to my leveling a critical eye on the book, but I really did like it on the whole-- the writing in the short "The Metaphor Delivered" conclusion is absolutely beautiful, some of the best I've read from Mailer, which is saying something, and his dissection of the internecine squabbling and division into smaller and smaller factions among left-leaning groups remains accurate 50-plus years on-- even if, as it went, I found myself reading in shorter and shorter bursts. While at its best the book approaches something like Ten Days That Shook the World, one of its main problems is that at points the actual stakes of the central event don't feel worthy of Mailer's craft, or the volume of the writing-- he even acknowledges that during the second, shorter section ("The Novel as History") by comparing the demonstrators' rite of passage unfavorably to those faced by soldiers at Normandy, in the Argonne, Gettysburg, etc. I think that's part of why the first section ("History as a Novel") works better: because it allows him to focus on a central protagonist (himself in third-person) and take a mildly critical/gently mocking tone toward "the Novelist's/the Historian's/the Observer's" self-important posturing about the significance of his participation in the action, and the action itself. I also thank, frankly, that Mailer is a more interesting writer when he's flirting with (or outright groping) the bounds of good taste and throwing caution to the wind to be one of the most, if not the most, ambitious authors of his era, as in works like Ancient Evenings, An American Dream, etc. All in all a fine book and work of narrative journalism, but I think Mailer did better work in that and other realms elsewhere.
October 5, 2017
Early example of the "New Journalism" which Norman Mailer helped pioneer...and not an especially good one. Most of the book is an account of the March on the Pentagon in October 1967, which Mailer vividly conveys in biting prose and lively, colorful descriptions: the beatniks and Yippies trying to levitate the Pentagon, the goofball activists dressed in a panoply of historical costumes, the contrast between the rowdy crowd and the regimented MPs and soldiers who contained them. The book is crippled, however, by Mailer's overweening narcissism, reflecting in third person on his authorial reputation, his antiwar credentials and comparing his wise viewpoint with the often misleading accounts of newspapers and the Mainstream Media. Worth reading, perhaps, for the bits of vivid imagery Mailer conjures up, but also filled with that author's most obnoxious shortcomings.
January 3, 2022
Norman Mailer casts himself as "Norman Mailer" in this non-fiction novel of the anti-war march on the Pentagon in 1967. (You know, the one where Abbie Hoffman said the demonstrators would literally raise the Pentagon.) "Mailer" is by turns a political militant, a clown, a genius author, and above all, a keen observer of America tearing itself apart yet oddly also coming together in response to evil. Mailer's (not "Mailer's") prologue, a prayer for the future of the USA ("The death of America rides in on the smog") is alone worth reading this book in its entirety.
November 2, 2013
The biggest load of over-rated, self indulgent drivel I have ever read. A total chore to read. Just delighted to have finished it so that I can leave it to gather dust on a bookshelf somewhere. It was so dire, it was actually annoying.
October 26, 2019
Az egész egy újságcikkből indult. A Time 1967. október 27-én megírta, hogy ez a csibész, ez a semmirekellő, ez a ripacs Norman Mailer tajtrészegen bohóckodott a washingtoni pacifista tüntetésen. Erre válaszul Norman Mailer kénytelen papírra vetni saját verzióját: hogy ezzel szemben ő a washingtoni pacifista tüntetésen bizony igenis tajtrészegen bohóckodott A különbség pedig: ég és föld!
Ez a könyv mindenekelőtt az önirónia sziporkázó áradása. Az író megtalálja azt az elbeszélői pozíciót, ahonnan ez az egész történet egyszerre komikus és hiteles: kilép önmagából, és E/3-ban szemléli önmagát, a Regényírót, a Békeharcost, a pocakos, jobb napokat is látott figurát, aki mintha egy személyben testesítené meg a konzervatívok és a liberálisok legidegesítőbb tulajdonságait. Ez a fickó őszintén hisz saját zseniális írói kvalitásaiban, de annyira azért nem, hogy el tudja rejteni a sasszemű mesélő (önmaga) elől kétségeit, frusztrációit és sértődöttségét a bámész és értetlen külvilág iránt. Ez a fickó egyfelől a vietnami háborút a gonosz mesterkedésének tartja, ám csaknem ugyanennyire gyanakodva figyeli azt a tiltakozó tömeget (a konzum békeharcosokat: radikális feketéket és túlfinomodott liberális WASP-fehéreket), akikhez csatlakozni kénytelen. Ezek a kettősségek azok, amelyek megtöltik a dokumentumregényt üzemanyaggal: egy autonóm egyéniség önvizsgálata, aki megpróbálja több-kevesebb sikerrel összeforrasztani saját, tüskés világnézetét egy közösség világnézetével – bár úgy kell neki ez a közösség, mint púp a hátára.
Ez a könyv megkerülhetetlen dokumentum a vietnami háborúról – illetőleg a washingtoni erőszakmentes mozgalmakról, amelyeknek alighanem elévülhetetlen szerepe volt abban, hogy az USA végül kivonta erőit Vietnamból*. Ezt Hitler bizonyára úgy fogalmazta volna meg, hogy a Pentagonnál tüntetők „hátbadöfték” a kommunizmus ellen küzdő Amerikát – a kérdés természetesen túl bonyolult ahhoz, hogy én csak úgy ukkmukkfukk megoldjam, de azt hiszem, inkább csak nyilvánvalóvá tették, hogy ez a katonailag megnyerhetetlen háború egyben belpolitikailag is megnyerhetetlen. Persze ezt Mailer akkor még nem látta világosan – a könyv végkicsengése is inkább pesszimistának mondható –, de mi már innen, a jövőből megkockáztathatjuk ezt a kijelentést.
