The Time of Our Time
The Armies of the Night
The Prisoner of Sex

A L S O +T O D A Y

The Overspent American
Reviewed by
Dante Ramos
A Harvard economist blames technology and advertising for a "new consumerism" that's plunging many Americans into debt

T A B L E+T A L K

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From "Boxing with Hemingway" (the first piece in the book) on, Mailer's nonfiction is remarkable for the use to which he openly -- years before the confessionalism of popular culture had taken hold -- puts this habit of exposing himself in all his weakness and all his anxiety. Having adopted the distancing device of speaking of himself in the third person (a trick seen at the time of writing as a piece of shameless egoism), he freely, happily, repeatedly confessed to envy, greed, insecurity, raging competitiveness. What is curious is how little affect his confessionalism achieves. "Himself" is nothing he confesses to. Himself is the driving quality of the prose. It's the rhetoric that is the compulsive confessor, the finger pointer come alive in the jabbing, prodding, taunting feel -- not the substance, the feel -- of the sentences. The way those sentences are accumulating, that is Mailer's self on the page, and the aggression in them never lets up. It contains all his intelligence, all his bravado, all his shrewdness and insight. Literally: contains it. It -- the aggression -- is never changed by the subject, never influenced, never deflected. It does the changing.

This glittering, pugnacious insistence through a rhetoric that knows no bounds, being written in a period of restraint and repressiveness, about the need to live openly, and with intensity -- this was all put in place in 1959 when Mailer wrote "The White Negro," his now-famous manifesto of the existential heroism of orgasmic black violence. It is an astonishing piece, marked as it is by the clotted sentences, the headlong drive, the sheer inability to stop. Mailer is so in love here with the need to "arrive" that he goes on arriving until he exhausts both himself and the reader. Repeatedly, the power of his own insight is swamped by his own overkill. Nothing he ever wrote after "The White Negro" went any further or deeper, or took us to a different place, or failed to exhaust us. But some strange and wonderful things came out of this driving hunger of his:

There is the piece on the Democratic convention of 1960. Everyone went into that convention convinced that Kennedy would be given the nomination -- and indeed he was. Yet the hall erupted in the most amazing wave of welcome when Adlai Stevenson mounted the podium. The clapping went on and on, threatening never to stop. Mailer makes the moment thrilling. He describes it with an eloquence that comes directly out of his poetic intelligence. He understands the longing behind the applause.

Then there is the speech at Berkeley on Vietnam Day: "One must speak of alienation, that intellectual category which would take you through many a turn of the mind in its attempt to explain the particular corrosive sensations many of us feel in the chest and the gut so much of the time, that sense of the body growing empty within, of the psyche pierced by a wound whose dimensions keep opening, that unendurable conviction that one is hollow, displaced, without a single identity at one's center." That is his remarkable opening sentence. What follows is a strong, moving presentation of America in mid-Vietnam war ("The country is in disease ...").

And, of course, there is the problematic but ultimately magnificent "Armies of the Night": pathologic and this time transcendent. Here, in this famous account of the 1967 Pentagon march, we see clearly that the professional self-exposure that came to characterize all his nonfiction is Mailer replacing the corporate redneck voice of his fiction with "himself" -- and here the replacement does mount up into something extraordinary, as so often it does not. Yet, throughout the piece, we also see clearly the continual rise and fall of his self-command as a man, and as a writer.

