Magazines: First Person Singular

MAGAZINES First Person SingularMany editors have lately decided that magazine prose is too impersonal — that in a rather impersonal world, readers yearn for human voices and the pro noun “I.” The result is a revival of personal journalism, typified in the current issues of Harper’s and the Atlantic, each of which is almost entirely devoted to the work of one writer.

Harper’s gambles most of its March issue on the hope that readers will be fascinated by Norman Mailer’s 90,000-word reflections on the follies of last fall’s Washington Peace March. Mailer flails himself as much as he does other Mailerian targets—Nazis, cancer, L.B.J., newspapers, and TIME. Indeed, Mailer begins by fully quoting TIME’S Oct. 27 account of his performance on the stage of Washington’s Ambassador Theater at a rally before the Pentagon march began. Drunk he was, and he admits it. But the crisp account of Mailer’s role in the events that followed is bathed in the harsh, dry light of hangover. Though he writes in the third person, no modesty is involved: his main character is Norman Mailer. He evokes the dilem ma imposed by the Viet Nam war on many American liberals: self-exiled from Lyndon Johnson’s Democratic Party, they are forced to array their antiwar consciences in the same ranks as Communists, New Leftists and giddy, neo-anarchic hippies.

Amusedly saddened by his own middle-aged moral spread, Mailer moves with almost prissy distaste among the rabble. His sharpest barb is reserved for Poet-Polemicist Paul Goodman, who “looked like the sort of old con who had first gotten into trouble in the Y.M.C.A., and hadn’t spoken to anyone since.” Arrested himself during the opening hours of the Pentagon siege, Mailer winds up in the same paddy wagon with a tall, ferocious American Nazi, and stares him down in the inevitable Mailerian confrontation of wills. “You Jew bastard,” shouts the Nazi. “Kraut pig!” replies Norman, only a bit embarrassed. But for Mailer’s reportorial eye and his caustic comments on an America overwhelmed by institutionalism, his version of the Pentagon march might have become far too personal. As it is, he reveals the diversity and ethical intricacy of the protest movement as no reporter has yet done.

Two Nations. The Atlantic allots an equal amount of space to an assessment of the national mood under the stress of the Viet Nam war. The onlooker: Freelancer Dan Wakefield, 35. While Mailer indulges in broad polemics, Wakefield prefers quiet irony. Roaming the U.S., or the “Supernation,” for four months, he discovered within it two nations. Not the traditional rich and poor. Not even the generation gap, though that exists. But what might be called the organizational gap. The well-organized, Wakefield found, generally support the war in Viet Nam; the organizational dropouts do not.

Wakefield deftly shuttles back and forth between the two nations, from the cops to the hippies, from Kiwanians to the ghettos, from an energetic retirement village to a listless Indian reservation. The organization men, rich or poor, high or low, spout a lifeless, insensitive jargon. The unorganized are often speechless. Wakefield could hardly coax any words out of a young Indian man at a Phoenix school. But a white teacher was full of answers, such as “There are ten sociological variables which influence why Indian students become dropouts.” Yet, Wakefield found grounds for hope. An Indian militant was distributing cards demanding “Red Power” and bumper stickers with the slogan: “Custer Died for Your Sins.” Subliminal Triumph. Everywhere on Wakefield’s journey, the organization men—whom he may over-villainize—seemed to be winning. Even what is apparently spontaneous turns out to be organized—subliminally. Last summer’s ghetto riots, for instance. Black Power was not the culprit. As Vice President Humphrey told Wakefield: “The looters took the TVs or the stoves or whatever had been best promoted. Why, the way people selected those things they looted was the greatest triumph of advertising the world has ever seen.”

All of this is less an eye-witness report than a very private vision. As Wakefield sees it, present-day U.S. society is so stringently regimented that it is marching inexorably to war. Viet Nam is no aberration: it is U.S. destiny. Readers may draw different conclusions, but in personal journalism, the writer is paid for expressing his emotions—and even fiction is a vital form of human perception.