Nagyszerű könyv, gyönyörűen érzékelteti a forrongó amerikai ’60-as évek hangulatát és a békemozgalmak hátterét. Szükségeltetik hozzá mindazonáltal egy masszív történelmi érdeklődés, hogy értékeljük a különböző jobb- és baloldali irányzatokról szóló fejtegetéseket, valamint a sok moralizálást a korszak Nagy Amerikai Sorskérdéseiről. Ha ez megvan, akkor nincs is más dolgunk, mint élvezni ezt a helyenként pynchon-i (bukowski-i?) szövegáradást: Mailer unikális szóképeit és leírásait, és néha bad tripbe hajló kalandjait.
* Különösen a könyv második fele, ami – az első rész abszolút szubjektivitása után – megkísérli „történészi” alapossággal rekonstruálni az ominózus tüntetést.
Ez a könyv mindenekelőtt az önirónia sziporkázó áradása. Az író megtalálja azt az elbeszélői pozíciót, ahonnan ez az egész történet egyszerre komikus és hiteles: kilép önmagából, és E/3-ban szemléli önmagát, a Regényírót, a Békeharcost, a pocakos, jobb napokat is látott figurát, aki mintha egy személyben testesítené meg a konzervatívok és a liberálisok legidegesítőbb tulajdonságait. Ez a fickó őszintén hisz saját zseniális írói kvalitásaiban, de annyira azért nem, hogy el tudja rejteni a sasszemű mesélő (önmaga) elől kétségeit, frusztrációit és sértődöttségét a bámész és értetlen külvilág iránt. Ez a fickó egyfelől a vietnami háborút a gonosz mesterkedésének tartja, ám csaknem ugyanennyire gyanakodva figyeli azt a tiltakozó tömeget (a konzum békeharcosokat: radikális feketéket és túlfinomodott liberális WASP-fehéreket), akikhez csatlakozni kénytelen. Ezek a kettősségek azok, amelyek megtöltik a dokumentumregényt üzemanyaggal: egy autonóm egyéniség önvizsgálata, aki megpróbálja több-kevesebb sikerrel összeforrasztani saját, tüskés világnézetét egy közösség világnézetével – bár úgy kell neki ez a közösség, mint púp a hátára.
Ez a könyv megkerülhetetlen dokumentum a vietnami háborúról – illetőleg a washingtoni erőszakmentes mozgalmakról, amelyeknek alighanem elévülhetetlen szerepe volt abban, hogy az USA végül kivonta erőit Vietnamból*. Ezt Hitler bizonyára úgy fogalmazta volna meg, hogy a Pentagonnál tüntetők „hátbadöfték” a kommunizmus ellen küzdő Amerikát – a kérdés természetesen túl bonyolult ahhoz, hogy én csak úgy ukkmukkfukk megoldjam, de azt hiszem, inkább csak nyilvánvalóvá tették, hogy ez a katonailag megnyerhetetlen háború egyben belpolitikailag is megnyerhetetlen. Persze ezt Mailer akkor még nem látta világosan – a könyv végkicsengése is inkább pesszimistának mondható –, de mi már innen, a jövőből megkockáztathatjuk ezt a kijelentést.
Nagyszerű könyv, gyönyörűen érzékelteti a forrongó amerikai ’60-as évek hangulatát és a békemozgalmak hátterét. Szükségeltetik hozzá mindazonáltal egy masszív történelmi érdeklődés, hogy értékeljük a különböző jobb- és baloldali irányzatokról szóló fejtegetéseket, valamint a sok moralizálást a korszak Nagy Amerikai Sorskérdéseiről. Ha ez megvan, akkor nincs is más dolgunk, mint élvezni ezt a helyenként pynchon-i (bukowski-i?) szövegáradást: Mailer unikális szóképeit és leírásait, és néha bad tripbe hajló kalandjait.
* Különösen a könyv második fele, ami – az első rész abszolút szubjektivitása után – megkísérli „történészi” alapossággal rekonstruálni az ominózus tüntetést.
March 26, 2023
Mailer's admirable ideological position of self-identified "Left Conservatism" cuts through the smoke and slogans of hippie drivel, providing a clear-eyed evaluation of the march on the Pentagon. Despite its clear insights housed within digressions within digressions, Mailer still can't hone in on his strengths of best ideas, having to run wild chasing the dragon of profundity. Why was this deemed worthy of a Pulitzer? Chalk it up to recency bias, social conscience, take your pick.
September 26, 2016
Mailer's writing style in this book is very fast and pulled me through the first section quickly. I can easily see how Mailer’s book has been compared to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which was the first non-fiction novel, whereas Mailer has created here an early example of historical and fictional journalism; which seems to combine novel style with reporting. The book reads as split between two sections, in "History As A Novel," Mailer uses the third person to describe his own experience participating in a anti-Vietnam war rally. By using the third person Mailer himself becomes just as much a part of the subject matter, as the march he participated in. In the second section, "The Novel As History," Things slow down in this section, but not because the subject matter is slower. Mailer focuses on the historical perspective on the march. Including why it happened, who was involved, and then describes the march as it might have been seen by some sort of an unbiased reporter. It was an interesting read, and Mailer’s opinionated voice is a never separated from the subject matter. I was mostly intrigued by the self-awareness Mailer was able to portray through writing in the third person. Since this move allowed him to step outside of himself and observe, he used this to the full potential.
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