The night before the march there's a party and an indoor rally at the Ambassador Theater in Washington. At the party Mailer consumes a huge amount of alcohol, and then before he's to go onstage he has to urinate. By now, he's drunk, can't find the light switch in the bathroom and misses the bowl. He describes this hilariously, observing that in the morning the theater owners will blame the piss on the floor on the communists. Once onstage -- now really drunk -- he begins to bomb and starts to tell the story about missing the bowl, going on and on until people start yelling at him from the audience. This drives him to further excess. He begins to curse (as no other speaker has), and is bewildered when the audience roars its displeasure. Puzzled, he tells the reader that he loved talking obscenely: "It gave a heartiness like the blood of beef tea to his associations. There was no villainy in obscenity for him, just -- paradoxically, characteristically -- his love for America. He had first come to love America when he served in the U.S. Army, not the America of course of the flag, the patriotic unendurable fix of the television programs, and the newspapers, no ... he had come to love what editorial writers were fond of calling the democratic principle, with its faith in the common man. He found that principle and that man in the Army, but what none of the editorial writers ever mentioned was that the noble common man was as obscene as an old goat, and his obscenity was what saved him ... The sanity ... was in his humor; his humor was in his obscenity."

True, but as the years went on, the obscenity in Mailer's writing became an unbroken rush of language that grew increasingly more vicious, and when it did it lost its American-ness, as well as its humor. This was the poison of a writer growing old with his private grievance intact, projecting it onto the idiom of his time and place and calling it cultural identity. That same poison is there in the work of writers like V.S. Naipaul and Martin Amis and Gore Vidal -- and in them, too, it fails. The "idiom" is neither English nor Anglo-Indian nor upper-class American; it is simply that of an anger, there from the cradle, that precedes culture and almost always precludes transcendence. Mailer's writing continued to be dominated by this sense of things well into middle age. It wasn't life he was at war with; it was writing; it was himself. And this made the reader his antagonist. "He did not have a notion of what he would say next," he tells us somewhere in "Armies of the Night," "but it never occurred to him that something would not come. His impatience, his sorrow, his jealousy were gone, he just wanted to live on the edge of that rhetorical sword he would soon try to run through the heart of the audience."

In 1971 Mailer faced Gore Vidal on television in a now famous session of "The Dick Cavett Show." He had already written his antifeminist tract "Prisoner of Sex" and Vidal, in his own nasty way, had taken him down in the pages of the New York Review of Books. So before he ever walked onto the set Mailer was feeling humiliated. In the waiting room backstage he decides how he will handle his bad feeling: "Mailer -- like that general he could never become -- was contemplating the military chances for entering an ambush of such delicacy connected to such strength. The only answer was attack. Shatter all prepared positions. Go out, he said to himself, and smash that fucking tea house." And he did. He came out battling, made a shambles of the program, and along with it the most monumental and horrifying fool of himself. He was nearly 50 years old, and he'd been doing this for more than 20 years: still standing with his back to the refrigerator, taking on all comers.

Two other writers working around the same time as Mailer also developed voices that originated in murderous truth speaking -- George Orwell and James Baldwin. Each of them labored long and hard to make anger serve thought. Orwell did it most successfully, and we remember almost everything he said. Baldwin produced a powerful rhetoric that also served, and we will respond to much of his writing as long as American literature lasts. To be now in the presence of Mailer's voice speaking throughout 1200 pages of writing that span 50 years, is to be overwhelmingly aware not only of its unchanged sound, but that one hardly remembers anything it actually says, only that it is determined to drive its rhetoric into our hearts. This is a startling conclusion. Startling and depressing.
SALON | May 27, 1998

Vivan Gornick is a writer who lives in New York. Her most recent book of essays, "The End of the Novel of Love," is published by Beacon Press.

Weigh in on Norman Mailer's literary career and fallen reputation in the Books area of Table Talk.

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R E L A T E D_.S A L O N_.S T O R I E S

Twilight of the Old GoatsThey're all past retirement age, they've been thoroughly trashed by feminists and the (many) women in their lives, they seem sadly out of touch with the multicultural literary fashions of the day.Ê But Mailer, Roth and Bellow refuse to go quietly.
By D.T. Max
May 16, 1997

The Gospel According to the Son by Norman Mailer
From the author of "The Naked and the Dead," an attempt to tell the story of the Gospels from the point of view of Jesus
Reviewed by Joan Smith
May 19, 1997