http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/books/review/Berman-t.html
By PAUL BERMAN
Published: August 22, 2008
Some 40 years ago, the cumulatively unbearable stresses of war in
Vietnam, a revolution in civil rights and a series of unexpected,
bug-eyed cultural uprisings sent America into a psychological
meltdown. Norman Mailer wrote a two-volume participant-observer
journalistic portrait of the experience "The Armies of the Night"
(one of his masterpieces), on the antiwar movement in the fall of
1967, and "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" (a non-masterpiece, but
good enough as a follow-up), on the Republican and Democratic
National Conventions in the summer of 1968. The books, looked at
today, are terrifying. "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" (New York
Review Books, $14.95) has just been republished with an admirably
self-effacing preface by Frank Rich. I have read it anew, and it
gives me the willies.
The blandly creepy triumph of Richard Nixon at the Republican
convention, the six-hour line of working-class New Yorkers filing
past the casket of Robert F. Kennedy, the Chicago police's running
amok during the Democratic convention in that city, the National
Guard, the tear gas, the dry police humor ("I'm glad to hear that,
Mr. Mailer. But it's your reputation that you like to get arrested")
these are not the most serene of themes. But Mailer's journalism
gives me the willies mostly because of Norman Mailer.
There were two Mailers, Irving Howe observed a "reflective private
Norman" and a "noisy public Norman." Mailer's genius in those two
volumes was to show how, under the right sort of midnight pressure,
one of those Normans was perfectly capable, as if pulled by lunar
tides, of transmogrifying into the other. It is horrifying to see.
The two books paint a picture of America at a bad moment. But they
are also a werewolf autobiography.
The reflective, private Norman, as Howe described him (in his own
autobiography, "A Margin of Hope"), was someone who "wondered whether
there might be a speck of truth in the cautions of his liberal and
socialist friends" which is a phrase that, especially in its
mention of socialists, connoted a precise group of sharply
opinionated and insistently sober people. Howe was the editor of
Dissent magazine, on whose editorial board Mailer uncomfortably sat,
and the socialist and even some of the liberal friends constituted
the mini-faction that used to be known, in times gone by, as the
anti-Stalinist left. Mailer made his political home among those
people for a while in his younger years (the period he evoked in
"Barbary Shore"). Their lore was his, and likewise their
sophistication. And here lay a complexity.
Mailer took a hard line against the Vietnam War, but given his
anti-Stalinist sophistication, his hard line could not be a simple
line. He understood that in Vietnam, America's enemies were
Communists, and not just nationalists with a red star; and he wished
Communism on nobody. He knew that America's antiwar doves were, in
overwhelming numbers, hopelessly muddled on Communist themes. A good
many young stalwarts of the New Left and a few of the older people,
too, were openly pro-Communist, in one fashion or another. A still
larger number, "a firm minority" of the antiwar movement, in his
description, were secretly pro-Communist, at least in regard to Asia.
And the dove majority avoided facing the problem posed by Communism
altogether.
What would happen to Indochina and the rest of the world if Communism
were to carry the day in Vietnam? The dove majority, in Mailer's
judgment, "simply refused to face the possibility." The mass peace
movement, its grown-ups, anyway, had compressed a hostility to the
war into what he called a "hopeless mélange, somehow firmed, of
Pacifism and closet Communism." And the resulting national debate
over Vietnam seemed to him twisted and fake: "The hawks were smug and
self-righteous, the doves were evasive of the real question."
You could wonder, reading those acrid observations, why Mailer wanted
anything to do with antiwar demonstrations. But he had his reasons,
which combined a pragmatic assessment with a larger political
prognostication; and this larger prognostication of his turns out to
have been 80 percent brilliant. Mailer prophesied that Communism,
based on its inbuilt inadequacies, was going to collapse. There was
no reason to go to war against it. His analysis would loom today as
totally brilliant if only he had added a 20 percent tip about what
was meanwhile likely to happen to the unhappy people of Indochina
during the interval between America's withdrawal from the war and the
Communists' eventual withdrawal from Communist doctrine the interim
experiences of policy-driven famine and poverty in Vietnam, extreme
oppression, "boat people" fleeing for their lives and Cambodian
horrors: the Indochinese catastrophes that have still not registered
in the consciences of Americans when they are feeling dovish, just as
Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not yet registered in the consciences of
Americans when they are feeling hawkish. But this is merely to say
that Mailer's political journalism of 1967 and '68 was wonderfully
nuanced and sophisticated, even if not wonderfully enough.
And one complexity led to another. In the America of that time, given
the psychological meltdown, people were in no mood to entertain any
sort of nuance at all. Irving Howe stuck by his own anti-Stalinist
sophistication critical of the left, critical of the right and
relatively indifferent to what anyone else might think of him. This
sort of lonely stance came naturally to Howe. Grumpiness was his
strength. He was handsome in his isolation. Mailer, though, had
chosen a different path. He had set out to experience the spirit of
the age in his own flesh, and to send back firsthand reports. And
since everyone else, minus a handful, was slipping into hysteria, who
was Mailer to do anything less? He slipped, therefore. He did this by
adopting new and wild opinions, not instead of his old nuanced
anti-Stalinism, but on top of it. And he vented his gaseous new
opinions in fits of oratory at antiwar demonstrations, as recounted
in his books.
His oratory was alcoholic. At a demonstration in 1967, he finds
himself delivering somehow a Christian peroration. "Wow," he
reflectively observes. In Chicago outside the Democratic convention
he delivers a drunken speech in the middle of the night, calling for
a militant march that never took place. Those are disgraceful
speeches, and are meant to be disgraceful speeches by a man who
wants you to know that his own fist-waving blather is appalling to
him, at least in some degree. It is always said of Mailer that he was
possessed of a huge ego. But that is only half the story. No man
likes to picture himself as a drunken fool. Mailer in these classic
volumes nonetheless devoted his muscular energy to the task of making
himself look asinine, and he did so because, in addition to an ego,
he was possessed of an accusatory superego otherwise known, by the
editor of Dissent, as "the cautions of his liberal and socialist
friends." And the whole of his self-portrait gives me the willies
because here we are, 40 years down the road, and hawks, some of them,
are still "smug and self-righteous," and doves, a good many, are
still "evasive of the real problem." And the temptation for many a
fine citizen remains irresistible to go on waving a militant fist in
a style that pretends to be civic and nowadays even sober (because
times have changed), even while reflecting (because times have not
changed) the same jumble of admirable, execrable and crowd-pleasing
impulses that Mailer in his self-mortifying candor revealed so
cannily on those long-ago pages.
A footnote: 1968 marked a turning point in race relations. Mailer was
short on sympathetic insights into this event, possibly because he
was, on his own admission, "getting tired of Negroes and their
rights." Still, he thought to mention that at the Democratic
convention, the name of Channing Phillips of Washington, D.C. a
Robert F. Kennedy delegate, except that Kennedy had already been
assassinated was entered into nomination. Phillips, as Mailer
observes, was the first black politician to be nominated for
president at a major party convention. He received the ballots of 67›
delegates. The wilderness trek from that first step until now has
lasted 40 years to the week a freakishly biblical span of time. Wow.
--
Paul Berman, a writer in residence at New York University, is the
author of "A Tale of Two Utopias," "Power and the Idealists" and
"Terror and Liberalism."
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