That giant step
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER
1 Fire on the Moon Norman Mailer \Veidenfeld and. Nicolson 65s)
Last year, some months after Armstrong nd Alden had returned from the surface if the moon, the Observer printed various tracts from a forthcoming book on the Apollo 11 mission by Norman Mailer. They seemed unpromising, to add to nothing but the air of bafflement and complete ungrasp- ability which surrounded the whole moon venture. But the book is now complete, and vve can see that it is in fact by far the best thing Mailer has ever done.
The problem of the moon flight was its total unreality, in the deepest philosophical and psychological sense. It was simply be- ■ ond our human frame of reference, which accounted for the strange sense of boredom and inadequacy in our reaction to it. It was something so alien to our familiar sense of place and identity in the universe that it became as unreal as the narcotising jargon of the astronauts themselves. With Mailer's book, the human voice at last breaks in. Beyond the suffocating foreground of jargon, handouts, statistics and television images, a Wider and deeper perspective opens out. We can begin to face up to what really happened to mankind on 21 July 1969.
In a sense one feels that Mailer's other recent books of reportage, on the Pentagon march of 1967 and the party conventions of 1968, have simply been training for this supreme effort. Almost all the faults of the previous books have fallen away, like stages of a rocket, as he comes finally face to face with a challenge so great that even his intrusive ego is left behind. All his skills developed over thirty years, his sense of occasion and of America, his power of des- cription of men and machines, even his scien- tific training as an engineer, and above all his persistent preoccupation with the deeper uestions, come perfectly into play. Why did
man need to fly to the moon? What was he really doing? What was he doing to him- self? Indeed, the subtitle for this book might well have been 'Some Speculations on the Metaphysical Significance of the First Moon Flight'.
The framework of the book is a kind of spiral of reportage, winding deeper and deeper into his subject. He introduces us through the preliminary press conferences with the three men, Armstrong the obsessive solitary flier, Aldrin, the computer mind who takes a chalice and wafer to celebrate Corn- munion on landing. Collins, born off the Borghese Gardens, the wit and man of the world. We are led on through a brilliant account of the brute machinery involved, the Vehicle Assembly Building, large enough to hold Salisbury Cathedral, the Saturn V lit up at night on its launching pad, visible eleven miles away, the terrifying, apocalyptic blast-off; through the intricate structure of the Space Administration, a speech by Werner von Braun, interviews with the wives, to the moon landing itself, as seen from Houston. Then. all the time pressing deeper, harping continually on the question 'Is God or the Devil at the helm?', Mailer takes us right through the flight again, this time as it were from within the capsule—via discus- sions of the nature of energy and gravity and computers, the history of rocketry, the murky place of the moon programme in American politics, the place of the moon in human psychology, the nature of technological, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture—up to the prolonged climax of the first moon walk.
Not a necessary human or scientific detail is missed, not a thread is not followed back from the unreal glare of the event itself to its historical root, or some deeper psycho- logical significance. The psychology of ma- chines, the sociology of astronauts (and of these three in particular)—each thread is analysed in turn with cool detachment, and woven with increasing clarity round the in- sistent question: Is it God or the Devil who is driving ,men into this literally incredible act of daring or insanity? What slowly emerges is a devastating pic- ture of wAsP-American culture; technologi- cal man, heir to the Renaissance, increasingly boxed into a material prison, from which he has tried to drive all magic, all unpredictabil- ity; a prison from which he tries to make the ultimate material escape. that of flight from his own planet—but which ends, of course, like all attempts to find freedom which are not based on the spirit, only in the mockery of its aim: the literal enslavement of two human beings, blundering about on a dead planet, in search of dead dust, imprisoned in endless layers of metal and plastic, sustained only by every kind of mechanical lifeline. Is the exploration of space only the spin-off from man's plunge into an unreal techno- logical hell which will finally destroy him? Or is it in fact his last hope of regaining contact with the metaphysical reality he has tried to shut out?
All this, down to the last question, is achieved to the point of masterpiece, every tiny sociological, psychological and meta- physical detail of Mailer's speculation work- ing together as neatly as the technology he describes. And then finally, in the last pages, we return to earth with a bang. We return to Mailer's own life, to Provincetown, where his fourth marriage is breaking up, where he and his friends watch Nixon praising the astronauts at a ceremonial dinner on televi- sion through the enlarged intimacies of a pornographic film which they are project- ing onto the screen at the same time. We return to the worst hell of contemporary America (set in the town where the Pilgrim Fathers landed), which reflects back yet a further dimension on the gigantic act of escapism we have just lived through. In the end the truth of his own evidence is too appalling even for Mailer. He visits a dis- play of the moon rock, stares at the little grey lump of dust, quotes Aquinas. 'trust the authority of your senses', with a revealingly total lack of understanding, and finally takes refuge in the sentimental fancy that the moon rock seems friendly towards him. We are back in the material trap. Ego has returned —but after what a journey.
Previous page
