Weekend rebel
KENNETH ALLSOP
In October 1967 Norman Mailer—`America's best novelist? and America's inspiration to the young??????'—took part in an anti-Vietnam march on the Pentagon. The above descriptions, plus question marks, are Mailer's own in this chronicle of the demonstration, and signify the misgivings, ideological squirmings and queasy self-mockery with which he enlisted with the `weekend revolutionaries.'
The sequence was that, glumly responding to the appeal to his crypto-youthful idealism, Mailer went to Washington with a group of New York intellectual enemy-buddies who seem to fit that definition of a literary school as two writers who live in the same town and hate each other.. He joined Robert Lowell, Dr Spock and other sober, reputable peaceniks, gave a drunken speech at a fund-raising rally. (he informed the audience that the pool of urine offstage was his and not Commie sabotage), attended a draft card return-to- sender ceremony at the Department of Justice, and then headed for the Pentagon, the logistics being to invade the us military brainbox to paint slogans and cause general hell. Short of the objective, Mailer transgressed a police line and spent a night in gaol. His suit was in a terrible rumpled state in the morning ('there had not been a hanger nor a clothes rack') and his regimental tie was all creased. Grimmer still for this freedom-fighter, he consequently missed a party—`the best coming up in some time'—back in Manhattan. Still, after the pub- licity of being busted and a Tv appearance, he
was contracted to write an account of those four days that shook the world of Norman Mailer, and here it is.
Thus the event in skeleton, now corpulently fleshed with 130,000 words of script, shot, as it were, from two different camera angles. Crowd- ing the screen in the first section, 'History as a Novel,' is the comic anti-hero star, referred to banteringly as Mailer, a hard-drinking, battered pro with a mind like Swiss cheese but now only `partially hampered by old bouts of drugs.' In the shorter section, 'The Novel as History,' Mailer is focused down to bit-player size and the frame fills with the clashes between para-
troopers bristling with M-14 rifles and tear gas guns and hippies tenderly slotting flowers into the opposing muzzles, brandishing their CORE, SNCC and SANE placards, and rolling in their own blood.
This treatment is presumably attempting to isolate—like mural blow-ups in an exhibition— just one episode of America's protracted agony of crisis, to fix it in existential form, immediate and concrete, yet strained through the sweat- pores of one participant, so that it will stand as a universal statement. There are occasions, frozen by Mailer's flailing flash-camera, that catch mood and scene with rebarbative accuracy. There is the dismal slapstick exchange with a Nazi bundled into the same paddy wagon : 'You Jew bastard.' You filthy Kraut.' `Dirty Jew.' Kraut pig.' I'm not a Kraut. I'm a Norwegian.' There is his eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with authority, in the shape of a young Negro MP: 'The MP was trembling. "Why, why did it have to happen to me?" was the message of the petrified marbles in his face. "Go back," he said hoarsely to Mailer. . . . The raised club quivered. . . . Stricken faces as he went by. They did not know what to do.'
Between such actualities are the spools of philosophical rhetoric and rumination unwind- ing in daunting tangles of incoherence. Un- avoidably one has to be schoolmistressy about Mailer's bid to marry ambition to ability. This is nothing to do with the pukey feeling induced by the winning self-deprecation, the arch third- person trick, like Peck's Bad Boy being cute. That apart, quite frequently there is no discern- ing what meaning is struggling to find egress through the mumble-jumble. 'We will remem- ber,' the author intones behind his hand, 'that Mailer had a complex mind of sorts.' Yes, but what does this mind tell us, for instance, about Lowell? 'We may only be certain that the moral debt of the Puritan is no mean affair: aggluti- nations of incest, abominations upon God, kissing the sub cauda of the midnight cat- Lowell's brain at its most painful must have been equal to an overdose of LSD on Hal- loween.' Shouldn't that have been left on the cutting-room floor?
Unkindly I must quote Mailer against him- self, from a Paris Review interview reprinted in h,is Cannibals and Christians: `Style is character. A good, style cannot come from a bad undisciplined Character. . . . Good in the sense of being well tuned. . . Good style is a matter of rendering out of oneself all the cupidities, all the crippling, all the velleities.'
More rendering, please, Norman, for you seem still cruelly hung up on the dread of velleity. It is not meant frivolously to suggest that this desperately mandarin grandiloquence is analogous with the strivings of a renowned but enervated sexual athlete to maintain an erection. Impotence hovers horridly near. Whenever wilting creeps in—renewed thresh- ings of frantic prolix energy. I recalled
Alexander Woollcott's joky confession: 'I was the best writer in America. It's just that I had nothing to say.' The unhappy truth is that Mailer doggedly believes the first and comes close here to admitting the second. The elaborately ponderous irony, the fantasy-spirals of soliloquy, the King Kong chest-beatings to keep the fury up and blow the reader's mind, don't conceal the emptiness.
The paradox is all the sadder when one remembers what is almost crushed under this dead weight : that the Vietnam issue in America is neither trivial nor trite. It is a depressing achievement of a complex mind of sorts to nullify its importance with self-importance.
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