Comment: Mailer’s America

Norman Mailer, who has had his literary ups and downs, feels that the national political conventions have “encouraged some of his very best writing.” This year’s conventions are no exception — they may indeed have encouraged his best. With a minimum of the compulsive self-analysis that has characterized his other work, he re-creates in the November Harper’s the events, personalities and mood of Miami Beach and Chicago. His reporting is, as always, intensely personal as it probes the darker, unexplored passageways of American political life. But Mailer — Eastern Seaboard exotic, alienated artist, New York practitioner of improvisational cinema — is strangely in touch with heartland America this election year. His own surprisingly shifting views of civil rights and Negroes, of WASPS and Nixon seem to reflect the national mood.

Not as much can be said for some of the other coverage now emerging. Editors chose some unlikely writers to cast a new light on events, and it is quite often a lurid one. In Esquire, that chronicler of human decay and perversion, Jean Genet, reports that he could smell America decomposing; he was also fascinated by the size of the thighs of Chicago cops. In the same magazine, William Burroughs concocts a fantasy in which a purple-bottomed baboon runs for President. Esquire’s John Sack, on the other hand, convincingly finds the typical cop much more playful, much less passionate about his skull-splitting than other commentators suggest. In National Review, Garry Wills poignantly captures the insouciance and vulnerability of the kids playing at revolution.

Home of the Heave. Yet it is Mailer who most impressively comes to grips with the convention in passages of intuition and eloquence. With his customary sense of apocalyptic drama, he declares that “the country was in a throe, a species of eschatological heave.” It may seem obvious, but Mailer’s writing overcomes the triteness inherent in describing hog-butchering Chicago as the setting for confrontation; he succeeds in connecting the cries of the bloodied hippies to the eerie death wail of the gutted cattle. “Chicago was a town where nobody could ever forget how the money was made,” he writes. “It was picked up from the floors still slippery with blood, and if one did not protest and take a vow of vegetables, one knew at least that life was hard life was in the flesh and in the massacre of flesh—one breathed the last agonies of beasts.” In this setting, in fact, Mailer engages in a bit of butchery of his own. His account seethes with contempt for conventional liberalism and the man who embodies it: the Democratic nominee. “Humphrey simply could not attach the language of his rhetoric to any reality; he was perfectly capable of using the same word, ‘Freedom,’ let us say, to describe a ward fix in Minneapolis and a gathering of Quakers. He was a politician; he could kiss babies, rouge, rubber, velvet, blubber and glass. God had not given him oral excellence for nothing.”

Mailer is scarcely more sparing of other Democrats. He writes of Senator George McGovern: “A Christian sweetness came off him like a psychic aroma—he was a fine and pleasant candidate but for that sweetness. It was excessive. Not artificial, but excessive, as the smell of honeysuckle can be excessive.” He describes Gene McCarthy’s followers: “Their common denominator seemed to be in some blank area of the soul, a species of disinfected idealism which gave one the impression among them of living in a lobotomized ward of Upper Utopia.”

At first Mailer was dismayed at McCarthy’s failure to attack Humphrey in debate before the California delegation. Then he came to realize that the Senator was “proceeding on the logic of the saint, as if the first desire of the ONE devil might be to make you the instrument of your own will. God would judge the importance of the event, not man, and God would give the tongue to speak, if tongue was the organ to be manifested. Everything in McCarthy’s manner, his quiet voice, his absolute refusal to etch his wit with any hint of emphasis, his offhand delivery which would insist that remarks about the future of the world were best delivered in the tone you — might employ for buying a bottle of aspirin, gave hint of his profound conservatism.”

After Humphrey’s nomination appeared to be a certainty, Mailer ran into McCarthy in a restaurant, and still another hue of the Senator’s personality came to light: a hard and bitter humor. Mailer tried to match his mood. “You should never have had to run for President,” he said. “You’d have made a perfect chief for the FBI.” Replied McCarthy: “Of course, you’re absolutely right.” “The reporter,” says Mailer, “looked across the table into one of the hardest, cleanest expressions he had ever seen. The face that looked back belonged to a tough man, tough as the harder alloys of steel, a merciless face and very just, the sort of black Irish face which could have belonged to one of the hanging judges in a true court of Heaven.”

Mellowed Nixon. Like many of the commentators on the left this year, Mailer is much more charitable toward the Republican Convention than the Democratic. He was surprised himself at his diminished hatred for Nixon. The man still suffered from slickness. “His ability to slide off the question and return with an answer is as implicit in the work of his jaws as the ability to bite a piece of meat.” Yet, adds Mailer, adversity seems to have mellowed, even deepened him. “The new Nixon had finally acquired some of the dignity of the old athlete and the old con —he had taken punishment, he knew the detailed schedule of pain in a real loss, there was an attentiveness in his eyes which gave offer of some knowledge of the abyss, even the kind of gentleness which ex-drunkards attain after years in A.A.”

Mailer felt a wrenching change in his own politics. It came to him when he was waiting for the Rev. Ralph Abernathy to show up for a press conference. “It was a simple emotion and very unpleasant to him,” writes Mailer. “He was getting tired of Negroes and their rights. It was a miserable recognition, and on many a count, for if he felt even a hint this way, then what immeasurable tides of rage must be loose in America itself? He was so heartily sick of listening to the tyranny of soul music, so bored with Negroes triumphantly late for appointments, so depressed with Black inhumanity to Black in Biafra, so weary of being sounded in the subways by black eyes, so despairing of the smell of booze and pot and used-up hope in bloodshot eyes of Negroes bombed at noon, that he must have become in some secret part of his flesh a closet Republican—how else account for his inner ‘Yeah man, yeah, go’ when fat and flatulent old Republicans got up in Convention Hall to deliver platitudes on the need to return to individual human effort?” Mailer’s only second thought was a postscript remark that he “would probably not vote—not unless it was for Eldridge Cleaver.”

Return of the WASP. Though no writer has spoken more disparagingly of the small-hearted WASPs of small-town America, Mailer begins to seem almost sympathetic toward them. “They had been a damned minority for too long, a huge indigestible boulder in the voluminous, ruminating government gut of every cow-like Democratic Administration. Perhaps the WASP had to come to power in order that he grow up, in order that he take the old primitive root of his life-giving philosophy—which required every man to go through battles, if the world would live, and every woman to bear a child—yes, take that root off the high attic shelf of some Prudie Parsely of a witch-ancestor and plant it in the smashed glass and burned brick of the 20th century’s junkyard.”

Happily, Mailer remains a minor character in his work. He indulged, it is true, in a bit of cop-baiting at the Democratic Convention and got into a scuffle with a hippie-hater. But it was mercifully brief and it is briefly told. Otherwise, his subject matter keeps him too occupied to find much time for self-dramatization. In the process, he may have become an uncertain friend of the left. To youth’s search for spontaneity and sensual gratification, he offers a 45-year-old’s caution: “The best things in life were most difficult to reach, for they protected themselves, so beware of finding your true love in a night.” In fact, Mailer provides no comfort for any cause or creed. “There is no history without nuance,” he writes, and in all his nuances there is the darkness of many nights.